Finding your passion(s)

Written by karen on December 7th, 2009

[I wrote this last week. Since then, I’ve gotten more interested in my project for work, in part I suppose, because it’s been too cold and windy to do much else. It’s a nice quality, at least, to find enjoyment in whatever I’m stuck doing. :]

I’m a big believer in finding something you really love to spend most of your waking hours on. Too many people hate their jobs, and we spend too many hours at work for that. I’m sure that some think it’s pollyanna-ish, but I think that everyone can find something they love that generates enough money to live on. I’ve been fortunate to do this for all my life. I love my job. I’ve been spending less time on it this year though and have started to think a bit about what I’m going to do after the house project is finished (not that that will be anytime soon…but it’s kind of like when I was in Africa; I was puzzling over how my career would track before I even left).

This morning, I spent awhile working on a project for work (my paying job, that is). It’s been a bit of a frustrating project that I just am not having a ton of fun with. After I finished, I went out to work on the house.

I started by putting up insulation for a couple hours. Working with insulation is not the most fun job in the world. It’s itchy and scratchy. You have to wear a mask that is awful. It requires contorting your body in weird angles to reach ceiling corners. And still, while I was doing it, I thought about how much I love doing construction. I kept thinking, “I wonder if I’d like this as much if I were doing it for someone else’s house?”

I asked Brad. He’s worked construction for years, and obviously knows me pretty well, so I thought he’d have a reasonable answer. He said that he thought I might like it even more. He pointed out that building other people’s houses gives you the chance to learn new things and to do kinds of work that you’d never do on your own house.

Food for thought.

 

Solar panels

Written by brad on December 5th, 2009

We have so many things to do at the moment that getting the solar equipment running is on the back burner. I have managed to make a little progress on installing the solar panels.

I searched the web and believe I have found the ideal angles for the solar panels for winter and not winter (the proper angle is entirely a function of  latitude, ours is 31° 50′ 7″ N, and the angle of the sun). You could, I imagine, adjust the angle of your solar panels constantly. Most people just pick a angle somewhere in between the summer and winter ideals. Some people adjust their angles four times a year. I’ve settle on two angles, winter (57°) and spring, summer, fall (28°). My thinking on this is that adjusting the angles will be a pain, and I won’t want to adjust them very often. There are fewer hours of daylight in the winter so the angle during the winter months will be most important. During the summer months we get lots of hours of sun so having the perfect angle is not really that important. Therefore, winter and not winter angles.

You might wonder about the solar panel mounts that track the sun automatically. Unless the price drops dramatically, they are not practical. They provide very little additional power; it’s a better value to buy extra solar panels. Also, they are a moving part, and moving parts break.

In order to make adjusting the panels easy and to make sure I remember the proper angles, I cut two pieces of OSB each to one angle. Here is the winter angle propped up and facing south.

winter-angle

We ended up getting twelve 210 watt panels. They will be mounted in two rows of six, one in front of the other. You never want shadows on your solar panels (enormous decrease in power output) so I need to position the front row accordingly. I could just compute the proper distance, but it’s close enough to the solstice that I’m just waiting until then to measure the proper placement. I’m thinking about ten feet should do it, but will find out for sure on December 21st.

Click to continue »

 

Neither gratifying, nor enjoyable

Written by karen on December 5th, 2009

Lest I’ve given anyone the impression that the work here is all fun and games, let me tell you about today. It was awful.

The morning started cold but with little wind, so it looked like a good day to prep Tumbleweed for stucco (our current #1 priority). So….we spent the day ripping most of the paper off the house so we could put new paper on. You may remember that I wasn’t too keen on putting the paper on. Well, tearing it off was much worse. Trying to dig all the capped nails out of the walls wasn’t that fun either.

As we worked, it got colder and colder. And the wind came up. Pretty soon, we were getting whipped by the half-removed paper.

Knowing it was difficult work, Brad asked me at some point how I was feeling.

“Frustrated. Cold. In pain. Tired. Cranky. And I NEVER WANTED TO BUILD A HOUSE ANYWAY.”

OK, the last part was just out of frustration. We got through it, but with the wind, we didn’t get to the next stage of putting paper on (just to get back to where we started). Maybe tomorrow.

For now, I’m baking fresh bread and pizza and not thinking about it.

 

Christmas came early

Written by karen on December 4th, 2009

My life has changed! I have discovered the palm nailer.

It you don’t have one of these, you really must get one. (I’d recommend Porter-Cable. I love their tools.) Here’s how it works:

Barry brought us one when he came to visit last week. When he showed it to me, he had a look on his face like it was something really special. Kind of like he was showing a giant chocolate cake to someone who’d never seen or tasted one before. I was thankful for any new tool (he also brought us a nail gun) but didn’t fully appreciate how great this was.

I’d seen some kind of corner nailer on TV and wanted one.  It’s supposed to make nailing into corners easier. It’s a handheld thing that you put a nail in the and then it hammers it in for you. With all the problems I’m having with my hands, I thought it might be worthwhile.

The palm nailer is all that and more. First of all, it’s pneumatic (runs off compressed air), which is essential, because it means it has real power.

It works not only in corners but everywhere. I will use it for almost everything from now on.

The nail gun is great too, but the palm nailer has several advantages to me. First, it’s not remotely dangerous. I can imagine nailing myself with a nail gun (and have heard the story about Doug about a hundred times) but not with the palm nailer. It’s very gentle and innocuous. It’s also a lot lighter than the nail gun, which is especially good when you’re nailing overhead. And of course, it’s super small so you can use it almost anywhere.

For a just a minute or two, I wondered if it was lazy or somehow inauthentic to use a power nailer. Then I thought about accounting. I’m glad I know how to do debits and credits by hand on ledgers. Having actually done that, I better understand the process and how the various accounts work. But would I ever think of running a business without an accounting software package? No.

I think that the nail gun and the palm nailer together will probably save us hundreds of hours on the rest of the building. (Just today, I did some work that I never would have finished in a single day without them.) And the pain and wear and tear on my hands that this will eliminate is incalculable.

Me and my new nail gun

 

Brrr….

Written by karen on December 3rd, 2009

On Tuesday night we came home from celebrating Brad’s birthday to see snow on the mountains on both sides of the  valley. It has continued to be cold this week….20s at night and 50s during the day.

On Wednesday, we got the roof on the battery house in one day. It was pretty easy after doing the other one. (Things are way easier at 9×12 than 44×27.)

Today, our plans, if the wind cooperated, were to start on re-wrapping the house and doing chicken wire to get ready for the stucco.

There was too much wind though, so we finished the interior of the battery house instead. It’s almost finished now. Excellent.

 

Stucco’ing

Written by karen on November 28th, 2009

Last week, we stucco’d the battery house (the first coat that is; there will be one more finish coat done in a month or so). The whole thing only took two days.

Here’s the formula:

stucco bag

1 part STUCCO MIX (We have a pallet full of bags of this. It’s astonishing to think how much stucco’ing we’ll be doing.)

PLUS

sand

3 parts SAND (We just got a delivery of 13 tons. Eek.)

PLUS

water

WATER (We have lots of this.)

AND STIR COPIOUSLY…

(This is our new cement mixer. It is so awesome! I highly recommend one of these. The small ones are quite cheap.)

This kind of stucco seemed to go on quite easy. One thing we learned was that you really want the chicken wire stapled down super-tight before you stucco.

Corners are my speciality.

Corners are my speciality.

The final step is troweling in a mesh fabric. It is supposed to prevent cracking. We found it super easy to work with.

The final step is troweling in a mesh fabric. It is supposed to prevent cracking. We found it super easy to work with.

Here are the final results.

batteryhousestuccoed

 

Happy Thanksgiving

Written by karen on November 27th, 2009

This year, we are thankful to be spending our first holiday season here and grateful that we have made wonderful new friends and have made great progress on our new home.

We spent the holiday with Barry and Elizabeth and a few friends from here. It was a traditional day: football, friends, family, and food (and lots of it).

This week we also made a trip to the nearby Chiricahua National Monument, which is always a delightful trip.

bradanddadandelizabeth2009

 

Arches and lath

Written by karen on November 18th, 2009

One of the things we wanted to experiment with as we built the battery house is archways. We’ll have several archways in the houses, both inside as doorways and outside as an architectural element. The idea is to have indented archways around a few of the outside doors.

This kind of detail is added by putting Styrofoam on the outside of the house and then stucco’ing over it. Apparently, some people put this inch-thick Styrofoam over their whole house (for insulation value, we hear…that seems very odd to us), but we’re doing it just for looks where we want detail like this.

While I love the design (see below), I have been concerned about how we would do the arches.

arch_elev

Brad has always said he’d just “freehand” it, and it would be fine. Today, we found out.

We began by looking at different shaped arches on the Internet. Then we talked about how we’d do it. Since Brad thought he could just draw it and this was only a test (we could always throw out the foam if it didn’t work; we have lots), I said go for it.

We planned to cut one half first and then use that as a guide for the other half so they’d be symmetrical. Brad started by showing me how this would work and that it would indeed result in the point at the top that I wanted.

papercutout

Then he drew out the design.

He cut the foam with a jigsaw and used a guide for the straight part.

Here’s the end result.

And on the actual battery house.

After we got the arch done, we mounted it on the wall of the battery house and started on lath. The lath we’re using is called stucco netting, and it looks pretty much like chicken wire (or what they call here “poultry netting;” that cracks me up). We were both dreading how difficult it would be to put up.

It has to be nailed down very tightly so that the stucco goes down smoothly. And the stucco goes on in a very thin coat, so you can’t really cheat it much. On the solid wall, we used a staple gun to nail it down. On the foam we had to use very long roofing screws, which was a lot harder. Overall, though, it really wasn’t bad to put up. More pictures here if you’re interested.

All in all, a very good day’s work.

 

Making doors: take 1

Written by karen on November 17th, 2009

So, we have begun to make our first door. Here are the steps.

First, we chose seven 2×6 boards that were reasonably straight, flat, and nice looking, a challenge given the quality of our lumber. Here the boards laid out on the slab to make sure they are flat.

door1

Then we used a table saw to cut about 1/2″ or so off each side to square them up and help ensure fit.

door2

Then we ran a router around the edge to give a beveled look. There are many shapes of router bits with various angles, etc. We chose one that would make a shallow, slightly rounded edge.

door3

Next, we laid out the boards on a series of four pipe clamps with cardboard underneath for gluing. We smeared the edges of each board with carpenter’s glue and then clamped then tightly together, trying to make sure the boards were all flat with no bowing.

door4

Here it is all clamped together….now to wait for 24 hours.

door5

After it came out of the clamps, everything looked great. It’s going to be a week or so before we get to town to get stain and varnish to finish it, so you’ll have to wait until then to see the final results.

 

Special delivery

Written by karen on November 16th, 2009

We are having many deliveries at the ranch this week. Today, the inverter arrived. This driver was really great.

IMG_5992

IMG_5997

We had a productive building day today as well and got the whole battery house wrapped. We plan to start on lath tomorrow and hope to get it done before the paper begins ripping off. (The gale force winds are a real problem.) The battery house is looking really nice and solid. We’re going to stucco the outside, in part as practice for the “real” house. I am quite certain that are batteries are going to have one of the nicest houses ever.

IMG_6001

IMG_6000

(This is the back. The inset is for the generator. Boy were the corners of this hard to nail down. The generator needs to be outside, but this will keep it covered and will shelter us from the noise. I don’t think it will be running much though.

The weather here has been freezing. Literally…mid 20s at night. This afternoon we finished work at about sunset, and we were both shivering despite our warm hats and coats. It seems only a couple days ago that it was so hot. The human body has an amazingly narrow comfort range!