Apocalyptic Homesteading (Day 148-161)
Hello Everyone!
A brief introduction: Hi I am Jacob.
TL;DR: There is no tl;dr because you should have more patience and attention span than a gnat on a high wind.
Apocalyptic Homesteading Day 148-161!
Chicken Shuffling, Foundation Work, Termite Shields, Skirting, Supply Runs, Skinks, Gardens & Lots Of Cabin Carpentry
The roosters have been quite active this morning ever since I woke up a few hours ago (a little after four o'clock) which is always an hour that I look forward to waking during so that was nice. It is kind of funny because there are other roosters several dozen acres away from here and whenever those roosters crow mine tend to crow back. Those roosters are so distant that I can only hear them if I am outside and intently listening for them so I doubt that anyone else could hear them in the distance. Somehow my roosters sure can hear it and I guess that (aside from being attuned to listening to such things) now that they are elevated up off the ground (in the new coop) I think that they can hear a lot more because they sure are crowing more.
As a side note, the roosters have taken well to being separated from the hens and although I let one or the other of them out to roam around with the hens each day I mainly just let Bob out with them because he is not abusive towards them like Bob Backwards is. I have also noticed that Mister Backwards is a bit nicer with the hens on the occasions that I let him roam around the dog yard with them but he is still quite pushy and demanding of them which is not all that bad but it does stress them so I have been mostly avoiding that and letting him roam around alone.
The thing is that if I let either of the roosters out they tend to stay around the coop (chatting up and showing off to the hens) and not meandering around the yard enough eating the bugs and most importantly the ticks. When the hens are out (especially by themselves) they scour the entire dog yard and stay in motion until they either scratch up a spot to lay down and dust themselves in (usually in the shade) or want to get to their nesting boxes inside the coop. Doing a bunch of chicken shuffling each day is not something that I want to do in the long-term but for now it is working and I have seen very few ticks (or ants) because of it. A few days back I made a small trellis for some grape vines outside of the dog yard and in the hour or two that I was working in the area I wound up with five ticks (that I noticed) that I later pulled off of me so the ticks are undoubtedly here and out in force with the changing of the seasons.
Anyway, I had some time to sit and write this morning before the sun came up but now it is growing light outside so I do not know how much more I can spell out here before the itch to get to work grows too unbearable to not scratch it. Yesterday I worked more on getting those cinder block piers and the three skids into place for the cabin and I got all but one pier finished. I also cut the skids down to exactly four meters in length, leveled and squared them and then staked the two outside ones in place so that they will not move while I finish the pier work. The main thing that I was trying to accomplish with bracing it all was to be able to see just where I was at with the overall square, plumb and level because I am building atop the skids and while being a little under the desired size (where the skids rest on the piers) is fine if the pier extends greater than the skid then the finish siding will not plane in and there will not be anything that I can do about it. Whereas if the skid extends beyond the edge of the block pier then I can always shim things out in a way that accommodates the siding but it is looking like it will not be necessary to do so.
The way that the piers are coming out so far is okay but I still dislike dry stacking cinder blocks as a foundation. They also have about four times more mass than what is actually needed as a support and I can at the most only harness half of there mass for load bearing. With nine such piers in place there is very little room left under the cabin and all the available space is locked between the (maybe two feet wide) confines of the piers. The cinder block piers cannot be anchored to either (unless I fill them with concrete) but that is not going to happen on this project. Do not get me wrong they will make a stout foundation and the skids themselves will be strapped to the ground with anchors but there are always huge disadvantageous to any kind of dry-stack pier/foundation system.
Well, it is now a few days later and I should try to get this entry caught up some before the sun comes up and I get going on today's projects. The last few days have been pretty 'hit or miss' with working but I will get to that in a moment. I did manage to get all of the foundation piers in place for the cabin and I also got the skids leveled. After finishing all of that stuff I wound up going on a supply run the following day to get some building materials that were not available through that building supply company that delivered that lumber package last week. I also got a bunch of seeds and some bags of cheap potting soil for my gardening endeavors which is something that I am very excited about.
The supply run to town was a bit weird and we spent a really long time wandering around the building supply store looking for stuff. The store itself has been having the locations of its inventory rearranged so that was confusing enough but also there were once again many items that just were not in stock and/or altogether unavailable. It is rather surreal shopping during these times but wandering around a store that is in mild disarray, with limited amounts of goods and an extremely over-priced lumber supply made me keep asking myself is this a sign of a civilization in decline and furthermore should I be buying up everything that I can now while it is still available!
To make things a bit weirder when we got into the store and began loading one of the carts with zip-board this fella walks by and grabs the other cart I had (that was literally a foot away from me at the time) and just mosied off with it like he had not just sniped someone else's cart. Of course I just chuckled about it and went and got another cart but still I was like what the hell. Sometime later we had loaded two rolls of insulation onto the cart with the zip-board and when we came back to it later (after shopping other parts of the store) someone had taken one of the rolls of insulation. I guess that walking two isles over to the insulation section was just too much effort for them. Once again I got a chuckle out of it and fetched another roll of insulation before heading off to the checkout lane.
The adventure was not quite over there because as I was pushing the cart loaded with lumber and insulation across the parking lot I noticed three guys (that looked like three generations of the same person) sitting in a little truck near where we had parked and as soon as I saw them I was like 'what the hell are they up to' and was rather relieved when they switched their focus from my friend to me. The look on their faces was this sort of wanton malicious hatred that I was familiar with seeing on hateful folks faces long before the age of mask wearing. Lets just say that it was not the first time that I have seen such looks or had them directed at me over the previous year and yeah that is why wearing a small axe on my hip seems like such a good idea... because people are fucking crazy to start with and now the crazy is wide ass open and on full display. The area being very chill had lead me to not wearing the axe but this incident has me re-thinking that.
Anyway, back to the story. So I was pushing the heavy cart along across the parking lot and things are going good because the cart is rolling smoothly and it was nice and breezy which made the heat not so intense. Then the little truck starts up and starts driving towards me and that little inner alarm I have went off and I was like well whatever is going to happen is going to happen. The hateful look on those three guys' faces grew stronger the closer they got to me and I had to slow the cart a good bit because they cut me off and drove by me on my right side. They were maybe four meters away as they passed and I was watching (as long as they were in my field of vision) the passenger window that was down and the beady eyed fellow sitting there looking like he had something in mind to do to me. I expected him (or them all) to yell something or to throw something and as they passed me by and began to exit my peripheral vision (and I began pushing the cart at full speed again) the guy in the passenger seat blasted a fucking air-horn (the large size can) and gave me quite the start. Shit does not always surprise me but that time it did and I jumped a bit mid-stride and pinched something in my lower back along the way that is still annoying me two days later.
I turned when I heard the noise also and the guy was holding the air-horn down low outside the door, waving it at me like 'look here I got you with this' while he was giving me this smirk that made me want to snatch one of the pressure treated pieces of lumber off my cart and smack him across his arm with it. I was pretty sure I could span the distance in time to do it before they could drive away but a scene of me not having enough time played out in my head in which I had to throw the lumber like a spear through the back window of their truck and all the chaos that would of course have ensued from there. There is a big difference between discreetly smacking the guys arm with a piece of lumber (so that he drops the air-horn) and launching a deadly missile into a moving vehicle and yeah unfortunately I know and weigh the difference between such things.
In that moment though I felt a sadness for those folks because here they are three grown men (probably three generations of the same family) in a truck with no tools, no building supplies and no signs of either, harassing folks in a busy parking lot like a bunch of delinquents. The fleeting sadness faded and was of course replaced with hostility and rightly so especially given the big adrenaline dump that I had just got. I thought that it was just my friend there when I rounded the vehicle parked adjacent to the one we came in and as I said very loudly something to the effect of "Those fucking rednecks... they have no idea I will snatch all three of their fucking asses out of that truck and whoop all their asses..." and I trailed off there because I saw that in fact it was not just my friend in earshot and their was this sun weathered old black man sitting on the tongue of the trailer attached to the vehicle beside ours and his eyes got wider and he sat up a bit straighter as my words registered. In hindsight that truck of other folks had been parked beyond that truck with the trailer and who knows what they might have been saying to that fellow or just near him before they drove away.
I was surprised to see the fellow there and my friend (who had missed noticing the guys blasting me with the air-horn because he was bent inside the vehicle loading it) asked me what was going on. I told him something like "Those fucking rednecks just air-horned me!" My friend then asked me what I meant and the air-horn sounded again (as if on cue) and we could all see the person jump from it near their truck across the parking lot. I turned to the old fella at that point and said "What the hell is wrong with people?" to which after several moments of thought he said "I don't know" and just shook his head. I laughed in a 'me neither' way and said "Me either man me either!" and of course the old fella did not laugh because we both knew what I was really saying there and honestly the shit just is not funny. Folks like that have always been around and probably always will be but they just seem a bit more emboldened than they used to be which of course is why when this whole thing got rolling over a year ago that I thought it was a good idea to wear the axe even if it just keeps people back. It is a sad gods damn state of affairs when those are my conclusions and a sadder sign of the times.
The following day I kept thinking about all the sequence of events that occurred while we were at the building supply store and how if along the way I had not had the cart swiped, the insulation swiped, wandered around aimlessly looking for stuff that no one knew where it was because the store was being re-arranged... I mean every second of that entire trip (and preceding day) have replayed in my mind and I am like 'exactly how did I wind up to be in that exact place at that exact moment (when I got air-horned) and did I miss seeing it coming or fail to keep watching the folks as they passed me and I was steering a super heavy cart in a parking lot downhill after just being cut off by them... and it all replays as it is without thinking about what ifs, maybes or should haves... simply as a pristine memory because I guess sometimes we are just having whatever damn experiences we are having and the best thing that we can do is inspect them to see what can be learned along the way.
In this instance of things the entire experience is just par for the course of my life and not as unusual as it might appear to be. A much younger version of myself might have reacted differently to the situation but as it was all playing out and I heard the air-horn in the distance blare several more times across the parking lot I thought what I still think now which is folks like that always wind up getting the attention they deserve in the end and it seldomly ends well for them and I damn sure will not let my own experience with them sandbag me nor detract from my life. The little pinched muscle or nerve or whatever in my lower back is this subtle (okay not so subtle) reminder that in these times (like all times) the only things that I can do is maintain vigilance, remain peaceful unless directly attacked and stay the fucking course because I only really have to veer into civilization once a month and a few chuckle-heads stirring up trouble for themselves is not worth sacrificing my little merry lifestyle (and life) over. This newfound mellow temperament is nice and all but those folks really do need a good ass whooping to help move them forward in life but alas it does not have to come from me.
Well, it is getting on in the morning and the sun is up over the horizon so I should bugger off for now and get on with my day. During that supply run I did manage to get everything that was needed to move forward on the cabin and hopefully today I can get the termite shielding and the ground anchors in place. The termite shield is made from some galvanized manufactured home skirting that we picked up for that purpose from the building supply store and I just had to cut it down to size so that I can cap the cinder block foundation piers with it and have enough along the edges so they can be turned down at a ninety degree angle. Apparently the termites cannot negotiate the turned down edge of the metal from below and therefore cannot reach the wood above the metal. It is a pretty neat trick and a totally new one for me so hopefully I do not wind up with a bunch of sharp edges to contend with but still get the necessary shielding because whoa the termites are bad here.
Alright, I gotta get my boots on and get out the door. I have spent way more time on writing this morning than I intended to but I am glad that I did so because life is good and I love the precious wee hours of the morning and spending them clacking away at the keyboard is soothing.
It is now the following day and I am up several hours before my usual four o'clock wake up time because I took a nap very late in the day yesterday and failed to get out of bed again afterwards. I totally zonked out and left the tent's door and window flaps open and of course it was the first chilly night we have had in a while so I just kept snuggling further under the blankets instead of getting up. In general I do not mind getting back up after a nap but ugh was I worn the heck out after the day's toils and just did not have it in me to do so. Instead of making espresso and beginning my day I should probably have continued to get some more sleep even though I already got six hours of it but here I am and I can always take a nap this afternoon or something.
Anyway, with the way the new cabin is being built atop those skids (which themselves rest upon the dry-stack cinder block piers) I used four of the strap style ground anchors to anchor the structure to the ground. After watching a bunch of videos on installing the anchors (and even reading some articles and looking at diagrams) I decided to stick as close to the installer guidelines as I possibly could for maximum effectiveness. The anchors themselves were a bear to screw into the ground by hand and although I made an adapter for my largest cordless drill to screw the anchors in with... I burned up the drill on the first anchor. The adapter that I made worked awesome and the drill did good until the anchor (which is about a meter long) hit the hard-pack clay layer. When it did and the drill stopped turning I engaged the hammer on the drill (because it is also a hammer drill) and continued trying to drive the anchor in further. At which point a little puff of smoke exited the drill and it quit working altogether. As a side note the drill is probably repairable and it was more than likely one of the leads to the motor that melted and all I will need to do is solder it back together.
Long story short there, I installed the anchors at a more or less forty-five degree angle and used a variety of tools and materials to accomplish it. A few times I even used a pipe wrench attached directly to the rod of the anchor to turn it because I was stuck at some angle where nothing else would work. Since the skids and piers were already in place and the degree of the anchors meant the ground was in the way for a long lever it was super tricky to get the heads of the anchors nearly flush to the ground but I gave it my best. A few of the anchors have a few inches of their rod sticking out of the ground but none of them exceed the four inches cautioned against by the manufacturer so that is good. Basically I screwed them in as far as I could get them and was fortunate that I could get them that deep into the hard-pack layer of clay.
Several times I resorted to attaching a big pipe wrench to the anchor head (around the flanges where the bolts go) and then slipped a thick-walled piece of PVC pipe over its handle so that when I reached the point where the skid was in the way I could flex the piece of pipe over it and continue cranking the anchor into the ground. The other handy items that I used to drive the anchors was a large crescent wrench (which was also handy to straighten out the flanges that got bent from all the prying), a meter long crowbar with a ninety degree hook at one end and the medium and large pipe wrenches. I also used a four foot piece of two by six inch lumber that I cut two different angles on the end of so that I could (like with the PVC pipe) bypass the skids when turning the anchor. The last and perhaps handiest thing that I used was a piece of old one inch diameter thick-walled galvanized pipe that had a gentle bend at one of its ends. Since the pipe was slightly smaller than the crow bar it made missing the cinder block piers easier.
I know that it is a small cabin and all (at roughly two point four meters by four meters at its base) but the roof will be four point eight meters by four point eight meters and be covered in solar panels. Hell, the way it works out for it to have the 'all-season pitch' (for the solar tilt angle) the rear wall of the cabin is going to be nearly four point eight meters tall itself! In other words the entire building will create a heck of a lot of load (even minus me filling it with gear and living in it) but it also creates a huge surface area for wind sheer and uplift. So anchoring the structure firmly to the ground was a must unless at some point I want to see it get pushed off its dry-stack piers and topple down the hill in a big storm. There is after all severe thunderstorms and hurricanes that can occur in this region so best to not 'half-step' when it comes to properly anchoring it. The only real downside to the anchors is that they extend out beyond the building on two sides but the plan is to cover them with the porches when I get to that phase of things.
I should backtrack here a bit and say that before I started anchoring the building I finished the fabrication of the termite shields and got them all installed atop the cinder block piers. They sure are ugly and create so many sharp edges that I will most likely close the bottom of the building off to keep the dogs out from beneath it (that yeah in the long run will ensure that I have a rodent problem) but the shielding is necessary. From the amount of termite activity that I have seen around this property (and hearing about how bad it is in this region) I think that it is worthwhile especially considering how much the lumber cost at the currently outrageous prices. I know that I mentioned it many months ago but a big part of why I removed so many trees from the shelter site was so that it would be as sunny as possible which apparently is one of the biggest things that can be done to deter termites from an area. Anyway, the termite shields capped the piers quite nicely and I did my best to minimize the sharp edges. The current plan is to skirt the bottom of the building with some of that manufactured home skirting (that I made the termite shields from) which will conceal how ugly it all is quite well.
As I was doing all that jazz yesterday and especially so during the ground anchor installation I kept getting super hungry and feeling like I was low on calories for the work ahead so I was like 'to get the rest of this anchor in I will need twenty olives, three slices of pear and a sandwich' which is pretty much what I ate between doing each anchor. All of this probably contributed to me not getting up from my nap because by the end of the day (and of course I did a bunch of other stuff as well) I was absolutely stuffed with food and was still eating just before I fell asleep! It was by far the most food that I have consumed in a single day in many months and although I did not quite overeat I came pretty close to it. I took it all as a sign of good health and simply trying to keep up with the amount of calories that I needed. I know it does not work like that and that I was burning even more calories digesting the food but since I was mainly eating fruit I was getting those little natural sugar rushes along the way that are always satisfying.
On a different note. I have still been closely watching the sun each day and doing my best to notice which areas get the most sun so that I can pick a few more garden spots and start preparing the sites. I am mainly trying to avoid having to do much in the way of brush clearing which makes the south facing hill a no go for the moment. What I have been looking at is some large open areas in the pine forest and while such forest are not ideal to garden in there are some things that will grow well in them. Before I had made that most recent supply run I had done some research and found what was best for the pine forest and I bought a few things to experiment with to see how they do growing in the pine forest. Apparently lettuce does well in such places so that is the main variety of edible plant that I am going to be planting in one of the sunny spots.
It is now a few hours before dawn on the following day. I am slowly getting fully woken up all the way by sipping some espresso and having an early morning smoke as I listen to the sounds of traffic in the distance. The last few nights the temperature has been rather chilly and although it is above freezing it is nowhere near the warm nights that we have been having here over the last month. It is of course nice and toasty in the tent now that I turned the propane heater on but before that it was a tad too cool to be comfortable even though I had the recirculating oil heater running all night which usually does the trick but I failed to cover the little opening where the three zippers for the tent's door come together... and that is all it took to make it not quite warm enough inside. It is a tiny little opening but with it being windy and the rising hot air in the tent... a lot of cool air gets sucked in through that opening.
It was a pretty productive day and I got started working outside a little after the sun was up over the horizon and did not stop until a few hours before dark. Given that I had woken up at two in the morning it all made for one heck of a long day. I was fast asleep before dark and barely woke up with enough daylight left to feed the dogs and secure the chickens in their coop before falling right back to sleep and sleeping until a little after four this morning. I am achy all over which is probably because I have been pushing myself pretty hard and been lifting and carrying so much stuff lately. Shuffling around so many building materials has assuredly taken a toll on me and although I try not to overdue it with carrying any one thing... the cumulative effects have really added up.
Anyway, I spent the early part of the day getting my irrigation system more dialed in and installed another one of those y-splitters on the hose that leads to the chicken coop so that I can have both the coop hose and the irrigation line that runs to the fenced garden connected at the same time. Connecting and disconnecting those hoses all the time was getting annoying so I am glad that I no longer will have to do that when it is either time to spray out the coop or water the fledgling garden. For whatever reason those kinds of little inconveniences sure do get on my nerves over time which is probably why I generally try to solve them as soon as I notice them.
By around eight in the morning I got all my morning chores done and began the slow process of getting all the tools that I would need for the day rounded up and re-located to the cutting table near the new cabin site. What I am calling the 'cutting table' is that first outdoor counter that I made when I originally started clearing the site several months ago. It worked pretty well when I had the music rig setup on it but since then it has remained mostly unused and its sole purpose was to be a cutting table for when I began the cabin building process. After months of looking at it in the dog yard it sure is nice to be using it for its intended purpose.
Alright, so I do not want to recount all the details of what I did with the cabin yesterday but in short I got the skids all shimmed to where they needed to be, squared the skids up so that the rectangle that they make was as square as I could get it, installed some blocking between the skids, re-checked the overall squareness (I actually did that at least half a dozen times over the course of things) and then I installed some strips of lumber three quarters of an inch down on the inside of all the skids so that I could then lay OSB plywood in between the skids which will act as a barrier between the floor's insulation and the ground. It all worked out rather nicely and it was super neat because I did not have to crawl under the structure to attach the plywood that is basically acting as a pest guard and vapor barrier.
After all that jazz was accomplished I rounded up all the lumber that I needed to build the floor itself and in quick order I got it built right on top of the skid structure. Once I got the floor framing all nailed off I placed a small block of wood under each corner to lift it up a little off the skids so that I could squirt construction adhesive atop the skid structure and below the double outer bands of the floor framing itself. With all of the adhesive in place I removed the wood blocks and was careful to get the floor framing as square as I possibly could with the skid structure beneath it before attaching the outer bands of the floor to the skid structure with six inch landscape screws at roughly two foot intervals all the way around it which smashed the adhesive quite nicely between the two wooden structures and made for one heck of a nice seal. It is worth noting that before the adhesive could dry I used a piece of wood to scrape off the excess on the exterior of the building so that it would not interfere with the exterior sheathing later on.
The trickiest part of the entire process of attaching the floor to the skid structure was making sure that everything planed in on the exterior all the way down to the cinder block piers that the building is resting upon. It is also probably the most important part of things because in order for the sheathing, skirting and siding to all work out well (and basically lay flat) all of those things have to plane in to each other one way or another. It is not a big deal if one layer or another is recessed a bit because I can always shim out but if there are any protrusions then there is not much that can be done about them aside from chiseling or planing them down which is not an option with the cinder block. Overall there are only a few spots where I had to cheat the floor structure back from the edge about an eighth of an inch (from the outside edges of the skids) so that when the walls go up I can still plane in from them to the skids where the sheathing will be lapping onto. None of that stuff is uncommon with wood construction and failing to pay attention to it can create a ton of work later when five minutes of prevention does the trick nicely.
With the new floor system glued and fastened in place I moved onto getting the insulation stuffed into the bays of the floor joists but before doing so I checked the layout of all the floor joists and fastened them in their middles to the center skid of the structure so that they would not move around when it came time to install the tongue and groove plywood sub-flooring. I also secured the joists so that they would not potentially 'clack' against the center skid later when the building is being used and the floor is getting a lot of foot traffic. The insulation installation went super fast and I had just enough in those two rolls we got the other day to fill all the floor except for the last four feet of one bay. We had accounted for this happening when we got the insulation and had decided to use some insulation that was already stored on site but was a bit ratty. The little piece that I got to finish the project was not in too bad of shape but it was pretty gross nonetheless and I was glad that I only had to use one tiny piece of it and thankfully I was thinking ahead and it went in the bay where I am planning on the door being located.
By the time that I got to that point in things I should have just put a tarp over it all and called it a day because I was pretty beat by then after waking up at two in the morning but I just kept on going and wound up getting all three of the pieces of three quarter inch tongue and groove plywood sub-floor installed and ugh was it an all around bear to accomplish. Mostly it was probably my fatigue that interfered with getting the tongues and grooves of the plywood sheets to line up well (and get mated) but after lots of effort I got it done. I have a method of doing that kind of tongue and groove installation that works rather well involving my long crowbar but my back (and energy level) was not up for it so I did not bother doing it that way so that I would not injure myself further. The joints between the sheets came out good enough but they are not the tightest that I have ever done nor the prettiest and not just because I beat things up a bit along the way but because the material itself was not all that great to start with. No complaints in regards to that last bit given the way the lumber price, supply and availability scenario is and like I have said before I am happy just having materials to work with in the first place.
Once I was satisfied that the tongue and groove was as good as I could get it I once again checked how all the exterior was planing in and was stoked to find that with only a few minor adjustments (by banging on the plywood edges with a hammer and block of wood) it all planed into the floor's outer bands, the skid structure and the cinder block piers... which was quite the relief because I could then nail off all the sub-floor and be done with it! I even snapped chalk lines where all the floor joist are located so that I would not accidentally miss during the nailing process. That battery powered nail gun that I have been using came in handy once again and after a gazillion nails (and hammering the odd ones flat) I finally... after long last... after all the prep work... had a surface to actually begin building walls on. I had a moment there once I had swept the entire floor off with a broom and added the nails that I had missed on the first round and was like: "Whoa! Fucking Finally! Something to really build on!"
From that moment on it took every ounce of my focus to get all the tools wrapped up, the trash rounded up, the miscellaneous stuff put away, the tools pushed and/or carried uphill, the sound system powered down and out of my boots and outer clothes before I flopped into the bed and zonked out for several hours. It was not so much that I was simply fatigued and long past my nap time but the combination of that and an overall stiffness that I felt in my body and a deep ache in my back in that pinched area that thankfully had not given me much trouble throughout the day. It all hit me like a ton of proverbial bricks but I was smiling this deep satisfied smile because I had at long last reached a benchmark in the progress here that I had been working towards since my initial arrival.
A plateau of sorts I guess it could be called and one that has been well worth the effort especially given the quality level involved much like with the fencing, plumbing, electrical and other projects which is in itself rather awesome. If things take more time to do to achieve a greater longevity then I am (as always unless the circumstances demand otherwise) all for it. I think longevity matters when it comes to the stuff that gets built and it is after all wasteful to build things that will not last. There are all sorts of exceptions to that but as a general rule if I can build it well once then I am going to build it well once and be done with it no matter what it takes to do it.
Well, the sun is up over the horizon now and although it was nice to get in some writing the morning chores are nagging at me to be done so I best wrap this up for now. If all goes well today I will get most of the walls built for the first floor of the cabin and perhaps even get the ceiling in place and dried in which would be super nice because I would be creating some shade to work under on these sunny days.
Alright, it is now the following day (Saturday actually) and I awoke before the sun was up to it drizzling rain outside. Since my back is aching (from the last several days of activities) I just let myself drift off to sleep again and hoped that when I awoke next the ache in my back would subside. Which it did mildly by the time that I finally roused myself several hours later when it began raining in earnest. From the look of the weather forecast it is going to continue to rain on and off throughout the remainder of the day and it is looking like some thunderstorms will develop later in the day. Between the change in weather and my aching back I will more than likely take the day off but I may wind up getting some more vegetables planted if I get to feeling stir crazy in the tent and the rain lets up enough.
I spent most of the morning yesterday getting the layout for the cabin's exterior walls figured out which given its size and simplicity was not all that big of a deal. The tricky part was to make sure that when the walls went up that their exterior surface planed into the skid and floor systems beneath them. To accomplish this I leveled up from the skids themselves (because they determine the plane) and then measured over the width of the wall and made a mark with a pencil on the sub-floor. I actually made two marks on each side of the corners and used my framing square to draw a 'corner' where the walls would be. After that I snapped lines (with a chalk line) through all the marks to form the line which defined the inner most distance that I could set the walls and still maintain the exterior plane between the skid system, floor system and the exterior walls.
The layout came out rather nice and I was a bit surprised that I only had to 'cheat' the lines a small amount to correct any abnormalities with the way everything lines up which is per usual when building with wood no matter what you do because there will always be variations in straightness/squareness due to twists, crowns, hooks, bends and general inconsistencies in the material. It is all just 'run of the mill' (yeah that is an intentional pun) when it comes to working with wood and ironically after years of building with round wood (which has way more inconsistencies) I notice them a heck of a lot more when working with milled lumber whether that be linear (rough-cut)_or the more standard dimensional lumber produced by large milling companies. Honestly after building so much with round wood over the last decade or so and coping with its challenges... those presented by actual dimensional lumber are trivial at best and as long as I am paying attention to what I am doing I can make some curvy ass lumber do its job without inducing too much extra work (or headache) upon myself.
Since I had a nice big flat area to work on with the floor of the cabin I decided to make good use of it and built all four of the walls on it and the panel that makes up the framing for the ceiling and the floor system for what I am calling 'the second floor' but is really just the attic space that will most likely become storage later unless I think of something else more creative to do with that space. I built the two short end walls first and made them duplicates of each other with the same rough opening for a header and doorway. This is not the first time that I have done this in this manner and often like to frame in a window opening with a door opening because if I (or anyone) wants a door there later it is easy to do without having to do a bunch of demolition for a larger opening. I also aligned the rough openings across from each other at the front and back of the building so that when I put the window in (or a second door if I decide to put a deck off that end of the building) then I will get good airflow through the room. The only thing that I did with those short walls that might turn out a bit funky later is that I put the wall stud layout for them both in line with the exterior sheathing and not for the interior wall covering.
Once those short walls were built, I squared them up (by measuring from corner to corner) and diagonally braced them off so that they would remain square when I moved them around. I just stacked them on top of each other out of the way near the tent deck and kept chugging along building the other walls. The first long side wall that I built I actually stood up after bracing it off and it was so perfect (as well as the very level sub-floor) that it remained standing up on its own totally unattached and me not touching it! From there it was pretty simple to brace it off and put a few temporary fasteners in the base plate to keep it all there as I built the remaining wall and second floor panel. When I got finished with the second long wall I braced it off and slid it off the sub-floor and leaned it up against the tent deck (out of the way) so that I could build the second floor ceiling panel.
The next steps of adding construction adhesive to seal the bottom plates of the walls to the sub-floor and installing the walls was rather straight forward and I just slid the second floor panel back a few feet on the sub-floor, un-fastened the long side wall that I had tempted into place, laid it down atop the panel, swept the sub-floor clean, applied the adhesive with a caulk gun and then finally stood the wall up again, nudged it into place with my giant oak mallet, checked it for plumb and fastened it into place with a combination of big ring shank nails, three inch deck screws and some six and ten inch landscape screws. The big screws were so that I could anchor the bottom plate of the wall all the way down to the skids roughly six inches below. Since the skids are anchored to the ground with those straps and giant ground anchors this effectively ties the wall to the ground.
From there it was just rinse and repeat for installing the opposite long side wall and I simply leaned the second floor panel up against the first standing wall and actually screwed it there so that it would act as a brace. With the two main walls standing in place I carried the downhill side of the cabin's short wall to below its opening and hefted it into place which was a bit tricky because I had to lift it vertically nearly four feet and then push it in between the two walls that were already installed. When I put the bracing on the short walls I had done them so that when I 'popped' the walls into place the bracing would overlap the corners of the other walls and stop me from being able to push it in too far and possibly losing control of it in the process. It worked out super well and that wall went in surprisingly easy considering how awkward it was to lift into place. Between the two side walls I had only given myself maybe an eighth of an inch of tolerance for the other walls to fit between them so you can imagine my surprise when the short wall fit between them exactly as planned on the first try.
With those three walls in place I unfastened the leaning ceiling panel and through a series of small maneuvers I got one corner of it up onto the top of the first long side wall that I had installed. After a good bit more maneuvering and pushing I got the panel resting atop all three walls and turned it sideways so that it would remain there until I could get to that phase of things. I did put a few screws in it just to help hold it in place but for the most part it is just sitting up there out of the way for now. With that panel out of the way I was able to get the last remaining short wall installed and the only thing that I did different with it was when I added the adhesive to the sub-floor I was careful not to apply it where the threshold of the door is going to be because I will eventually be cutting that portion of the bottom plate of that wall out altogether to accommodate the door jam.
Anyway, It was a super long day and I am kind of making trivial of all the carrying of lumber, shuffling of tools, hundreds of measurements, all the wood cutting, the prolific use of squares and levels and all the little details that have to be gone over (and paid attention to) so that by the time the trim and finish siding goes on that everything works as its intended to and not a total snafu or waste of materials. There sure is a heck of a lot to the building process and while anyone can hammer some stuff together it takes much more than that to go from an idea to something worth building in the first place.
While I do enjoy experimenting with building techniques and will often build things according to the desires of whoever is having me build it (unless it is something that I am building for me which is a whole different ball of wax) I do have my preferences for how I like to do things and that comes from habits built over a lifetime of doing construction projects. In other words I do not get too obsessed or attached with one way or another of doing things as long as I feel confident that I can stand behind the work later and be proud of it. I think a lot of folks get way too focused on doing things one way or another and lose sight of the fact that there are numerous ways to do most things and achieve the same end goal which in this case is an insulated, weather-proof structure that can withstand a hundred and twenty mile an hour sustained wind... or hopefully withstand it. Not that in this location that is a massive concern but there is (like I said before) the possibility of tornadoes and hurricanes here as well as the shifting climate so I think it is wise to not take chances with such a building especially once the roof is loaded down with solar panels.
What I was trying to get at there is that I really do enjoy the overall building process and doing things a little differently each time keeps things interesting to say the least and fun to say the most! It is a heck of a lot of work even doing a small building (which is part of why I like doing small shelters) and when I am working I continually double and triple check all the math involved, draw diagrams where necessary and try to dodge making mistakes that my past experiences tell me are avoidable. I really get in the zone when I am building and although I constantly chide myself not to 'get creative' and follow the steps in my concise plan... a little deviation never hurts.
I also like to remain flexible so that I can enjoy the process itself and not get fixated on the end result and in doing so I occasionally notice some interesting things or have some good ideas. I have had a few such occurrences during this build process and most notably the way that the OSB for the vapor barrier got installed which made life so much easier than doing it from beneath the structure. For whatever reason little clever things like that really make my day and not only because they save me time, calories and often hassle but because once I discover them I can use them again later if the need arises. It is kind of funny but yesterday I was thinking that I am just as likely to forget some new trick that I learn or even forget an old one out of disuse than I am to have a new trick actually stick so I have to stay sharp and perhaps start thoroughly documenting things just for good measure.
It is still raining here and the wind has been picking up along with the rumblings of thunder in the distance. The dogs have been freaking out a bit and my boy dog has been doing his 'Beelzebubba' thing the last few days as the storm system drew closer and closer. By the way his sister has been acting oddly for just as many days now though (the dog that is hyper-sensitive to large and small weather events) and has been like 'the storm is not all that bad but it is coming' which is much better than her response to severe weather. As long as I can read the signs for what they are with the dogs and the weather and do my best to pay attention to it and be forgiving of them when they get caught up in their anxiety loop over either the approaching or occurring weather. Some quirky behavior (and its occasional frustrations) are well worth an early detection system for bad storms so I do not mind the trade-off at all. Thankfully the dogs do much better these days with coping during the storms than they used to and are rather content to simply be close to me as they do their shaking and panting.
Okay, it is rapidly approaching noon and it is dark outside due to the overcast skies and the rain is still pouring down so what the hell I may as well keep writing the day away lest I convince myself that I should get the rain gear on and get to moving around outside doing whatever I can which is probably an all around bad idea with my aching back and the slippery mud. Sometimes I wonder what so drives me to take the time to spell things out and why I feel like it is important to do so and then I go a few days without doing it and I begin noticing 'sand' getting in the gears of my thinking and am always mildly surprised that writing helps keep the gears turning smoothly and the sand being ground into the dust of time as new experiences are had that... need remarking upon in one fashion or another... and the cycle continues.
Whatever is going on with all that jazz I am rather satisfied with the end result and although I do not have the time of late to pour a bunch of hours each day into writing I am quite satisfied with the writing that I do get to do. After all the times we are in are remarkable to one degree or another and our lives are all somehow caught in the specter of events playing out before, around and through us. It is all quite wacky in this age of hyper-connectivity and massive availability of information on a scale that previous generations (dating back what would it be millions of years?) that never had access to such a wealth of both information (good, bad and neutral information) and the ability to communicate with each other in real time globally. I mean really it is astounding if you think of how recent (in the grand scheme of time's passage) we went from cave drawings to smartphones. Now with technology at our forefront we seem to be to dissolving the very boundaries that separate the material world from the immaterial world and mesh the two together in a way that further enhances either our pleasure (like immersive video games) in it or our awareness of it for more tactile/sensory augmentation or some fusion of both.
I like the idea of digital assets somehow pinned in the physical world (or vice versa but that is way off-topic) like props/items for games but I like the utilitarian aspect of say tracking wind speed/direction, having an X,Y,Z floating axis to consult, or something as simple as a compass, or a way to accurately gauge elevation changes and 'draw' lines between various points of their changes all in beautiful three dimension. Eventually it will probably only involve popping in a contact lens (or two) and the show will be on from there! We may well be on the brink of it now but who the hell knows what direction things will take in the long run.
On a different note. Nature has really been coming alive here with the mild spring that we have been having and whoa have I seen a lot of lizards. There is a big variety and I have no idea what the names for most of them are and the one that I do know is the skink which thankfully the other kinds seem to vastly outnumber given their potential toxicity to animals. I say potential there because the skinks carry a liver fluke that the dogs are immune to (I just recently learned that and previously thought all skinks were poisonous to dogs if eaten) but cats are not immune to the liver fluke... if the skink happens to be hosting it in the first place. The little buggers (the skinks) can apparently carry salmonella as well so there is no love lost there if the other lizards out populate them around here. I have yet to see any super big lizards here (exotic invasives) but I would not be all that surprised if I saw one given how far south the place is located.
The rain has finally stopped and I am feeling inclined to get my boots on and get outside to at least do my daily chores while I can but I also do not want to get full tilt in motion doing stuff because I have to take the day to myself and just let my body recover from all its recent exertions. In other words I will more than likely wind up back here again in the not so distant future wording out my ponderous thoughts. For someone who has been doing nothing but 'glorified camping' for the entirety of this series of daily writings... I am in remarkably good mental and physical shape with pretty much nothing to complain about which I find oddly unsettling but I will undoubtedly grow accustomed to it.
I am glad that I went outside when I did because there was nearly an inch of standing water atop the cabin's sub-floor. I guess that shows just how well of a seal that I made when I glued the bottom plates of the walls down! To evacuate the water I used a cordless saw to cut the bottom plate out where that door I was just writing about is going to be. I then used a broom to sweep all the water out. I inspected under the structure and there was only one place that I saw where water had seeped through to the OSB vapor barrier. In the broader picture a little water now is not going to supremely ruin anything but I need to get that cabin 'dried in' (weather-proofed) as soon as possible. It seems like everything that I build winds up getting a little rain on it during the building process and I always figure that if it happens... well then... it happens and I am not going to overly concern myself along the way with anxiety about it.
I went on a bit of a hike to see how some of my corn patches were doing (and check that everything was okay after the storm) and was pretty bummed to see that a bunch of the corn that had been growing before was gone. I am pretty sure those back to back nights of low temperatures and that last frost wiped out those corn plants, even the ones that I covered in straw to protect during the coldest nights. Considering how early that I planted that corn it is amazing that it made it as far as it did. Just in case none of it grows I bought a few varieties of corn seed when I went on that most recent supply run and am going to plant it soon.
Alright, it has been a few more days and I never wrapped this entry up so mayhaps I should put in a little time this morning on it and see if I can at the very least fill in the last few days if not wrap it up entirely. I am in slow motion this morning and pretty darn stiff and sore after the last few days of work so I am inclined to make a slow start to my day and not push myself to utilize every hour of daylight like I have been of late.
Let me see here... I got the rest of the first floor framing done on the new cabin minus a few odds and ends that do not need to be done for progress to continue like the ceiling blocking, the window and door headers and stuff like that. The ceiling panel (or the second floor's floor if you want to look at it that way) was rather easy to move around atop the erect walls and I just slid it one way or another so that it was out of my way as I installed the second top plate for the walls. In hindsight I really should have put that second plate on before setting that panel up there but by the time that I did that (put the ceiling panel up there) it was the end of a very long day and although I had reminded myself to put the plates on numerous times... my fatigued brain let it slip when the time came to do it. The funny thing is that as soon as I put the panel up there I realized it but by then of course I was not going to remove the heavy panel from atop the walls when I could just slide it around up there to accommodate putting on the plates which worked out well enough even if it made the process a bit slower and burned a few extra calories.
Once I got the top plates on and the ceiling panel in place I then added the second bands to the ceiling panel on all four sides of it and got it all anchored to the wall plates with a combination of three inch deck screws and six inch landscape screws. I did not over do it when it came to fastening the panel down because when the walls for the second floor of the cabin go on my plan is to anchor through the wall plates all the way down through the ceiling panel and into the double band of the exterior walls with ten inch long landscape screws which will tie everything together quite nicely.
The way things currently are I basically have a three inch by six and a half inch continuous header all the way around the building which is created by the double top plates of the exterior walls being attached to the double bands of the ceiling panel. A benefit of doing things this way is that the ceiling joists have about a half an inch on either side where they are resting on the top plate of the load bearing side walls and effectively acting as a ledger for the joists. A half inch ledger on each end of the joist should be plenty for my purposes and although I could have gone without the ledger I thought it best to do so in case the second floor gets used for storage at some point in the future.
When I got the ceiling panel all sorted out (but before installing its second outer bands) I wound up removing one of the joists and framing in a rough opening for a drop-down attic ladder near the center of the room. It is actually located about a third of the way into the room and when the ladder (once it is installed) is extended down the base of it (where it touches the floor) lands where there will be just enough room to walk around it. Those ladders sure are handy for saving space when it comes to a small building like that and it beats devoting a bunch of space to stairs or using a regular ladder to access the 'attic' space or in this case the second floor.
Anyway, with all the framing done I began sheathing the exterior of the building with zip-board and although I maintained the plumb of the sheets rather well I drifted a good bit on where they line up at the top. Which is fine and all because I mainly wanted the bottom of the sheets to match up so that when I install the skirting it will not be a hassle and will be very uniform around the bottom of the building. Eventually other sheets of zip-board will be installed for the second floor and they will butt up to the previously installed sheets and the inconsistencies will be inconsequential especially since all the zip-board joints get taped off with that three inch wide flashing tape.
Dang, this entry is taking a really long time to get wrapped up. I keep adding to it without editing and posting it so perhaps after this morning's writing I can do that before it grows too much longer. Some of these entries take forever to edit and the longer they are the more I tend to avoid buckling down and doing the proof-reading and editing. What usually happens (or at least it has with this entry) is that I write for a few hours before the sun comes up and then once it is up I tend to get outside and start doing stuff without another thought about writing or let alone editing.
A few days ago I went on yet another supply run. I know two in one month! This time we tried to round up more of the building supply stuff for the new cabin by visiting two different building supply stores and although we found most of the stuff we were looking for there was still stuff that was unavailable. The supply chain stuff will hopefully sort itself out eventually but there is no telling when that might be. I still have my doubts as to whether lumber prices will go down or if the grossly inflated prices are here to stay but it all has me thinking more and more about either making my own lumber or switching to steel stud construction. The thing is that even if I made most of the lumber I would still need sheet goods (like plywood) and making that stuff is way outside of my capabilities. It also has me thinking about cob and other alternative building techniques but I always reach a stopping point with that when I consider how labor intensive that kind of stuff can be.
Let me see here. So, since a few days ago when I last added to this I have gotten more of the external sheathing installed on the cabin and begun getting the skirting around the bottom of the cabin installed. I cannot recall if I mentioned it but the sharp edges of the termite shielding sitting atop the cinder block piers makes for too many hazards for the dogs and although I generally like having the dogs to be able to access such areas... in this instance I am skirting off the bottom of the building as a precaution to keep the dogs safe. Anyway, as I was installing the first piece of skirting (on one of the downhill corners) I got this feeling like something was wrong and walked around the building to see my boy dog having a seizure and he was laying only a few inches away from the sharp edges of one of those termite shields... utterly convulsing. My fucking brain about exploded when I saw that happening and as I was pulling the dog out from under the building a few seconds later I was like well that is just one more reason to get the skirting on! As a side note my boy dog is fine and I just carried him to a shady spot and sat with him until the seizure faded.
On a different note, I have been putting in some time each day working on doing some gardening aside from just watering everything when it needs it like I have been doing. I got a super early start on the planting this year but now that it is getting close to May I have been trying to get a lot more stuff planted. I finally rescued my other big flower pots from being used as storage containers and planted the remainder of the potatoes that I had in them as well as in a few other smaller pots. I also planted some corn and basil along with the potatoes just to see how they grow together. I wound up putting all the newly planted pots (and moving all the ones that I previously planted with vegetables) to that sunny spot in the big pine forest where hopefully everything will get enough sun.
After lots of observation that area looks like the best option (aside from perhaps inside the dog yard) for gardening in the vicinity of the shelter site so I took the plunge and committed myself by creating two raised beds at the edge of the area near where I put all the flower pots. I did not do a heck of a lot of prep (hardly any) to the area as far as cutting back the existing vegetation goes but I did line the bottoms of the raised beds with cardboard that had sufficient holes for drainage in it. On both my last two town trips I picked up several bags of cheap potting soil and have been using it which I think is a first with me on my larger scale gardening endeavors. Oddly enough the price of the soil I have been getting went up sixty cents per bag in the span of a few days (the days between my two recent supply runs) and it was the absolute cheapest that was available to start with so now I am considering trying to find a dump-truck load of the stuff so that I can really get to farming! All total I think that I have planted potatoes, two types of corn, two types of tomatoes, two types of bell peppers, two types of lettuce, basil and whatever those random seeds were that had spilled in that bag when I first started the planting season back in March.
The gardening and farming stuff is looking rather promising here at this location and over time I am sure that I will locate the best places to do such things but as of now I am just happy to have stuff growing. Keeping things convenient as far as the sunny spots go might not be optimal for growing tons of food (or black locust trees for that matter) but I know better than to create a bunch of work for myself on a totally different portion of the property that I would have to hike to to do the planting, the watering, the un-wanted vegetation control and ultimately the harvesting. I am after all still in the building phase of things and have an incredible workload to maintain in the area that I am living in so I want to keep my energies focused in that area and not create too much more work for myself outside of it which is more a matter of efficiency than anything else at this juncture. It is a fun hobby and even rewarding when things actually grow but I have no intention of trying to live off the food that grows or anything like that and if I were, I think that I would take it out of the 'hobby' category altogether and really go for it with a massive garden and some large scale irrigation. I have it in mind for the place at a later date but for now I only have so many hours and calories to burn each day.
Maybe working from sun up to sun down each day sounds like a recipe for disaster but whoa do I feel good while doing it, I get plenty of rest along the way and those hot baths at the end (and occasionally at the beginning) of the day sure makes for some blissful moments. During those baths I often look around me and think something along the lines of: Gods damn a lot has been accomplished in a short time! Indeed it has and I am thankful that I have spent the last several years staying in the habit of doing my daily chores, waking up early and generally making the most of my days. Keeping my attitude in line and my morale high has assuredly gotten easier over time and it seems like this adventure has been a good stress test of all that because hey after camping for the last half a year and working the entire time... I have no complaints and am genuinely excited to wake up each day and see what else can be done around the place with the materials that are available and if not then maintaining the mindset to figure out what will it take to get the materials.
A good example of that last bit is my current irrigation rig (and utility water setup) that all runs from that one hydrant that we installed at the top of the shelter site near the road. It now has three brass y-splitters attached to it, two garden hoses that run sprinklers and one that goes to another y-splitter near the chicken coop that branches off to that long run of irrigation tubing that winds its way to the shaded garden with the PVC fence around it where I have another sprinkler. It is a good bit of water line to navigate and all the individual shut-off valves still get me confused but overall it is working well for the patchwork of hoses, irrigation tubing, adapters, fittings, splitters and whatnot that comprise it. With how dry it has been a few times around here for extended periods of time over the last few months I think that all the grass that I planted around the shelter site would have turned to dust had I not been watering it. As with most things the irrigation system was/is an ongoing adaptation to meet my needs and I will undoubtedly keep making things work one way or another.
Thankfully my drinking water and hot water setup is an entirely independent system and so absolutely perfect for my scenario that I am uninclined to change it even though it eventually needs to be ran into an outdoor kitchen or something like that. The simplicity (and yeah convenience) of it is awesome and there is not a day that goes by that I am not grateful for them because we all know that I have gone to great lengths in the past to rig something/anything together just to have clean water let alone hot water. On demand hot water is such a luxury item to me that I still only use it for my baths but the peace of mind in the knowledge that it is 'right there if I need it' is spectacular! I get quite the thrill out of having both a hot and cold water line just for personal usage and I doubt that I will ever take it for granted or be wasteful with it.
Another day and night have passed and I ought to get this entry wrapped up one way or another. I am up pretty early this morning but not quite as early as my usual four o'clock wake up so I do not know if I will finish this before the sun comes up and it is time to get to working outdoors. I got wiped out rather early in the day yesterday but I did manage to get the rest of the skirting installed on the cabin and it came out pretty good even though a few of the skirting panels are not quite as pretty as I would like them to be because I dented the metal some while screwing them together.
Not long after I finished the cabin's skirting the load of lumber for the second floor arrived via delivery truck and to keep it from being a hassle I just had the driver dump it all in the road. After getting the bulk of the lumber carried into the dog yard and stored in the solar shack I was so tired that I put all the tools away and promptly fell asleep for what I thought would be a brief nap but turned into me sleeping most of the late afternoon away. I did manage to get up late in the day and get all the critters (including myself) fed before falling back asleep again for the evening. Between the nap and my usual night's sleep I got in around twelve hours of rest and I sure do feel better this morning for having done so.
I have been getting plenty of rest but the workload has been intense and strenuous and I have been somewhat surprised at how well that I have avoided getting burned out thus far which is good because I do not have no damned time for getting burned out. As much as I feel a sense of urgency about what I am working towards... I thankfully have the fortitude to be patient and keep things in perspective as far as what is humanly possible each day for one person working alone to accomplish. It is all a tricky prospect to do whilst camping (with all its inherent inconveniences) but in the not-so-grand scheme of things I have done well with it all and not let it overwhelm me along the way. If anything I feel like I am fulfilling more of my potential than I have been capable of doing before and if maintaining that requires keeping my nose to the proverbial grindstone for now then so be it.
Words often fail me (or I fail with them) to describe how awesome my life has been of late regardless of any inconveniences and I really do feel like I am putting my energies towards something that is worthwhile. Like I was saying before there is a 'quality' to the stuff that I am getting to build at this place and something about doing that really gets my mind racing about the overall project to the point where I am truly excited about the endeavor in a way that makes doing even the most tedious tasks into something that I enjoy doing and leaves me feeling satisfied when they are done.
Not 'working with junk' sure is playing its part in things as well and not having the aggravation, frustration and all too often disappointment that accompanies it makes managing my morale much simpler because all I have to do is look around and see the accomplishments around me that make my quality of life so much better... like having a super stout dog yard fence that I do not have to think twice about it holding the dogs while I am working at some other area on the site. Stuff like that (and the hot water) sure makes things a heck of a lot less stressful and I think the lack of stress is gradually bleeding into every aspect of my life because each day I feel a little 'happier' (whatever the hell that is) and something I am way more familiar with which is calmness. That last bit I really enjoy feeling and I have been forcing myself each day to take a few minutes for myself at the beginning and end of the day to relax into that calmness which usually involves stopping myself from doing anything physically, sitting in the sun and doing nothing else but relaxing into the calmness and feeling some true serenity no matter how brief it is.
Well, it is once again early in the morning and although I could more than likely do some more writing before the sun is up... I think that I should instead focus on getting all this edited and see if I can get it posted before the sun is up and I get my usual urge to go outside and start working once it is up over the horizon. Yesterday was another incredibly long day and I managed to get the two load bearing walls (the side walls) for the cabin built and anchored in place. I was trying to get the rafters on also but never finished fabricating them before the sun got low on the horizon and it was time to call it quits for the day. There is some stormy weather on its way over the next few days so I am going to have to do my best to get the roof sheathing on before it starts raining.
That was a lot to edit! I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
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