Moving up and down

 

    I am squeezing a blog update into what has turned out to be a very busy September. We have been leaping forward and making discernible progress on multiple fronts, inside our house and out. First, we have a second floor! It is official, as you can see, and has totally transformed the space inside the house (not to mention greatly increased safety when working upstairs!) We looked for some time for second-hand wood to use for the second floor subfloor, but we ended up purchasing some newly sawn oak from our local mill, run rather appropriately by an Amish man, Ivan Miller. Ivan has supplied our house many times with necessary components, from our joists to our porch decking to our wainy-edge siding, always squeezing our little orders in a timely fashion in between his massive orders for mostly pallet wood. (It is a little saddening to see such beautiful large oaks milled down to pallet components, but such is the demand that keeps him and his fleet of sons in business!). At any rate, we are grateful for such an affordable local resource a few miles from us, and our house is far more beautiful and sturdy for it.

 

     Credit goes to Mike for laying the second floor while my mother and I have been a plastering machine the last few weeks, (make that month+). While we finished the first floor plastering, Mike raced us to finish half of the upstairs so we could get started there. Then as we worked on that half, he raced us to finish the second half. While we were pushing to execute these goals, I did a somewhat imprudent thing. I agreed to teach a half day "natural building" class to a group of 25 students who were taking a two-week Permaculture class up the road. The class was to have a hands-on component and I thought it would be perfect to work on building our upstairs partition walls, trying out lath caging with woodchip-clay infill, as well as another technique of stuffing straw-clay in temporary plywood forms. But all of this meant considerable prep work: stud framing the walls and ripping down scrap wood into lath, as well as getting the floor complete enough for 25 people to work on. And deadlines never go over very well in this building process, nor in Mike and mine relationship. Nonetheless, despite some considerable stress and long hours leading up to it, the class went well and 25 people were unleashed on buckets of slip and bags of straw. It was a frenzy of woodchips flying and buckets being passed every which way, but in the end, we filled the walls half way and had a successful demo. 

      When the stress of trying to meet our goal of finishing the house gets to be too much, it has been nice to sit and begin to imagine what each of the finished spaces will look like. The bones and flesh of each space are now there, and as light moves through the house on sunny days, it is easy to mentally fill in the details. This is fuel enough to keep me going for now, because truth be told, I am really beginning to fall in love with our house. It is my favorite place to be actually, even despite the fact that it is a mess, looking rather like a giant muddy dog shook itself off in every room. After a few more necessary components get scratched off the to do list (ahem, heat and water?), we will really be in the home stretch, trimming windows and putting on our finish flooring. Okay, it will be a long home stretch, but it is all relative anyhow.

    So on top of all of this progress inside the house, we decided to take another leap forward while the great weather and available assistance were all favorable. Thanks to our fairy-godmother parents stepping in to help organize necessary funding (our house funds start drying up at this time of year before their winter replenishment), we have been able to start another construction project. You know, in our spare time... And that is, our water catchment cistern. Our plan has always been to catch rainwater from our roof and funnel it into a below-ground cistern that we could pump into the house from. Neither of us are masonry experts or plumbing experts however, so our learning curve has been pretty steep on this one. At first it seemed so overwhelming that we just mentally kicked it down the field into next year. But then the thought of daily breaking the ice on our pond this winter and carrying 5-gallon buckets the long walk back to our house started nudging us back into the "wouldn't it be nice just to get it done now?" mentality. I mean, we had the hole already, how hard could it be?

     Immediately, we started consulting everyone we knew who had some knowledge about cisterns. It turns out one of our sister communities 45 miles away, Sandhill Farms, had just undertaken a large cistern project the year before and everything about it had been successful. At the lead of the project was an experienced guy named Laird, who had several cistern builds under his belt. He downloaded his brain on the topic to us, and we soaked up the details of construction. We also read Art Ludwig's book, Water Storage: Tanks, Cisterns, Ponds and Groundwater and soaked up his recommendations as well. We consulted plumbers and masonry contractors and lined up a team of semi-experienced helpers and took the plunge. The first step was squaring out our hole and ensuring the ground would hold a gazillion pounds of pressure. I stepped into the role of project manager while Mike would lead construction. Whenever stepping into unfamiliar terrain, every step seems like it could be a misstep. And here too, we have been second-guessing ourselves every step of the way. Is it firm enough? Maybe a little more gravel. And a little more. Next was setting up formwork for our slab floor pour. We ordered "readymix" to come delivered in a truck with a godsend of a driver who took one look at our questioning faces and jumped off the truck to start showing us what to do with the giant puddle of concrete. That went well too thanks in part to him. Our blacksmithy neighbor Brian worked a little rebar magic for us on his anvil and helped with the pour and within a few hours we were breathing sighs of temporary relief.

     The next hurdle would be the walls. We decided on the safe strategy of copying exactly what had worked for our Sandhill friends, and that included borrowing our friend Tyler from them, who had been on their team last year. Thankfully he was more than willing to join us for a week (it doesn't hurt that his sweetie Cynthia lives just down the road from us). Tyler and Mike started laying out the blocks, the key being leveling each course and block, as well as grinding the blocks smooth for a tighter fit. Every third hole gets rebar running the height of the wall as well as concrete mortar. The goal is to then do a fiberglass-reinforced surface-bonding cement plaster inside and out along with an additional water-tight interior coat. And what I have been doing in this crazy cement circus? Alternating between trying to finish the plaster inside and running around sourcing all of the pipes, obscure ingredients, to keep things on track. On top of needing an inlet and outlet pipes, the cistern also needs a clean-out valve and overflow pipe. Another puzzle has been figuring out how the outlet plumbing will clear the airspace between our house (on piers remember) and the 2.5' underground safe zone where ambient ground temperature will keep it from freezing. Luckily it turns out the Home Depot plumbing department consultant is someone I know (Sparky from Neighbors United!) and has spent hours with me hashing out ideas. We are going to try a series of insulation layers around the 3/4" PEX tubing (which won't burst when frozen) with a strip of heat tape for insurance on those extra-cold days.

 

    So that is basically where we have gotten to! The next puzzle to figure out is how to set up framework to pour a roof over the cistern. And all of this before we start getting into frosty weather which is not great for cement curing.  If only we could hit the toggle switch on our superhuman powers of moving twice as fast with twice the limbs.... Until then, we are steadily plugging along.

Pigs, solar panels, vegetables and a ceiling

The pigs arriving by trailer with Teri and Everett waiting in excitement

    As some of you readers may have figured out already (from some photos leaked to facebook… those paparazzi!), everything that I said in my last post about “the pigs not working out” has turned out to be false. The pigs actually “worked out” the day after I wrote my last post. Our not-so-excited-about-more-responsibilities neighbor Brian and I were just breathing a sigh of relief that we had one less thing to worry about this year, just as our pig-enthusiast partners, Mike and Teri, were doubling down on their plot to bring pigs into our homesteading lives. A little ad buried in our local buy/sell newspaper “The Nemo Trader” announced piglets for sale for a buck a pound of body weight and before you know it, they were backing down our driveway: one pig for their family and one for us, as well as one for Mike’s father. For years I have been putting off Mike’s fantasy of raising pigs, telling him, “next year, next year…” so I didn’t feel I could fairly put up a fight against them. But sigh, gone are the pig-free days when I could walk through the meadow without wafts of pig aroma hitting my nose or I could hear birdsong without squeals and grunts in the background. 

The pigs have been working on this synchronized rooting routine...

     Now we are beholden to the pigs, or I should say Mike is since this is his dream. We have opted to let them root freely, which they love and is usually kept in check by ringing their noses. That means however that we have to move their pen and hutch around every few days as they transform their turf into mud in no time (which they also love, but best to have some of both). Mike dutifully feeds them our table scraps and overgrown cucumbers twice a day as well as some grain mixed sometimes with weigh left over from cheese/butter making if we can get it. Pigs are pretty ideal in that their will eat almost anything and require very little in terms of fencing/housing requirements. Brian and Teri and the kids come down to feed them too, and we have pen-moving sessions as well. It all seems quite manageable, but slaughter-day is still looming, which I have my doubts about. If all goes according to plan we will be “harvesting” these pigs around Thanksgiving, once they are very large, and Mike and Brian hope to do some much of the butchering themselves. If we were sensible, we could opt to pay a professional to come and do it, but once again we are testing the limits of DIY culture and planning on the extra mile. Updates to come on how all that goes down, but for now I am determinedly not getting attached… no cute names like “Wilber” or anything.

The demolition post-pig, hopefully a future garden site!

    What else have we been working on? Well, progress has been chugging along on the house. We buckled down to business, making a list of all that needs to be done with highest priority going to those must-haves to get through winter, like “install stove” and “plaster behind the stove so house doesn’t catch on fire”.  The fuzzy area seems to be our water system. We have agreed we need to at least have a functioning drain pipes attached to sinks and tub, but we aren’t sure that we can feasibly get a functioning cistern ready by winter. It keeps raining, our giant hole keeps filling up, we keep draining it, but at no point has it seemed like, “ah, this is good weather to cure concrete!” For two winters now Brian and Teri have figured out a system of hauling buckets of water from the pond and then warming it on their stove for bathing and dish washing or filtering it for drinking and cooking. This is not their ideal, but they have managed it for now, until they too construct a cistern.  We figure if it has worked for them, it should be able to work for us too if need be. Still, water on demand would be nice.

     Some big steps have been crossed off of our house list this past month, and it feels good to have made some progress. Since our insulation was all blown in, we were able to put up boards and a bit of sheetrock on our ceiling, which is now all covered. We procured the tongue and groove pine boards last year (another Nemo Trader score) from someone’s tear-out job. We simply flipped them over to the unfinished plain pine side and we hope to eventually give them a lime wash to lighten up the space. Other parts of the ceiling got sheetrock, where we framed in an attic storage area. After all that, we were done teetering around on ladders and so we started in on our first floor framing and finishing notching in joists to finish the second floor framing. All of this has probably taken as much time scratching our heads as it has swinging hammers, trying to figure out the subtleties of space allocation in a small house: an inch in one direction or another could make all the difference. The big question mark to come this week will be the stairs, a tricky bit of carpentry in ordinary circumstances for sure, but combined with round logs soaring through the house and a rotation mid-stair…. Well, let’s just say this may take awhile. After the stairs however, and our second floor’s sub-flooring, we should be clear into plastering work for another month or more. It is slowly coming together and I think by the time the weather gets nippy again, we should be comfortable and snug inside a relatively finished space.

The second floor joists all finished and awaiting flooring

Recognize a bathroom? Well, maybe not yet...

     The last thing I wanted to mention in this post is how truly wonderful it has been to have a garden this year! I am only frustrated we didn’t take the time to create one sooner! The majority of the work of a garden is on the front-end, prepping and planting beds, and then in the fall, doing a second planting, and cleaning out beds and adding in compost. The summer is mostly a time of harvest and no maintenance as long as you don’t mind a few weeds here and there. The rain has been doing water duty for us, leaving harvesting and keeping up with eating the produce as our only chores. July seems to be the month when everything is ripe and ready. We have virtually stopped shopping, designing meals around what is pouring forth. Last night it was a delicious eggplant parmesan with fresh tomato sauce with a kale-cucumber salad. The night before I was dreaming of a Japanese-style beef stew. When I realized we were out of carrots and potatoes, Mike pointed out that we might have some ready in the garden and sure enough, he brought back fistfuls of rainbow colored carrots and some muddy but huge purple potatoes and some Thai yard-long beans, asking, “can you work these in?” Maybe it is because I have never grown such a range of things before, but I am just amazed by how easy it is to provide for almost all of our food needs with a relatively small space. We end up purchasing meat once or twice a week, eggs from our neighbors, dairy products that keep well (cheese and yogurt), and chips (because, um, fresh salsa? Need I say more?) I can just imagine the grocery bills if we were still buying all of this organic produce from our fancy Philadelphia food co-operative… So all of this is to say that I am feeling ambitiously up for trying to plant a fall-winter garden so that we might continue the harvest into the colder months. It will involve some row covers to keep things warm and a different set of veggies, things like cabbage, parsnips and broccoli that love cooler weather. But the fall/winter garden experiment is underway already as seedlings get started in little cups. It is hard, even with one garden already full planted, not to dream of the next garden to come.

     Last but not least, we have an exciting new addition.... more exciting than pigs you may be asking? Why yes, in my opinion at least. We have a solar panel! This was a gift from some wonderful family members of mine who were possibly concerned for our off-the-grid sanity. And I can truly say that now that we have electricity enough to recharge batteries of all kinds and power a radio, I don't know how we were doing it without one before. It has definitely made life easier. In fact, I am writing this in my house instead of at the library thanks to our solar panel! The hook-up for one panel was very simple and took us only a half hour. It consists of a battery to store power, a charge controller and an inverter. They all hook up in a line and then you can plug in anything that can run on a certain amount of voltage (for example, to run a fridge we would need more panels, more batteries and a larger size inverter). The great thing is we can add more panels/batteries into our system as we feel the need in the future. So we are still off the grid, but with a little more power now. Three cheers for the sun!