Snow days

This is what the house looks like today:



The weather has thwarted any progress. It drains the joy from my heart a little. The house and I had been getting especially closes, spending our days together from early morning until sunset. The end was in sight, I was imagining the bales walls, window boxes with flowers, a double dutch door, and blueberry bushes. My backyard cottage retreat. But now, there is just snow.

Perhaps it is for the best. It looks now like I won't be moving in until the winter is waning, and to be honest I'm glad to not have to deal with freezing temperatures my first nights in the bale house. By next winter I'll have time to properly prepare for the snow and cold, and I imagine it will be a more pleasant experience then moving in right now, were I ready.

For now I have a garden to plan, and maybe if the weather is going to continue being like this I should get my generator stand out of storage and start working on making it work.

Sand bags

Today was a delight of a building day. I got all of ground ready for the first course of the foundation, and when I finished that I discovered that the sandbags had arrived in the mail!

Here is the porch picture. Not a lot of difference.


In finishing the ground prep work I needed to expand the dry well, which looked like this this morning:

I don't know how clear it is between these two pictures, but the diameter of the dry well is about doubled.
After digging it out I lined it with landscaping fabric

Then filled that with large rocks/concrete chunks, from the sidewalk excavation in the beginning of the summer.

After that, the top was covered with landscaping fabric, and it was covered over with dirt. I also finished leveling the floor of the house and the french drain.

and then I came in and discovered my sand bag delivery and I got started on the very baby begin of getting the sandbag foundation in place.

So the plan is to get two or three courses of sandbags stacked up tamped level, then the bales will go on top of that.

more trenches

Trenches

Good morning, good morning. Yesterday was fairly productive. I got nearly half of the trenching work done. That means that I might be able to finish today. Here are the pictures:

The view from the back porch (this probably looks exactly the same as yesterday, but I want to have this picture everyday)

Here are the trenches. It is still difficult to understand what is going on. The trench in the foreground is the new one. The old trench runs right through the middle of the house, so I am digging gravel out of the old trench and putting it in the new one, and digging dirt out of the ground to make the new trench, and filling it into the old one.

That might all be easier to understand from this side. This is a picture of the trenches from the other side of the house

In the picture above, the trench in the middle is the old one that has most of the gravel out and is being filled in with dirt.

Pictures

I am doing a bad job of keeping up with this blog. Since my last post, I've built the roof and shingled it. The plan from here on out is to update daily with pictures. I need some better photo documentation of the house progress, and perhaps I will start actually doing it.

So here is what the house looks like today:

This is the house from the back steps of the main house. here you can see my messy/dangerous work site. Some tidying is in order.

Here is the back side of the house. All of the cross supports are new as of two days ago. those big diagonal pieces are what is allowing the house to stand on its own. Before that there were all kinds of wood bits nailed to stakes in the ground holding everything up.

Here is a shot of the state of the foundation trench. This picture is a little confusing, but the trenches are a hot mess right now. This is the job for today. Getting them in the right place, and then moving the gravel.
Here are another two view of the trenches.

Here is the roof, complete with sealed skylights and shingles.

So that is it. I'm hoping to make some good progress in the trenches today. Winter digging has a different set of challenges then summer digging. Getting over heated is not a problem. But the first foot or so of dirt is frozen. Good thing I figured out the pick axe --> shovel method in the summer.

side track

My plans changed a little since my last post. I was convinced not to notch all of the joist, but to just use the hurricane ties. I may have explained this before, but hurricane ties are little metal pieces that look like this :
They are used in deck and roof construction. I believe the name comes from their use in deck construction, in that case they are holding the cross supports down and in place in the case of strong upward/lateral winds.

I have not actually put up my joists though and they are not the subject of this post. The real subject is a pedal powered generator.

I realized last week that I am about to graduate from school, which means I am about to stop having access to the metal shop. I had thought about that before, but didn't think it was a big deal because I've been exclusively using hand tools in my back yard for the last few months. Then I remembered that I want to have a pedal powered generator for my house, and if I don't make it now, I will have to make it using hand tools in my back yard. That prospect was not appealing, so I put the house on hold and got to work.

A pedal power generator is a surprisingly simple thing. At least, to make it generate power. I have not yet hooked this thing up to charge a battery, which is what it will do eventually, and that I imagine is the more complicated part, I need to do more research because I am fuzzy on the details.

Anyway, a motor and a generator are the same thing. If you input electricity you have a motor, with a rotational output, and if you input the rotation you have a generator, with an electrical output. I am simplifying a lot, and possibly being a little bit liberal with my language, but if you have a motor and you hook it up to a voltmeter and turn the output shaft you will see that volts are happening.

For my generator I ordered an electric scooter motor off of ebay. It looks a lot like this:
Then I spent a while trying to decide what variety of pedaling device I wanted. There are about half a million plans on the internet, each with their own advantages. I decided to go with what seems like the simplest. The simplest plan (in my mind) is having a bike trainer stand that holds up a regular bike, and the tire rests on the output shaft of the motor and turns it.

The first step was building the bike stand:




The bike is held up by the nuts that hold the tire on. The pipe on the right is adjustable, the bike is put in place then the pipe is slid over and locked in, and the tire rests on the output shaft of the motor.
I hooked the motor up to a multimeter and give it a test ride. I got up to about 80 volts. To be honest I'm not sure what that will mean in terms of charging the battery, but I'll update as I know. For now I think I have a good starting point for my generator.

Long Due Update

Since the decision not to used power tools I have not felt inclined to update the blog, perhaps because the pace slowed down to a near crawl.

Though it has been slow, a lot has happened. I got four 6" x 6" cross supports up, and today I cut all of the floor boards for the loft. They are in place, but they have not been secured yet. Some of the wood had mold growing on it from being under the tarp for so long cleaned it with a bleach solution and it needs to dry out completely before I can seal it. I'll seal it up there, but I want to be able to move the wood around and flip it over (which is why it isn't nailed or pegged in place)


Today I also hauled a full length 2" by 12" up on that platform and set it on the big beams to mark the notches that will go in each of my joists. I got that one, which is my template, cut and another joist marked before it got dark. I think that if I really work hard tomorrow I could get all of the notches done. I'll need 17 of them.