Summer homestead flashback: Draining issues

  Probably the biggest issue we faced this summer was a total drain blockage in our farmhouse.  We had planned for a lot of issues and upgrades but this one hit us from out of left field.  You can have all the pressurized water in the world but if it has nowhere to go, you're in big trouble!

Everyday mundane activities that become nearly impossible include bathing, washing dishes, cleaning house, doing laundry and of course anything to do with the toilet.

  Before tackling the house's lack of drainage, we addressed how to work around our family's needs.  First of all, all housecleaning, dishes and a little laundry were done with tubs or buckets that could be hauled outside to dump.  We then made an hour and a half drive to the nearest Walmart and bought a port-a-potty.  The last and most difficult fix was the construction of an outside shower stall built around our Sun Shower.  I've always thought these were neat and figured that I'd be building one eventually anyhow.

  This was version number one and it went through numerous improvements over the summer.  It was really nice to take a shower in if you knocked off work early enough to beat the skeeters.  *E* was a different issue.  He was too small to shower in the stall so DW came up with an ingenious solution...

With all of our needs band-aided, we moved on to solving the plugged drains.

  My dad came to stay with us for a few days and was the real brains behind Operation Mudslide.  First thing we did was locate the septic tank and pop off the inspection hatch.  We dipped the level and found that the tank was nowhere near full.

Incidentally, the dipper was forever known as the "dookie stick" after this.  This told us that the blockage was in the pipes.  The house pipes were a combination of PVC, cast iron and copper; all connected with rubber sleeves.  We started disconnecting joints on the second floor to drain the system and inspected for blockage.  This was an absolutely HORRENDOUS job.  We eventually tracked the issue to the second-to-last elbow before the pipe exited the basement.  I hammered a steel rod into the blockage from the top while my dad did the same from the bottom.  We worked for about twenty minutes before we started getting chunks of concrete to come out.  CONCRETE?!!!  I couldn't believe my eyes.  We knew that there was a mobile home next to the house at one time and finally figured out that they dumped Quickrete into the drain when they attached the trailer house's septic into the farmhouse's tank.  This was to keep sewage from flowing back into the house if the septic tank filled up.  We finally got it all cleared out and I'm happy to report that water (along with other less pleasant things) is flowing again.

Flashback: Arriving at the Homestead

  It's been a hectic week around here.  DW caught the plague or some such related disease when she went to North Carolina to visit our Grandbaby.  It's hit her pretty hard and she's downright miserable.  We've all but quarantined her from *E* and to some extent myself in order to keep the house from turning into a total trainwreck.  Both parents sick or a sick baby is bad juju!

  I thought I'd write down a little bit more of our trip out to the homestead in North Dakota this summer.  This picks up on our arrival following a nightmare last day of travel (see earlier post for all the gory details).
  We pulled into the yard with both of us totally exhausted from being awake for the last 24 hours or so.  The first disaster was evident right away as all the wood shakes were missing from the top three feet of the roof.  It had been a particularly nasty winter and the old shakes just had no more to give.  Who knows how old that roof was?!!  To add to the fun, there was a hole chewed though the roof planking on the west side just big enough for a racoon.

If you look really hard, you can just see it up near the top. 
  The next fun was of the creepy crawly variety.  We managed to arrive at the height of tick season and as you can see by the above picture, the grass was a good two feet high.  We stepped out of the truck and were instantly covered.  Our poor dog Sparky was an instant walking tick feast and I think DW got more on her in the first ten minutes than she has had in her whole life!  We quickly ran into the house and initiated de-ticking procedures.
  With nerves stretched pretty thin, we took a walk through the house.  Our racoon friend had been busier than we thought and had also chewed a hole in the living room addition's roof.  It made for a nice sun roof but played havoc with the wood floors underneath the carpet.

  To top everything off, we also found that every drain in the house was plugged.  We knew from the previous summer that they weren't quite right but now nothing moved.  We discovered really quickly that not having running water is nothing compared to not having drains!
  It was all too much.  I couldn't stand having  DW and *E* spend the night in that carnage so I disconnected the trailer, packed them back up into the truck and sent them off to the nearest motel, which was over twenty miles away.  Sitting empty for 20 or so years had not been kind to our old house.  As I watched the truck pull out of the yard and drive away down the dirt road I asked myself "What have you gotten us all into?".  I spent almost the entire night and next morning cleaning and knocking down the jungle of grass in front of the house.  It was still a nightmare when they came back the next morning but it was bearable.

  OK, OK, that was pretty depressing!  Here's some gratuitously cute pictures of *E* dressed up as a scarecrow for Halloween to cheer you back up.  Enjoy!

Back from Dak

  Hey all!  Got back yesterday morning after driving 24 hours straight from our homestead in North Dakota to Cinci  and dragging the horse trailer.  It was a pretty uneventful trip except for a tire blowout in Minneapolis...AGAIN.  I don't know what it is with this trailer and Minneapolis.  At least this time it happened during the day and only took ten minutes to fix.
 
  Our new flatbed trailer worked out well and we were able to get a lot of stuff moved out there.  My dad and I were able to run wires up from the batteries, through the wall and to the new fridge.  There was quite a bit of head scratching as we tried to figure out the 90ish year old structure of the house and its many lathe and plaster walls.  In the end, the refrigerator worked out great.
  Next we tackled the wood cookstove.  The original intention was to go for the corn stove but we couldn't find any corn that was ready to burn in the area.  The wood cookstove ended up being a better choice any way because, Duh, I was able to cook on it and I had quite a bit of seasoned wood ready to go.  Dad and I swept the chimney first and ended up taking about five or six pounds of coal soot (and one dead bird) out of it.  We got the old "Majestic" hooked up and fired her up.  The heat was nice since we had two nights below freezing and the rest not much higher than that.

The nice thing was that even though I brought my propane burner, I never fired it up.  I definitely had to plan ahead when it was time to cook since things took longer to heat and you really had to have different kinds of fire for different situations.

Somebody had painted the stove in the past and boy did it stink when the paint burned off.  I'm going to have to give it some good old fashioned stove black when I head back out there to bring back the finish.  The nickel trim had been painted gray somewhere back in this stove's past as well.  Happily, as I used it more and more, the paint started wearing off and the nickel started showing through.  It didn't look too bad but we'll have to see.

  I ended doing some work with the old horse teamster down the road.  He's 86 and needed some help getting some hay bales stacked in his loft.  He kept right up with me...pretty impressive.  I think that his farm and horses keep him young.  He had an old horse drawn McCormick #6 mower that I had looked at when we were there this summer so we ended up trading my work and a couple of bucks for the mower.

Here's what it looked like when I was finished with it.  Everything was froze on it but one wheel when I got it.  My dad has been using a 50:50 mix of acetone and power steering fluid to break stuck parts free for a while so I thought that I would give it a try.  Here's a picture of the gearbox before I started.

  I have to admit that this stuff is nothing short of a miracle.  After about six hours I had every piece lose and turning on the mower.  It has been sitting for about 50 or 60 years so I was really impressed.  This makes our fourth piece of horse drawn equipment, along with the fancy cart, dump rake and forecart, so we're on our way.

  And finally, there were deer everywhere!  The farmer behind us was combining his corn so I think he had the deer all stirred up that were hiding in his field.  We had some in the woods right out one of the south windows of  the house.

You have to look for them in the pic but they're there.  It was pretty neat!

The road train is pulling out

  Taking a little break while my DW is out running some last minute errands before I go.  I've been spending the last week or so working over our truck and setting it up to haul our new monster trailer.  This is a big step toward our permanent move next year as it gets some of our larger items out to the homestead.  The manifest reads as follows...

My little Nissan truck (we call her Cranky Pants) that I've had for years and has about 285,000 miles.  She's starting to get tired but still gets around 20mpg on the highway and is a nice size when we don't want to break out the behemoth F-350.  I just don't have the heart to get rid of her so along she comes.

My Ducati and my DW's Ninja motorcycles.  I feel like we've both outgrown these toys and they'll probably just turn into barn ornaments, especially living on dirt roads, but they're so old that they probably don't have much value if we chose to sell them.

Our old IH throttle governed motor.  It's only one and a half horse power and weighs a lot but it just oozes cool.  I don't know if it has the guts to drive the old cordwood saw out at the farm but I think that it would be a neat semi-permanent set up instead of running a tractor over to the saw when it's time to cut wood.  If not, we'll use it to run our third well which still has a working pumpjack on it.

Our Aeromotor B-702 windmill and about half of its 60' steel tower.  The mill has a 10' fan and will eventually be used to pump water up from the house well.  This sucker is HEAVY and took up quite a bit of space.

  This whole evolution has been quite demanding thus far but thankfully everything has gone pretty smoothly and we were able to hit all of our planned milestones.  This is what I like to call the "road train"...

  This flat bed is quite a bit longer than the fifth wheel horse trailer we hauled this summer.  Since it's a bumper pull, I had to rig a weight distribution hitch.  I've never used one before so this was definitely a new experience for me.  I was amazed at what a difference it made in how the whole thing rides. 
  I'm jumping off tomorrow so we're kinda sad around here.  It's the first time that my DW and I have been apart since I got out of the Navy.  It'll be good to get the homestead straightened up a little for the winter so we aren't playing catch up when we head out there next summer.

  Oh, here's a gratuitously cute picture of baby *E* playing in the grass out at the farm this summer.  Couldn't resist!

Finally took the big step

  Today, we reached a major milestone in our ongoing attempt to develop traditional low tech alternative back-ups to the modern day conveniences we will be using on the farm.  All the stars lined up and we bought an Amish trained horse!

  Her name is Bonnie and she is a draft cross, half belgian, quarter percheron, and quarter standardbred; but  I think she just looks like a big boned standardbred.  She was trained to both ride and drive, although the current owners haven't had her under harness.  She is very gentle and was the husband's horse.  He confessed that he was very green but I didn't see him struggle at all with her.  It was a rainy day today so I didn't get to ride her a whole bunch but I did take her around the farmyard a few times and even got her up to a canter.  I really haven't been in the saddle for quite a few years so I was surprised how smooth she was for such a big horse.  Riding her is very basic since she only knows plough reining.  I ended up buying her with her bit and a very nice western saddle.  I wasn't looking forward to finding a draft saddle because they aren't all that common.  I'm looking forward to getting her back into driving so we can hitch her up to this...

  I bought this cart last year when I was living in Maryland.  It's from around 1903 and was made by the V. Lynn Carriage Company from Brooklyn, New York.  I actually found a little information about the company on the internet, which was pretty cool.  It's a tall two wheeled cart with an awesome suspension for unimproved roads.  Trucking it to Cincinnati on the back of my little Nissan was an adventure all by itself.  I truly had the cart before the horse!

  This past summer we also bought a John Deere horsedrawn hayrake for $50 at an auction in North Dakota.  It can be set up for either one or two horses.  Here's a picture of *C* riding on it being towed by the Cub.

  We used it when we mowed the farmyard in front of the chicken coop and grainary.  The grass and weeds were about four feet tall and thick as can be.  The rake is 12 feet across so it wasn't very efficient in this small area.  We ended up having to dump rake in big circles, which resulted in an interesting whorl pattern.

 
  So how is this horse going to act as our low tech back up?  We should be able to have her supplement/back up both our road vehicles and our tractors.  We live seven miles from a very small town which is pretty comfortably in range for a horsedrawn vehicle.  Now I just need to find a small bobsled or cutter for winter.  We can also use her in lieu of our three tractors for work around the farm, although we're definitely going to have to dig up some more horsedrawn equipment and a forecart.  The picture above shows our 1948 Farmall Cub.  We also have a 1938 Farmall F-20 and a 1926 McCormick-Deering 10-20.

  Sorry, I didn't have a picture of the 10-20.  Three antique tractors and a horse?  Nobody farms like that anymore.  You can't make it without a $150K tractor...or can you?  Our aim is subsistence first; any surplus will be considered for sale.  Once upon a time small farms operated under this principle and were very comfortable, albeit cash poor.  We also are going to try to keep it simple with hay being our main crop.  Our whole place is only 50 acres so we'll see if we can fly under the radar and operate on a cash or barter basis.  It would be crazy to try to compete with those gigantic monoculture operations!  We recently watched a very good movie called The Sweet Land.  It showed two farmers in the 1920's, one progressive and one conservative.  The progressive farmer ended up up to his eyeballs in debt and lost everything while the conservative farmer stayed within his means.  The banker kept trying to get him to borrow money to which the responsible farmer always answered "banking and farming don't mix".  I love that line and I think in the near future it's really going to apply.  Now I just need to find Bonnie a teammate...

Chillin'

  Remember the Seinfeld episode where Kramer tried to live without refrigeration?  He lasted about two days and then started using Jerry's fridge because he couldn't take it anymore.  That's pretty much what we felt like out at the homestead this summer.  See if you can spot our refrigerator in the next pic...

  If you guessed the blue cooler than you're absolutely correct!  Actually, we had a red one too but it didn't make the picture.  We knew we were going to have to face this situation going into this trip (no fridge, very little electricity and a long trip to town for ice) so we brought a lot of dry goods with us and just plain did without some luxuries.  It was especially callenging with baby *E*'s formula.  We brought both pre-mixed and powder and it didn't take long for us to realize that the powder was the only way to go.  We ended up needing ice about every other day which in itself wasn't all that much of a pain since we were running to the hardware store and hauling water from the town park every day anyway.  However, by the end of the summer we were pretty tired of the situation.  Yesterday, I took the plunge and ordered a sundanzer 12/24 VDC refrigerator.

  It's the 8 cubic foot model, which isn't very big by today's standards but after successfully dealing with about half that volume this summer, I'm pretty confident that it will suffice.  We also bought the colder thermostat for an extra few bucks so that we can change it to a freezer down the road if need be.  The small size should fit into the mud room nicely.  I'm thinking that it'll be pretty well protected in the seperate room from the wood cook stove so it won't be fighting to stay cool.

  Right now we have a small 12VDC system running.  It consists of an old 85 watt BP solar panel that I pulled off of an old sailboat that I lived aboard a few years back and an Air-X 600 watt wind turbine.

  This is my dad and *C* soldering up the splice on the cable running from the turbine to the house.  The rest of the system is a mish mash of components that I've collected over the years and the deep cycle batteries are from the aforementioned boat.  If there's children present cover their eyes!

   
  This Frankenstein monstrosity is the heart of the operation.  Starting at the top and going clockwise you'll see the inverter, solar controller, batteries, and finally the charger.  The whole system is pretty feeble but should be able to keep up with the demands of the 12VDC refrigerator and the house water pressure pump we have installed.  If not, we always have the backup generator.  We have the components for a 2.6 kilowatt 48VDC solar system but its installation is going to have to wait for next summer.  It's quite a rush to watch this system come together and I definitely have to thank the Navy for all of my electronics training!

 
  So other than the fact that making your own electricity is an awesome way to work toward self sufficiency, why would a person spend this kind of money to replace that sweet wire from Momma Power Company?  I've got two stories that should explain...

  During a tour in New Orleans, I owned an old drafty victorian house right across the river from the French Quarter.  There was an electric furnace on each floor that barely kept up with the mild Louisiana winters and it was a pig to heat just like all the rest of the homes in the neighborhood!  Just before Enron collapsed, they bought the power monopoly for our neighborhood from little Louisiana Power and Light and immediately added a 75% power surcharge fee onto everyone's bill.  Did I mention that they had been plastering the airwaves with ads touting the fact that even though the company had changed they weren't going to raise our rates one penny?  I guess a surcharge is not a rate increase.  Upon receiving an electric bill for $700, and this was small compared to my neighbors, I phoned customer service to voice my disatisfaction.  The lady on the other end listened quietly as I vented about the unfairness of it all and then replied "So what are you going to do about it, disconnect?"  I was floored and had nothing to say because you know what?  She was right!  I gritted my teeth and paid my bill, only later taking some solace in the fact that Enron went down the tubes.  I certainly hope that nice customer service lady was the first one in the unemployment line.
  My second power company horror story happened in 2004.  I had just checked into my new squadron in Brunswick, Maine after closing on the homestead that I had purchased from a Pennsylvania land speculator.  A snide (and rather effeminate sounding) customer service rep from the farm's local power company co-op contacted me all the way from North Dakota to tell me that I owed them $23 a month for line maintenance fees to the buildings on my land.  I inquired if the gentleman that I had bought the farmstead from had been paying this fee, especially considering that he had never stepped foot on the property.  The rep let me know that it wasn't company policy to give out that type of information.  At this point, I sort of lost my cool and told COMRADE power guy to pedal his butte over to my place and pull the wires down.  He followed with some kind of threat that it would be verrrrrry expensive to hook it back up if we went though with it.  I told him that it would be a cold day in hell before I ever came crawling back to a bunch of communists like his little co-op.  And that was that.  To this day, I sure hope he got all of the red references, hee hee.  I was pretty proud of them.  The next summer, I went out to the homestead on leave and found all of the wires gone and the yard power pole lying in the grass.  Thank God!

  So that is why I have NO problem  shelling out the extra bucks to escape these kind of monopolies!  Too many people I know burn their cash on new cars or the next bigger and better I-phone or an endless number of frivolities.  I guess that chasing that elusive dream of independence and self sufficiency has sort of become my hobby.

Tilting At Windmills

Today was pretty quiet around here.  Got a little bit more done on the stationary engine cart but figured out that in all my recent moves, I seem to have lost one of the oak pieces.  I'll take one more look around but I'm not too worried about it.  It was one of two identical pieces and I still have the other.

  On slow days like this, I thought I would start to document my plans for getting Fiddler's Green up on its feet and running.  I figure that if I get it all down in writing before I really get going, it will be interesting to go back to see which of my plans were workable and which were "pie in the sky".  I'll start today with the water system.  As it stands right now, the house has a working cistern connected to rain catchment through the roof and gutters.  I'd never seen a working cistern before and the whole thing is quite interesting and worth keeping.  I'll probably just connect it to a hand pump in the yard as something of a working novelty.  Who knows?  It might be useful for watering plants or animals.  The cistern has a dedicated 110V electric pump and is still connected to the house system.  The house also has a well on the souteast side that runs through a 220V pump in the basement.  I couldn't even imagine how to run this monster with off-grid power generation so I looked to the past for answers.  Prior to rural electrification, homes had a windmill with an elevated stand alone water tank to generate water pressure or they had a tank incorprated into the tower.

I don't really want to mess around with elevated tanks in 20 or 30 degree below zero North Dakota winters so I thought I would site a windmill over the actual well itself and top it with a Dempster handpump that we bought this summer.  We'll build a small shed over the whole setup and possibly pipe enough heat to it to keep everything moving.  There is a pipe fitting on the back of the pump that we can plumb to the existing buried pipe running into the basement.  In place of the 220V pump, we'll incorporate a 200-300 gallon water holding tank with a DC booster pump and a 30 gallon pressure tank to pressurize the house.  The system would take very little power since the windmill is doing most of the work in lifting the water and the holding tank would suffice for the rare times when it's not windy.  We bought a rebuilt 10' B-702 Aermotor windmill with a 60' tower just before Christmas.  It was a real nightmare transporting it from Punxatawney, PA to Cinci.  Our F-350 was happy as can be hauling what I estimated to be right around a ton of steel and cast iron.  The real problem was in my homebrewed wooden ladder rack.  It was BARELY up to the task.  I had to drive under 50 mph the whole way to keep from overstressing it.

I've looked at a lot of off-grid set ups on the Internet and in Home Power magazine but I have never seen anybody use this solution.  It seems like a natural to replace the water tank with a low amperage pressure pump.  Simple and elegant and not much of a leap from tried and true set ups from the turn of the century.  I think it's the fear of old tech!  The barn has its own dedicated well with a pumpjack but it will probably have our old stationary motor pumping up to a tank in the hay mow as needed.
  If anybody is using a water pumping windmill/in-house holding tank/pressure boost pump combo I'd sure like to hear from you.



Sock It To Me

  Spent a long day with a teething baby.  *E* was really cranky with his two teeth coming in but with a little Oragel he made it through OK.  He actually said "I love you" when I changed him after lunch.  He only said it once and I couldn't get him to do it again.

  Today I messed with *A*'s circular sock knitting machine.  She's been thinking hard about some kind of cottage industry to start in our impending move to North Dakota and thought she would like to try knitting some different items with pure wool.  I picked this up for her for Christmas.

I'd never heard of them before until she showed me some on the Internet.  It seems that these were pretty common in households and co-ops early last century .  This one is a Legare 47 and it's amazing to me after reading the manual (and trying my hand at it) that women would sit cranking socks out on these things for their families and for income.  I started trying to figure it out right after we got it and was totally befuzzled.  After playing with it and realizing that there actually is no magic involved, I'm starting to crank out things that are looking remotely sock-like.  This is the progression of my attempts so far from left to right.

This is the view looking down the maw of the beast.  Once you figure out what's happening inside, it's not that bad.  There is some definite art involved with the weights you add to the bottom to keep even pressure.



You may be asking yourself why am I messing with this thing instead of *A*.  When we got it, it was in its original crate with wrappings soaked in what I think was something like cosmoline.  It took a while to clean and oil, especially the 100 or so individual hooks.  It also has a few different adjustments that can be very finicky and *A* can be a little short on patience with things like this.  Mostly, I just couldn't resist bringing an old machine like this back to life!  We found two other folks in the area that are working these things as well and *A* is arranging a date with them to have a "crank in".  There's no substitute for working next to someone who knows the ins and outs of lost skills.

Snow Day

  Well today is another snow day for the boys from school.  It was absolutely beautiful outside this morning while we were shovelling out.  The air was dry and cold and there wasn't a breath of wind.  It was the exact kind of day that makes me love winter so much.  Didn't want *J* to get rusty so we worked on math problems and his writing skills all day.

  The rest of my day was spent playing with little *E*.  While he was napping, I worked on refinishing the running gear from an old train station platform cart.  When finished, I'll be mounting our old 1926 horse and a half IH motor on it.  She's REALLY awkward to move around on the oak skids.  As of right now, I'm planning on hooking it to the pumpjack for the barn's well but things may change if I see a better use for it.  Ultimately I'd like to set it up on a line shaft to drive some of my old carpentry tools...but that's a way down the road.

Why I'm Here.

 

  Twenty years went by in a flash.  Along the way, I made a lot of friends and probably won't see most of them again.  That's just the way a career in the Navy works I guess and this is an attempt to let those I care about follow the off-beat path I've decided to travel in my retirement.
  Fiddler's Green is the name for the place sailors go when their time has come and this is to be the name for our little farm in the middle of nowhere, North Dakota.  Our intention is to make it as self-sufficient as possible, hopefully without giving up too many creature comforts.  We have no illusions that we can be totally independent but it's a goal to work towards while applying a little common sense.  I think the key is going to be a blending of very old technology and cutting edge developments.  My family says that I inherited my father's weakness for old and archaic machinery...and I suppose that's true.  There's nothing like working with an item that was designed and built before industry came up with "Planned Obsolescence".  Sometimes I feel like I was born 100 years too late.  On the other hand, I'm grateful to Naval Aviation for the twenty years of highly technical training that should help apply today's solutions to the inevitable challenges.
  My intention is to pass along our struggles in the attainment of this dream.  Along the way I'm sure you'll see the farm getting on its feet, our family's adventures in learning society's forgotten skills and probably my opinions on current events (I can rarely keep my mouth shut when it comes to this).  Stay tuned!