Benefit of Country Living

Bill worked on organizing the garage and found lumber that was weird shapes and small; that we won't use in the building  process. We don't want to fill the landfills with our trash if possible. So time to burn!!!!

 When we have tree branches we haul them over to the burn pile and accumulate until we have enough to burn.

 You can see how the fire is burning the tree debris underneath and with the wind giving the underneath lots of oxygen we got a great fire going. Watching it transform drom a few wisps into a good fire reminded us of the movie "Updraft", first time we actually saw the living thing a fire is. Wish the kids lived close enough that we could at any time give them a holler and say come on over for hot dogs and s'mores. But they are 40 minutes away by the time they would have got here the fire would have been gone.

This was at 10:30 in the morning but I still took beers out for us to sit and watch our fire burn. When you work the hours we work you have to find the time to just relax even it is too early in the morning for a beer according to society's rules.

Power Up

We wanted to relax this past weekend and it was too stormy to go to the lake; so we looked for jobs to do that wouldn't take a lot of brain or muscle power. I chose painting door trim and compacting dirt. Bill chose organizing the garage and running electrical wiring.

The light switches for the Workroom need to be inside the garage and not the workroom. When the doors are opened they go into into the Workroom not into my car. After the doors open; we have shelving and work tables so the switches would end up being 20 feet away or behind the door. The switches have been dangling and on the opposite side of the room from our through the wall entrance up to now. We would have to take a flashlight to see our way over to the switches to get light. No more;  now that the doorway has been cut open we can go through it as planned. I ekkp telling Bill he needs a window in the Work room and he doesn't agree.

Another hole had to be cut into the metal skin.

 Move the wire from the outside of the wall were it has been dangling to inside the wall.

 Sticking his arm through the metal opening with jagged edges. I warned him not to cut his wrist going through the hole I was way too busy taking pictures and painting to get him to the hospital for stitches. He just rolled his eyes at me.

 When you are working with electrical wires you must see exactly what you are doing. so he found a place to hang his work light.

You can see that our walls are very well insulated. We now have light switches and a plug on this wall. We believe in lots and lots of plugs. There will be at least 5 in the garage. Don't run extension cords if you don't have to.

Mans Work

I keep telling Bill he has no idea how lucky he is that he has a wife who is willing to jump in and work and not just sit on the sidelines. This weekend while he was running electrical wiring I was doing a little tweaking on our retaining wall. I was pushing dirt and gravel between the rocks and compacting it with a 2x4 board.

I have owned a rock yard for 8 years and have never smashed a finger or toe. Even on the days that I may move a ton of flagstone myself from a pallet into the back of a pick up. This happened when my thumb got between the 2x4 and the rock. Now I know why the guys at the yard jump around and yell when they smash a finger.

Move Over Emily Sutton There Is A New Weatherman In Town

What do you get a guy for his birthday when he has everything and if he wants something he just gets it? Last year I came up with the great idea of getting Bill a weather station for Christmas and then ran out of time to investigate and find the right one.

We found that being so far out of town; we weren't fitting in to any weather forecast. We aren't Edmond and we aren't Guthrie, we are a No Man's Land.

My friend, Gailynn, mentioned her husband, John, who is also our friend had a weather station. Oh good someone to talk with who knew if  one works in Oklahoma. Our crazy weather and winds are little more complex than other parts of the country.

When you get someone a gift that is a little quirky you never know how they will react. He loves it!

 This is the station, you can see by the Butterfly bush in the back the wind we were having on its first day of work. The little cups on the top just spin like crazy in the wind. The rain gauge measures the rain as it passes through so no emptying the rain gauge after a rain. The flap on the bottom shows wind direction.

Everything else is found on the inside unit. The display gives you everything you could possibly want to know. Bill has been giving me hourly wind speed updates. When he gets up in the morning he heads to the display to see what is going on. We need to come up with a name for  his new device. There is a ticker tape running on the bottom of the screen so this morning we saw that our "rain event" started at 2:43 a.m.

This is his news room, set up and ready to give his version of our personal weather forecasts.

You're Outta Here

The tarps we have pulled out of the pond went to a new home. In my Craigslist ad I stated that they were coming out of a pond where they had been put to act as a liner and they didn't work. Guess where this guy is putting them? In his pond. He thinks he can make them work.I spoke with him about this not being a good idea and when he came to pick them up Bill talked with him. I think he is at least going to seam them together.


Now we can work on getting the grass to grow back where these were laying before everything goes dormant. I  told him that I wanted them gone because every time I saw them I could just imagine all the spiders living in the folds. Sure enough when the guys picked them up the Granddaddy Long Legs went scurrying.

The good news is that we got a very nice dinner out with the money he paid us.

Whoopee Another Hole In a Wall

A big part of this construction is destruction. We have to tear out before we can put in. At some point we will just be building but even then there will be times of demolition. Nothing is more satisfying than to knock a wall down. Or in our case cutting down walls.

Bill cut the doorway from the garage into the Workroom.

There will be double doors going into the Workroom. We don't want to have any problems taking things in and out of this space, In the top picture you can see the doors ready to be installed. I have them primed and painted they just need a door jamb to go into.

 Now we can close off the wall between the Workroom and the Trophy room. We had to leave a spot open to be able to get into the room with all the tools.

Protection Needed

Sometimes you just can't wait to do a project to get all the safety protection on. Also when you start things and your wife isn't around to make gentle suggestions you are macho and don't think aabout these things..

Hence, Bill's legs and arms look like this after using the grinder on the metal to open the hallway.

 His lawn chaps would have saved his legs and long sleeves would have saved his arms. Those aren't gashes that is the blood mixing with his sweat and running down his limbs. The grinder threw all kinds of hot metal shards everywhere.

 He did use eye protection and ear protection. Even with his ear muffs  his ears were ringing two hours later. I just needed eye protection, was able to hide behind the metal I was pulling out of the way to avoid being impaled with itty bitty pieces of metal.

After he showered I went in and washed all the metal down the drain. I didn't want to pick up all those pieces and get stuck with them. There were hundreds of pieces in the shower floor.