Don MillerEarly apologies for any typos on this entry. The batteries didn’t charge under the cloudy skies yesterday. I am typing this pre-sunup with fat thumbs in just above freezing temps on my phone keyboard.
Definitely winding down the building season here. Fall arrived last week and kicked sunny dry weather to the curb almost immediately. The short wet cloudy days are here. Once this blows through, the weather prognosticators are calling for sunnier and cooler days for a couple of weeks. So here’s to Indian summer. If we’re still allowed to call it that.
Electricity is becoming a problem. The shorter days are crimping my solar power style. As mentioned above one cloudy day and the lights and refridgerator go out soon after sundown. I do have a generator set up to charge the batteries whenever I run power tools I run a power cord to the battery charger. I am out of gasoline at the moment and need to drive into town for more when the road opens. Will see if the new gravel helps.
Then there is the unspoken Lithium battery constraint. They hopefully automatically quit charging below 32° otherwise they get wrecked. My battery vendor said mine have a shut off switch. So Far I haven’t had to see if it works. But it is in the 30’s every night now so it won’t be long.
I bought some insulation to build a box around the battery and looking for a small heater than won’t drain the batteries nor burn the place down. Best solution would be an incandescent light bulb in the foam box but they don’t make them anymore. So I have to run the gas guzzling CO2 spewing generator to keep the fridge cold. Hmmmm. I have seen that they sell heat lamps for lizard and snake cages so am tracking down that lead.
Enough whining about the weather. It isn’t going to get a roof over my head and that has become the goal for this year.
I was able to get the walls and roof covered in the past few weeks. It sounds better than it is. The wood panels are made of Oriented Strand Board (OSB). It’s a pretty common alternative to plywood and cheaper. It doesn’t like getting wet though. It will hold up for a few days of rain but it ultimately starts to swell up and crumble. My rain guage showed 1/2″ fell yesterday so the clock has started.
This week’s rains have left me stuck up here until the mud dries enough for my car to make it out. In the dry summer season, the road is smooth and hard as concrete. A new neighbor, having hopes of staying all year spent a ton of money grading and widening the road. He spread about a 1/4 mile of gravel too. Its pretty sweet. All the neighbors (3 of them) have a yellow jacket (we don’t have bees) in their collective bonnet to pour and spread gravel for the rest of the road out to the asphalt. I am not convinced it is money well spent. Since they haven’t included any drainage ditches. I think the rock is just going to sink into the mud as it gets driven on.
No grip on the wet clay. Just slipping and sliding |
Tire treads clogs with clay. No traction at all |
Jumping ahead to post atmospheric river and a bit of drying out. Two dump trucks spread a couple loads of gravel before they gave up because they were sinking. Their weight did in fact sink the rock that was spread a few months ago. It is going to be a hard check to write when my share of the bill gets figured out.
It is starting to feel like the last 15 minutes of an HGTV home reno show though. In my case, the struggle is real. (Imagine Dun Dun Duuuun!! Sound effect here). I have no choice but to get the metal roof on in the next week. If not, it’s going to have to wait til spring. It too dangerous to walk on a wet sloping OSB roof. By then, I’ll just come back to a soggy pile of moldy wood chips.
It does feel like I should be further along. I was hampered by the heavy beams that needed to be raised and fitted into place. I had to wait for my much stronger and more capable friend to come up and help with it. That was some heavy and considerably dangerous work.
The building process starts with a design. The cabin is an amalgamation of floor plans that I saw on the internet. I hired a designer to put it into to his pretty drawing machine to hand off to an engineer that figured out how to get the design to stay standing through wind, rain and snow storms. And maybe even a small nuclear bomb based on how much I have had to pay for brackets and bracing.
Somewhere along the way, the engineer changed the design to meet the bomb proofing he had in mind. A change that took me two weeks of head scratching and conference calls to figure out. That 2 weeks was pretty hard on my impending weather deadline, not to mention my back, various joints and muscles as I had to redo some heavy work by myself.
It is all roof and ladder work now.If the weather people are right and keep gravity at bay, I should have a pretty productive October.
Speaking of which, it’s time to get on with it while Mother Nature is being magnanimous.
So far…..
