Category: self sustainability

560 Articles
agriculture, self sustainability

I have plans to expand and diversify our water sources next year: roof capture, pond, stream buffering, well overflow, well from the old house we recently acquired. All will be at least investigated if not deployed. We want more alternatives to combat dryness, a fact that is made particularly relevant because of how many things we have growing nowadays, and it’s always hard to see them struggle from lack of water. On the same sad but relevant tone, we have started meeting families which moved to Vermont as various levels of climate refugees. We ourselves picked the area a decade ago for it’s better position in this regard, among other things.

This dry year, we’re moving water as we can, which is to say it helps but it’s far from a panacea.

Filling up at the stream, which is almost dry…

agriculture, self sustainability

It’s shaping up to be a good year in the orchard. I rarely post about growing plants because it’s all Nicole these days. I’ll have to try to do justice to everything she put in the ground this year, let’s just say the garden more than tripled in size.

building, self sustainability

I finished blocking and attaching to the house the 2 subfloors.

The 24’x12′ section weights a ton so I booped it in place with the tractor.

Checking for level, perfect!

Checking for square, could be better… The original 2015 tiny house and the 2017 addition aren’t perfectly orthogonal and so I have to find some compromises.

I started making trips to the lumber yard to get the next steps lined up. I’m going to try to insulate the subfloor right away from the top as opposed to crawling under later and doing it against gravity which is always tedious and miserable.

And after many, many screws and nails it all tightly made one with the existing structure. I want this to be solid, I tend to overkill fastening.

building, self sustainability

Not much to be said, as I said a while back, this blog is bound to become repeats without the enthusiasm of discovery. Don’t get me wrong we are excited to get more space, but the building process is very routine these days. In fact the experience is starting to show, what took me 2 days of work now takes a short one, and I’m less tired, and the result is better. It’s really nice to know what you’re doing.

Staging the boards

Cutting to length (12′ in this case). I can now wield this skilsaw one handed with great accuracy, such was not the case a few years back.

Working alone means more rigging

There are really 2 distinct subfloors to this project

June this year has been particularly perfect weather for building

And now, blocking…

But again, it went a lot easier with years of practice

That’s it for today 🙂

building, self sustainability

It took about 3 hours. I want to build another one before next Winter and I’m pretty sure I’ll adapt the way I built it, not the plan itself which worked just fine, just the order and methods for putting it together. I’ll try and publish a guide then. In the end, it takes a day to build, and it’s very sturdy.

Bill of material and plans bellow.

Bill of Material

  • 2x4x8 Pressure treated (2)
  • 2x4x8 (7)
  • 2x4x10 (16)
  • 8×3 tin panels (8)
  • any 3/4 thick cheap lumber for bracing (4)

Plan

quick_sturdy_shed.skp

self sustainability, solar power, water

Megadouche is back in business, it has been since early April. We’ve learned that we can deploy it early and get some use regardless of small frosts. We have it for almost half the the year now and its deployment is cause for huge celebration. The kids are very excited about it.

It comes with several major improvements this year too, I’m not sure we’ll be able to top that.

Bigger tankless heater

This guy can heat double the amount of water the previous one could at 3.2 Gallons per minute.

Bigger pump, bigger shower head to go through all this water, and a better platform to step on

Output Switch

We now have a choice between the shower head and a longer hose that can reach places like the tub or laundry spot.

Continuous Propane Supply

It used to suck, when a tank became empty, to go get another one in the middle of a shower. This “auto change-over” contraption comes from the world of RVs and will alleviate that. I still need to make all this a little more stable.

Lights

We’ll often be out there after dusk, and so instead of playing with flashlights I found some outside 12V DC string lights I could hook up to the little solar system we have out there to move water. It’s extra magical.

The very fancy control board

Pest repellant

last year a mouse built a nest right in the water heater one night. I imagine it must have been traumatic how its house turned into a sudden inferno. I had to disassemble it and clean it, no thanks. Also one day the water switch was just pulled to the “on” position, and we’re just not sure what happened but we blame squirrels. In any case, this thing there emits ever changing ultra sounds and LED blinking to hopefully keep all this away.

What’s the same

The siphon & sediment tub are the same, the formula works great. I did add an old battery to the solar setup, but it wasn’t really necessary, I just had it laying around.

This very well may be the final incarnation of megadouche, it’s become a fixture we all love.

building, self sustainability

I often joke that the siding I use for my house is more house. And well, this year will be no exception. The piers are in, more house will follow soon. The more experienced I am at all this, the more I procrastinate on the planning. I’m still figuring out the roof line but I did get the footprint in the nick of time for pier day.

building, self sustainability

Deck Stairs

As always, but especially with stairs, figuring them out on a more malleable and fault tolerant medium saves a considerable amount of time. It helps get all the little details right too.

It will move with the ground frosts, and so it attached to the deck in a way that will allow for this.

A Door

This is the first door inside the house, and it’s going to the kid who started needing privacy. He still leaves it open at night because he’s not used to being isolated, he’s still just a little boy. We had to explain a few things about door use that are not obvious when you didn’t grow up with them. Being careful with where Esther’s fingers are when he closes it, or how not to close the cat in. He of course slammed it once, and I told him just as I had constructed the door, I would deconstruct it if he did that again. The threat was deemed plausible and it’s been honestly hilarious to see him ever so gently yet angrily close his door when he throws a pre-teen fit.

maple syrup, self sustainability

That’s the verdict for Sugaring 2022. I’ve heard that the sugar content in the sap wasn’t very high this year, and I believe it. I was surprised at how little syrup we got for how much we boiled. Another thing we’ve been told is that the later sap runs were “buddy”, meaning that the taste is a bit off from the trees budding. Except they weren’t actually budding so that is this year’s peculiarity. Nothing to complain about though, it’s been a good year.

wood

$50 for a pot belly stove that has been sitting in the Tunbridge Store for god knows how many decades. We don’t know much about its history but it does look like it has lived :). This one was simply too beautiful to pass even though it doesn’t look like much thrown in the truck like this. I don’t know if I will be able to get it up and running again. But we figure even dismantled, the parts will be beautiful decorations once brushed up. I would prefer to keep it functioning if at all possible.

This will be the last new stove for a good long while. We have nowhere to store another one anyway. I need to work on the couple of fixer uppers we have lined up first.

aesthetics, self sustainability

Of ice patterns

We’ve gotten quite good at managing the heat in the house. On super cold nights, we used to wake up a few times a night to keep feeding the fire, this is no longer the case. I rebuilt the house temperature Pi which got borked and I never fixed, I’m curious to compute the variance in house temperature from early years to now.

50° differential opening the door

building, self sustainability

I’ve been pushing the hickory flooring into one of the flights of stairs. It sure it nice to have an alternative when I turn one into a minefield such as this:

I had to buy more clamps…

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