Birchtree Farm

Plumbing... ugh. Let's just say that whoever plumbed the drain system from the apartment through to the main house did a thoroughly bass-ackward job. Long-time readers will remember how the drains froze up last winter, and how we had to scramble to get the other bathroom in working order.

Well, Ken's been working under the house, in the crawl space, to get floors insulated, wires rerouted, and ultimately, to get the drains fixed. The problem was that there was apparently very little slope, and, "creative" joins where all the various drains came together into one, including a Fernco coupling which was never meant to be used in such a fashion. Do you know what happens when water freezes inside an improperly fitted Fernco? It expands, and leaks, and forms "icicles" from the coupling down to the ground, under the house. We know because we stuck our heads under there last year and saw the spectacle.

Ugh.

So, Ken finally got to the point where he could work on the drainpipes, which entailed digging out quite a bit of soil so he'd have room to maneuver under there. The original plan was to push the pipes up, as they'd obviously been hung up before (but the plastic hangers broke) and re-hang them. Last night that was what we tried to do, with Ken under the house, and me inside. Except, there wasn't enough space to push the pipe up enough to get the slope. It would just run into the floor joists between the first and second floor and couldn't go any farther. I should mention that the apartment has an upstairs half-bath and a downstairs full bath. The drainpipes for the upstairs bath run through the ceiling and then down next to the end of the staircase where the PVC pipe is visible for all to see and then down through the floor and underneath the house. The ceiling fortunately is made of rough barn boards so they can be taken down fairly easily to expose all the lovely plumbing.

After examining all this it became apparent that the vertical length of pipe running from the second floor down to the first was too long. And since the other bits and pieces up there in the ceiling had been leaking in various spots, it was decided to just take it all apart, and start over. Today therefore we made a trip to Home Depot and picked up all the necessary parts and got home and Ken started sawing through pipe and removing it bit by bit.

Then things got really interesting. He was upstairs in the half-bath where he'd had to cut a hole in the wall behind the toilet (after removing said toilet) to get to the vent pipe which goes up through the eave space and through the roof. He suspected that the coupling used to to join the vent wasn't glued, and indeed, it was just jammed on tight and not glued, which explained why we had periodic leaks. So he was up there examining that and I was downstairs, on the computer, writing a blog entry in fact, when the lights simply went out. No flickering, no warning, just out. Well, it was pretty windy and apparently a power line was taken out somewhere. So, now we have a dismantled drain system, and Ken's all dirty from crawling around under the house, and there's stuff all over, and we have no power. Oh, and did I mention it was raining?

What to do but press on! We got the generator out, plugged in some worklights (and our freezer), and kept going.

To make this long story slightly shorter, once Ken was able to get all the old parts out from under the house, he started to hang tees and wyes under there so he could measure to cut pipe to make the joins, and also so he could get the right slope..... except.... as currently configured, there is no slope to be had. See, where all of this rigamarole enters the basement of the main house, the pipe is up too high (it goes through an old window which is boarded up). From where the pipe enters through the old window, back to where the pipe comes down through the floor in the apartment, there is virtually no slope at all, and no way to get any slope because the pipe has to run across the floor joists, and it bumps up against them. The only way to get the required slope is going to be to lower the drain pipe where it enters through the window and runs into the basement of the main house. Fortunately, once it goes through the window it drops straight down for a distance before heading along the wall to the other end where it goes out to the septic. So, there is room to lower it, without messing up the drainage on the inside of the house.

About the time that Ken finished getting the old bits out from under the apartment, the power did come back on, so that was one bright spot (no pun intended) in this whole mess. But you can see why this Halloween turned into such a horror!

Link: http://birchtreefarm.com/pelts.html

Seems I have a bit of catching up to do blog-wise, but I did want to share that we now have some beautiful Icelandic sheepskin pelts for sale on our farm website, here.

These were professionally tanned using a method that produces a pelt that does not require dry-cleaning. They can simply be washed in water with mild soap, or even shampoo, and washing instructions will be included. These pelts are very soft and supple, due to the lower number of wool follicles per square inch in this breed as compared with some other breeds. They can be used in many ways, including for rugs, chair or sofa throws, cushions, wall hangings, crafts, to keep your car seat warmer in the winter and many other uses.

Here is one example, just to tempt you to take a look at the full listing. :-) A 12-inch ruler was laid on the pelt for scale.

Ken's parents have been visiting, and while here they have been helping us get our leftover firewood from last year restacked in the new woodshed. This was not as simple as just moving the old stack to the woodshed. Much of the wood was from a couple of cords that we had bought last year. Our woodstove will only take 17 inch lengths max, and a lot of it was in lengths of 18 - 22 inches or so. And much of it was in huge chunks that would be too unwieldy to load in the stove and those needed to be split. That meant sorting the too-long and too-thick ones out and dealing with them. So, I was sorting and stacking, Ken's dad was manning the bandsaw, Ken's mom was marking the pieces to be cut and helping to stack, and Ken was splitting the pieces that were too thick. Then there was a pile of small-diameter stuff that just needed stacking, for the most part, but some longer lengths that needed to be cut down. It took about a day and a half but finally it was done.

We also built a new coop this summer. It's been done and has been inhabited for several weeks by our new batch of laying pullets, but I hadn't taken any photos of it after getting it painted. Here are a couple.

And this was the other project we started today after finishing with the woodpile. This is the roof frame of what will be our new hay shelter. We bought the kit from ShelterLogic. It's 12W x 24L x 11H at the peak. This is as far as we got this afternoon. Tomorrow we put the legs on it, anchor it, and get the cover on.... I hope!

Just wanted to post the "before" picture from the "Clearing for pasture" entry, and a current picture, taken today. They were taken from roughly the same spot. The lighting is different, but you can see how much things have been opened up. Oh, and you can see the new roadbed is in on the right-of-way. It curves around to the right to go down to where the other property owner has his log yard.

Another log truck with a full load of pine logs is just leaving as I type this. The work has been going on now for a couple weeks, and even with some delays for rain, the progress is impressive. There is only one guy working, with a chainsaw and a skidder, and by the end of the first day he had a good sized yard cleared. He's cleared most if not all of the pine that was good for logs out of the areas closest to the house, and for the last couple days has been working farther back to get the pine out from those areas. What's left near the house is pine and hardwood for pulp which he'll be taking down soon.

It is of course pretty messy looking. But there's really no way around that. The rain we had all summer did not help because it left the ground saturated, and even with the recent drier weather it's still pretty muddy.

Besides our logging operation, the man who owns the property behind us is having some hemlock logged out. He has a right-of-way that crosses our land, and in order to make it accessible for his log trucks, he is going to have the top layer of loam scraped off and replaced with gravel. His ROW takes a sharp turn so they will need to create a good base with a large enough turning radius for the trucks to maneuver. His logger has been working just past the property line to create a log yard and they are now getting to the point where they will be ready to improve the ROW road. They brought in a huge excavator this morning to stump the yard. I'm not sure when they will start scraping down the loam although it should be fairly soon.

So, at one point this morning there was an excavator, a skidder, a log truck, and a logger with a chainsaw, all working at the same time. I wonder what the neighbors are thinking?

Here are a couple photos of the log truck and driver operating the grapple.