Jordan

Split Rail Fence

Earlier this spring, we got around to starting on our fence which will, when finished, run the perimeter of our little homestead. The fence is built of split cedar rails, made by splitting eastern red cedar logs that are around 8 inches in diameter into fourths lengthwise, and is modeled after those commonly used up into the early 20th century in America.

A steel splitting maul with a 6 pound head is used as a hammer, and a combination of wooden and steel wedges are driven into the logs to split them. More traditionally, a large wooden mallet would have been used to drive wooden wedges, called gluts, to do the splitting.

To start the split, the first wedge is driven into the end of the log.

As the crack forms and widens, another wedge is inserted and driven in to widen the crack further.

As the second wedge is driven in, and the crack grows, the first wedge loosens and is removed. It is now leap-frogged over the other wedge, and driven in again, further up the log.

The split is continued to the end of the log, and then the resulting log halves are split into quarters. It is usually easier to split the log halves than it is the first split.

I consider this quite enjoyable work. As the wood splits it makes a very loud satisfying crackling sound. Split wood also lasts longer than wood cut by a sawmill, because the split follows the fibrous grain of the wood, while a saw cuts the wood with no regard to the direction of the grain, and leaves a sort of fuzzy surface which soaks up water.

When ever I see a good building rock – one that is somewhat square – I gather it from the creek bed for future use. These rocks or stacks of rocks 8 to 12 inches high are placed in a zigzag pattern which straddles the line the fence is to follow, and the first rails are set in place. The rocks add some height, and will keep the wooden rails away from the damp ground, helping the already-rot-resistant cedar wood to last even longer.

Got some great help from our dear friends, Jesse and Alice from over at The Wright Family Farm.

Marian and Alan love to watch anything that is being done outside. They’re joined here by little Gavin.

The finished fence will be stacked 5 rails high, with vertical braces and an added top rail, which add stability to the fence and bring it to about 6 feet in height.

This type of fence is sturdier than you might think from simply being stacked – once the height is completed the weight of the wood is considerable, and the rails and sections of fence lock together well. We also like how it provides a significant visual barrier (as opposed to a hot-wire fence for instance) and we are hoping this will discourage any escape-minded animals we may have in the future, as well as acting as a deterrent to the occasionally wandering critters belonging to neighbors. Looking forward to trying it out with livestock. Until then, we love how picturesque the split-rail fence is and are anxious to add more sections!

So far, only a little corner of the fence is (mostly) done. Lots more to build!

Porch Railings

Over the last few months, we’ve been trying to move forward on the finishing of the house. We still have lots to do. In the last two months or so, with the help of some dear friends, we were able to pretty much complete the porch railings for both stories of the house.

The railings were constructed of Eastern Red Cedar wood, which we logged last year from a place that had had their whole stand of cedar trees blown down by a tornado a couple of years ago. The logs were sawed into lumber on the sawmill.

Fresh cut red cedar is so brightly colored.

Our two busy ‘helpers’ caught in the act dumping out and mixing up the various boxes of screws -again.

A new set of front steps also had to be constructed as the porch railings were being built. These were made from oak.

Cutting the treads for the steps:

Fitting the treads into slots cut into the side pieces, known as “stringers”…

The railings coming together upstairs.

The Cedar wood has lots of character!

…and finished! The house looks very different externally with the addition of the railings. I think it makes the house look bigger.

Looks so good! It also makes the porch space so much more useable, especially upstairs, where the porch wasn’t safe enough to really enjoy and use much before the railings.

The two small gates that will close this opening on the first-story porch still need to be hung. Other than that, the railings are all done.

How to Construct an Off Grid Shower with a 5-gallon bucket

The 5-gallon bucket Shower

So, I did this project back in march, and this post should have gone up then… but, better late than never, right? :)

For awhile now, we’ve had our claw-foot tub in the bathroom, with the drain plumbed in. But having no running hot water yet (and running cold water in only one place in the house so far- the kitchen sink), we have not been able to take showers, only baths, and that’s not terribly easy. We have to heat water on the stovetop or in a big cast-iron kettle outside, and then haul it to the tub in pots or buckets. It takes a lot of hot water to get a decently-deep bath in our large tub, too.

We got the “bucket bath” down to an art, too. The advantage to the bucket bath is that it takes much less hot water than filling the tub (it’s also not a real bath- and therefore not as awesome :).

Bucket bath: set a 5-gallon bucket in the tub, and fill with water at the desired temperature. Then, using a small pot or other vessel as a scoop, pour the water over yourself, being careful not to run out of water before finishing washing. Sound awkward? It is. And that cast iron tub is normally cold when you sit in it. :P

Back in march, I made the time to put us a temporary shower rig together. Here’s what I came up with.

Here’s the hardware I used. At the top of the first picture are the pulleys I attached to the bucket and ceiling, for the lifting rope to be run through. I wound up not using the showerhead, as the weight of the water in the bucket did not create enough water pressure for the head to work. The water just sorta trickled out. I intended to try to make or locate a showerhead that would work with the low pressure, but never got it done, and we have pretty much gotten used to just a solid stream of water. Had I known this was going to happen, I would not have used the shiny tube either, but used cheaper PVC pipe instead. I used a 5-gallon plastic bucket for the water reservoir.

Note the “o” ring at right, used with simple threaded PVC fittings to attach the assembly to the bucket, and seal the joint. Works great, and the rig doesn’t leak a drop.

Fittings, 1/2″ PVC. Left to right: female thread/female glue, pipe, double female glue ball valve, pipe, female glue/male thread, rubber “O”-ring, female thread/female glue. All is assembled except for the last fitting (next photo), and the male threaded end w/o-ring is inserted into a properly-sized hole drilled in the bucket, near the bottom. The last fitting, the coupler with female threads in one end, is then screwed by hand onto the male threads from the inside of the bucket, clamping the assembly firmly to the bucket.

Here, I removed one end of the wire bail on the bucket in order to slip the eye of the pulley directly onto the bucket.

Here’s the bucket fitted with the shower.

There are two pulleys. One is a single pulley, while the other is a double. The rope is tied to the bucket handle, goes up to the ceiling and through one side of the double pulley, back to the bucket and through the single pulley, and back through the other side of the ceiling pulley, with the free end of the rope hanging where it can be easily reached. The multiple pulley system is absolutely necessary in my opinion, as a full bucket of water would be very hard to lift with a single pulley. The more pulleys you have, the easier it is to lift the weight.

Kinda fuzzy, but you can kinda see the rope and pulley setup here, along with the shelf that the bucket sits on after it is hauled up.

The shower works pretty well, and certainly much better than the old “bucket bath”. A full bucket can give a really good shower for one person, and we can actually both get a pretty good shower only using 1/2 a bucket each. It doesn’t take a lot of hot water to make a warm enough bucket of water, either- 4 to 6 quarts of near-boiling water seems to be plenty, usually. So there you have it- one man’s 5-gallon-bucket shower. :)

Amish Auction

On Saturday, April 4th, Atlanta and I (along with Atlanta’s Mom and two youngest siblings) attended the “31st Annual Scottsville, Ky Horse-drawn Machinery Consignment Auction”. We left the house at 4 o’clock in the morning so we could get there ahead of most of the crowd, and peruse the goods before the auction started at 9 o’clock. We arrived just before cars started really filling up the Parking areas.

I had been to this auction a few times before, and this was the second year for Atlanta and I to attend together.
It is a large event, drawing quite the crowd, including locals as well as folks from many surrounding states.

Although it was a beautiful, sunny day, the auction grounds were quickly churned into soupy, sticky mud, as the ground was wet from heavy rain the day before.

There is a lot of horse-drawn machinery as the name of the auction indicates, but there’s also tons of furniture, horse tack, tools, and antiques of all descriptions, goats, poultry, and endless miscellany. We were there mainly for tools and home furnishings.

This is our friend Malcolm- we met him at this auction exactly a year ago, and have kept up since. It was great to hang out, Malcolm!

Atlanta bought a few household items – a stoneware jug, a crock, two cast iron skillets, and an oil lamp.

I was able to pick up this handful of tools:

A blacksmith’s vise, known as a “leg” or “post” vise, because of the long stabilizing leg which sits on a block or on the floor. This is a fairly large post vise, with jaws that are 5.5 inches wide. I was curious about it’s weight, so I put it on a scale: 75 pounds! I will clean this vise up and make any necessary repairs.

A boring machine, used for drilling holes in wooden beams for timberframe construction. I hope to be able to clean this machine up and put it to immediate use in the construction of our porch railings. It will eventually need all the wooden parts replaced.

Three axe heads. One Ward’s brand double bit, one Plumb brand double bit, and one little shingle hatchet by the Keystone Mfg. Co. These will be cleaned, sharpened, and re-hafted.

A nice lady standing next to me bought an old wooden tool box (that I didn’t much care for) for $20. She didn’t want the contents, so I bought them from her for $10. Quite a handful of nice wood-boring bits for my hand braces, with a few odds and ends.

Three “hardy” tools. These fit in the square “hardy hole” that most blacksmiths’ anvils have, and are used for forming and shaping metal. Most hardy tools like these that are made and used by modern blacksmiths are welded together with modern welding equipment. These were forged by hand. Unfortunately, they don’t fit the hardy hole on my anvil, as they were made for a larger anvil than mine. I will probably modify them to fit, or try to trade them for some that will fit.

…and one mystery tool. Purported to be a cooper’s (a “cooper” is someone who makes barrels) tool, it is entirely hand forged out of wrought iron. If someone knows what exactly this was used for, please let me know.

Here are all the tools together:

I’m pretty happy with my finds, and I’m looking forward to giving the TLC required to restore them to the useful, quality tools that they were once.

Homestead Layout Plan

As we start this New Year, Atlanta and I have big plans. We won’t be able to accomplish everything that we’d like to, but we certainly have a list of projects to work on. We want to make a lot of progress this year on finishing the house; we want to have a garden (we have not had one to speak of since we married); and we want to start setting up our little homestead in earnest.

I have several outbuildings planned, of which I hope to complete one or two this year. I am going to share with you an aerial photo of Winshaw, with a rough layout plan for outbuildings & etc. drawn over it. The photo was taken by good friend Jesse Wright, from over at Wright Family Farm, using a remote-controlled aerial photography drone. The technology available nowadays is mind-boggling (to me, anyways:)!

I will go through the items in the photo in order:

#1, at the extreme left, is my temporary fabrication shop, in which I do most of the work on the miniature steel beds for our online business, Dream Come True Beds. This temporary structure was built two weeks after our wedding, and measures 10 feet wide and 12 feet long, and houses one steel 3’x8’ workbench, my MIG welder, and an oxy-acetylene gas cutting torch. I am in the process of enlarging this temporary shop to 10’x18’ and adding two more 3’x8’ steel benches.

#2 is the site of a “pole-barn” that I plan to build later this year, Lord willing. It will measure 20 feet wide and 50 feet long, and will have a more permanent, larger space for my fabrication shop, along with storage areas for our farming and construction-related tools and materials, plus a room to house my 1941-vintage Farmall tractor (which belonged to my grandfather. I’m in the process of restoring it.). This barn will probably have a fairly large loft, but I’m not exactly sure what said loft will be used for-yet. There’s rarely any such thing as “extra” space for us.

#3 is another building site. On this one will stand our main shop. I hope to construct this building using traditional “timber-framing” methods. The main part of the structure will be essentially two stories, and will measure 20 feet wide and 70 feet long. The bottom story will have several different work spaces, and the top story will be finished out into living quarters and household storage. There will be a mostly open porch, or “lean-to” on the side nearest the house, that will add an extra 20 feet in width for the full length of the building.

#4, the dotted line, is the approximate route of a proposed driveway loop around the house.

#5. The flotsam inside this circle is mostly gone now- it was the left-overs from the many stacks of lumber I had sawed for building the house. We plan to finish clearing it out this spring. Most of the area around the front of the house and inside the future driveway loop will eventually be filled with raised-bed gardens.

#6. Mostly obscured by the trees, this is where the creek runs by the house.

#7. This is the house, and the narrow red box on the left edge of the house is the site of an unfinished portion of the house- the summer-kitchen/pantry/woodshed. The summer kitchen will be a screened-in porch set up as a second kitchen, providing extra storage, as well as a well-ventilated workspace in the hot summertime. The pantry will be a well-insulated store-room, designed to stay (relatively) cool in the summer, and warm (but not too warm) in the winter.

#8. Not really visible, but this is the hill-side site of our root cellar. Basically an underground basement separate from the house, its finished dimensions are planned at 8 feet wide and 16 feet long. The root cellar will be used as storage for vegetables and fruits, such as potatoes, squash, apples… plus canned goods.

So there you have it. Follow along here to watch us on our journey, as we build our homestead!