Grit your teeth and hold on!

I haven't posted for a bit. We still haven't got permanent internet out there, but the little thing is coming in the mail soon.

We are now almost fully settled into the house for the long haul, just waiting for springtime to arrive. It was nice weather for a week and some, but now cold weather has returned, and the wind as well.

I have place a temporary water system, which seems to work for the time being. It's basically a portable water heater that sits by the sink and gives us hot and cold running water from a bucket, but what else does a person actually need? We take showers in town, wash clothes in town, and flush toilets by filling the tank. We heat with wood and run our generator for electricity. We don't use very much of anything right now, except for gas, which I'm using too much of. It's a good thing gas is cheap for now, because we depend on it quite heavily!

At some point this week, probably tommorow, I'm going to order the first of our wind turbines, and replace our refrigerator. The turbine will just be a small one, and the purpose will be to supplement our electric usage, and allow me to equalize the batteries, which I can't do right yet. I picked up two 24volt battery chargers, and for the first time, we actually had fully charged batteries! I looked inside the cells, and I could see bubbles forming, which means that they're almost fully charged. I hope that these few months of moderate abuse aren't going to damage the batteries too badly. And the turbine will reduce the generator running time, which is nice, because starting that stupid thing in the cold is a PAIN! I should have gone with the propane version...but the price was right. $400 for a 4500 watt genny is pretty good, even if it only lasts for 1000 hours.

I've almost got all of the siding on the house, so things are going well. I've basically abandoned the water tank until spring time, when it's not going to freeze daily. It's well insulated, but I still can't keep the outlet from freezing! Plus, the trench that the intake line sits in is now filled with ice, which will freeze the water inside the pipe, and I can't get the ice out...so we won't have reliable, long term water storage till spring. That's about when I'm planning to start the barn.

The long term plan is to have a 15,000 gal cement cistern buried 4 1/2 feet in the ground (Which will protect the outlet from freezing) and this will become the back end of the barn, in a separate room dedicated to protecting it from freezing. All of the rain that falls on the barn will be channeled into the tank, hopefully providing at least half of our domestic water use. The pipe will be buried at least 4 feet in a trench leading up to the house, whereas right now it's totally exposed to the air (it's insulated, but it takes a ton of electricity to keep it from freezing).

All of this hardship is just making my family stronger, and I can feel myself growing hardier by the day! I don't regret this at all, and I'm actually glad we have a bit of hardship to strengthen our character. We've been spoiled in the city for too long, we've never had to fend for ourselves, and I knew it was going to be difficult at first, and it has been. Summer will be a nice break, and will give me time to build some more permanent fixtures.

Tax time is coming too, and I think I can milk that for some major refunds, especially in the GST dept.

See you soon, and I'll have more pics to come. I just can't upload them right now.

Rain delays

It's now a month after our scheduled move in date...and we are living at my parents. How did this happen? Well, let me just give you a little piece of advice...if you ever decide to do any sort of major renovation involving water pipes, a new home, or anything like that, do it in the SUMMER!
Our water pipes froze solid, and my wife and I decided that we would wait until we could get the entire thing running, then we would move in. So far, I've got almost everything completed, but it's just so hard working in the cold!
I was foolish to pressurize the water system without having the skirting on the house. I knew it was going to freeze, but for some reason I just went ahead and did it! Well, the jet pump paid for my mistake...by self-destructing. When the water in the pipes froze, all the pressure had to go somewhere, so it traveled down the line to the pump, and blew up the plastic housing. I figured that probably a pipe would burst, but none of them did, shockingly, that I'm aware of!
Everything else, and I mean EVERYTHING, is done, and ready to live in, but the water and skirting aren't fully complete.

The plan was to get a bunch of straw bales, put them around the bottom of the house and put some sheathing over it to keep the cold out. So, a couple days ago, I took the truck over to Claresholm to pick up around 60 bales from a farmer there. I was shocked at how many bales could fit on the truck and trailer, but it was stacked HIGH! I've got pics that I'll post pretty quick here. I tied the trailer bales down, but the truck stack was too high, so what could I do...I drove home with the teetering stack of bales swaying in the breeze. Took me over two hours for a 40 minute drive, but I made it without a single bale out of place at all!
Then, before I had to go to work on New Years eve, I managed to get most of the bales and sheathing on the house, and wrap about 60% of the exposed pipes.

Uh, time to work now...