The Deck is Done...Well, Kind Of....

So my assignment this morning was to cut the following lengths of board:

We ran out of pressure treated, and had to do the second half of the deck with mostly kiln-dried stuff.  I think it'll be okay, though, because it should be sheltered from the weather.

I marked up all of the boards....

...and stacked them by category...

...and then cut them!  I don't like circular saws a ton - I don't trust myself to cut in a super straight line, lol - but it went pretty well.

The Leaning Tower of Pine.

So then, Timothy and I lugged all the cut wood back out to my land and finished framing the deck:

As you can see, lol, a few of the boards are a little warped.  At least, that's what I'm telling myself, rather than the fact that I'm about as far as one can get from being a professional builder!  :P

The front section that sticks out here will be my little porch.  Hopefully I'll eventually be able to get the bug situation a bit more under control so that I can actually enjoy sitting on the porch, lol!!

So next week, it will be time to figure out what comes next...I'm not clear on whether I need to cover this whole thing with plywood...or cut a circle of plywood for the dome to sit on....or give up on the dome and just put walls on this thing...LOL!!  Probably not that last one...it's kind of tempting, but it would take too long and cost too much.  :P  

Anyway, that's probably enough rambling for tonight.  Thanks to everyone who is following this random, rather scattered process.  :P

A Bit More Progress

My brother Timothy was able to come with me today; he's a big help.  We added one more section to the deck, and then we ran out of lumber from the pile I'd been using.  So then Timothy started taking inventory of the other pile of wood while I went to Home Depot to get more cinder blocks and stone.  After that, we strategized, took measurements, and then loaded some wood into my truck to bring home and cut to size.  I'll do that tomorrow morning, and then, God willing, we might be able to finish framing the deck!

The deck is at its full width (just a smidge over 20 feet) in the photo below, but it's only 12 feet deep, so now we need to add onto the front of it.  

We've decided on a setup that will give me a 4x12 porch, which is cheerful.  :)  

Lol, we're doing everything we can to avoid getting eaten alive by black flies and mosquitoes.  It's a bit stuffy in there, but it's worth it!  I'm hoping that once I clear the land a bit and get some chickens, the bugs will be a lot less overwhelming.

Happy Wednesday!

More Progress

I got in a few hours of work this morning before it started raining steadily.  I added two more sections to the deck, so now it's roughly 12x16 feet.  

I've got Timothy to help me tomorrow, so hopefully we'll be able to make some significant progress on this thing!

Oh, and I thought of something funny...maybe instead of a homestead, I should be calling this a Domestead!!  LOL!!  :P  

Progress...and a Random Toad

It was a lovely day today, though the black flies are out in full force.  A while ago, I bought one of those hats with the mesh hanging off of it to keep the bugs out - and I'm glad I remembered to bring it with me today!  It's a little stuffy in there, but it was worth it to keep the bugs away from my face - and worse, to keep me from inhaling one occasionally!!

So I went out to my land today with plans to take an inventory of the available lumber, and maybe cut down a few more trees...but I may have gotten a little carried away...

So this is about 8x12 feet; the entire deck needs to be 20 feet wide, so I need to add on a few more sections, lol.  Timothy and I had discussed it last week, and decided to go with a square, since we're novice builders.  It would be nicer to build a circle, but the directions are pretty complicated.  (If there's enough lumber, we might actually do a rectangle, so that I can have a bit of a porch.)  :)  

The single board on the right shows how much wider the back side of the deck needs to be:

I'm pretty pleased.  It seems to be fairly square, considering that I built it, lol.  :P  

Oh!  And one blessing - in a few of the above photos, you'll see a tamper - the thing that has the square metal piece at the bottom of a long handle.  At church yesterday, I was asking if anyone had a tamper I could borrow...and a friend promptly drove to the store and bought me one!  God has definitely placed some very kind, generous people in my path to help with this project!  I used the tamper today, and it works beautifully.

I also had a visitor today...

 

He's got good camouflage!  Can you spot him in the photo below?

Anyway, I hope everyone else had a good Monday too.  :) 

Farewell, Trees...

I had a contractor stop by today to give me an estimate on installing my gray water system.  He said that it's pretty uncomplicated, but as long as they've got the heavy equipment out there, it might be a decent idea for me to have them pull a few stumps and dump some gravel on my driveway.  I figured that sounded reasonable.  So that'll happen sometime in the next couple of weeks...probably after I get my next paycheck, lol.

Timothy and I then spent the next few hours cutting down trees around the dome site.  I thought maybe we should do that now, rather than once the dome is up, since I am not well practiced in getting trees to fall in a particular direction, and it would be a real shame to squish my dome.  ;)

Lol, the following photos are not a very helpful before/after, since they're taken days apart and they're not from the same angle...but maybe they'll give some sense of what was accomplished today:

Before....this was taken uphill from the dome site, looking down toward the gray water system site:

And this is from today, taken from the driveway.  The dome site is uphill to the left, and the gray water system site is over to the right.  I'll have to get a better "after" picture the next time I'm out there.

I'll probably be cutting down most of the trees on the four acres that I took out of timber tax, so this is just the start.  Eventually, I'd like for the four acres to be mostly pasture, with a few nice big deciduous trees left for shade.  Many of the trees are bent or tipped over anyway, so they would have needed to come down in any case.

Next week, we'll be trying to figure out how to build a new deck for the dome from all the scraps of lumber we salvaged from its former site!!  I may avoid taking photos of the deck Timothy and I come up with, so as to avoid giving a heart attack to any viewers who ACTUALLY know how to build things.  ;) 

Slow Week

So far the pace has been much slower this week for dome stuff.  Monday I did some housekeeping kind of stuff here - talked to a guy about installing my gray water system, posted some stuff on Facebook Marketplace, ran errands, etc.  Tuesday, my sister and friend and I helped our coworker with some painting.  Then today, Timothy and I went back out to the dome's former site and collected more stuff - some lumber we hadn't de-nailed last week, the generator, and a kitchen sink.  

Lol, I picked up some of the nails and screws at the former dome site with a magnet:

I'm sure I'll get at least that amount again when we go back for the final load at some point!  There's just a couple things left now - a couple very long boards, some insulation that's just going to the dump, another sink, and a couple other miscellaneous things.  

Tomorrow I have a guy coming to look at the gray water site and give me a quote...it'll be good to find out what that's going to cost me.  And Timothy and I hope to do some more site work - take down a few more trees, settle on the exact location of the cinder block foundation, etc.  Maybe we'll even be able to get started building the new deck for the dome!  :D

Oh, Thane and Thea say hi.  :)  

More Stuff!

Hey, what do you know?  Timothy and Jason actually came back for another round of demolition and hauling!  I'm incredibly grateful - a lot of hard, hard work happened today!

We now have probably 90% of the materials that came with the dome transported to my land...I'll need to go back next week to collect one more load of wood, as well as the generator and a couple other miscellaneous items.  Some of the materials will be used to re-build the decking under the dome, and others will likely become a chicken coop and/or shed.

Here's a nice progression from early in the day until we finished:

Did you notice the bird house in the middle of everything?  The guys found an occupied nest in the eaves of the shed they were disassembling, and Jason whipped together a bird house to place it in.  We're hoping the parents can find the nest okay!

It's hard to tell scale in the photo, but the eggs were tiny - probably less than an inch long.

Here's all the stuff piled up on my land:

And Jason even pounded my sand point well down a bit further!  (After a little technical difficulty wherein the cap was off kilter, and the threads of one pipe got bent, lol.)  It's now about 8 feet below ground level.  It's tall because he attached the next section of pipe.  

Anyway, it was a long day, but very good.  I'm very grateful that God has given me friends and family members who are willing to sacrificially help out with rugged stuff like this!  

The Great Dome Migration of 2019

So...the dome has been moved!!  

There are still a few parts of the platform and the two little shed/hallway thingies to move, but most of the components are now on my land, waiting to be reassembled!

This is thanks largely to my brother Timothy, and our friend Jason...I helped, but these two really did the majority of the work.

Here are a few scenes from the day.

The cover has a couple sections that zip off, including the top.  The guys took that off first, so that they could get at the bolts holding the struts together:

Things got interesting as struts came down and the cover drooped lower and lower!

The guys working on detaching the dome cover from where it was connected to the shed (well, Jason was working...not sure what Timothy was up to.  :P ).

Folding up the largest part of the cover:

My trusty little hammer paid the ultimate price!!!  :(  

Disassembling the platform...this was by far the hardest and most time-consuming part.  The previous owners built a VERY solid platform!!

Some of the wood might become components of a future chicken coop - some of it got a little messed up during the demolition, lol.  And I'll definitely be replacing the insulation that was under the flooring...it had a ginormous ant colony living inside it!!!  Eek!!

The photo below is taken from basically the same position as the first three photos in this post...if that can give you an idea of what was accomplished today!

And the picture below shows the pile of stuff on my land....now to figure out how to put all back together again!  :P

Happy Domesday, everyone, and a million, gazillion thanks to Jason and Timothy!!!!!

Well, That's a Start!

Tomorrow is Domesday!  :D  

I was on my land for a good chunk of the day today preparing...I brought the last of the cinder blocks over from their forsaken corner, and then spent a while putting gravel under them and trying to get them more or less level.

I've decided to try to use the platform that's already under the dome, rather than building a new one.  The platform is a very interesting shape, though, so I had to really think about where to put the cinder blocks.  Hopefully I've got them at least pretty close to where they should go!

I also started a new project, unrelated to the moving of the dome, but VERY related to moving into the dome eventually - I'm installing a sand point well.

Also called a driven well, this works well in sandy soil and in locations with a fairly high water table.  The shorter pipe on the right, with the blue point, is the well point.  It has a heavy, pointed metal head, and the pipe itself has a bunch of holes with two layers of mesh over it to allow water in, but filter out sand.  You drive it into the ground with a sledge hammer or pile driver, attaching lengths of pipe as you go, until it's 20-25 feet deep.  Then (assuming you've hit water), you can attach a pump - and you've got an inexpensive, shallow well!

It's a good idea to dig a starter hole with a post-hole digger or auger.

Here's the pump I bought, along with the couplings for attaching the lengths of pipe:

The little blue thing in the above photo is a special cap that you attach to the top of each length of pipe so that you don't destroy the pipe threads pounding them with a sledge hammer.

And here's the progress I made on driving the point in....lol, this is going to take a while!

Anyway, I'm excited to see what we can get done tomorrow with moving the dome!  :D