Homestead bathing...

I thought I'd talk about bathing on the homestead today, at least from what I have experienced. When we first arrived here we had a solar shower, that was an interesting experience. It is not designed for long term use for a family, it is great for 1-2 people. We tried a few different ways of making it work better for us, one way was group showers; me and my daughters would stand under it and wet down... then we'd turn it off and soap up... then turn it on to rinse off. Well... that got us clean, but it did not work for hair washing. Just for one person with thick long hair it doesn't work to wash hair either. When we used the solar shower we had to use a metal pan to wash my and one of my daughter's hair.

Then my neighbor with all the animals gave us a bathtub her dogs used in the summer to cool off in to use as a bathtub for us to use. We spent 2 days cleaning out the tub before we started using it. Then to use the tub we heated water on our outdoor woodstove, now I'll have you know heating water over fire and dumping it in has two temperature settings. Not hot enough and ... oh my god thats hot! Oh did i mention as we were in the tent when this occurred we had to use it in the "great outdoors"? Yes Silver set up a single panel of OSB we had with a curtain on the other side to partly screen us with the open side facing the woods. However we got to experience every little breeze that passed through.

So lets see... burning hot water with cool breezes, it is an interesting experience let me tell you. Lots of fun too, to hear the kids shriek when they get out of the tub and a breeze blows through when they are getting dressed. We had to do that till the shed arrived and now thankfully we have a "sort of" bathing room which we hope to have a home made shower inside soon so we don't have to worry about freezing while we bathe.

Oh the solar shower? It makes a great water carrying bag until the handle on it breaks. If you need the info.

Be Well and Blessed be....

Well paid!

Lookie what I earned today feeding my sick neighbor's animals for the last few days. It is about 100ft of 14-2, and 14-3 gauge wire and it is enough to wire the shed aside from the kitchen and the desktop computer area which need stronger wire than we received. there is also some telephone wire included in it for when we do our house we can move the telephone ourself instead of being held hostage by the phone company (like we just were for a week). This helps us next week when Silver gets his pay as it saves us some money.

Be Well and Blessed Be...

Pictures!

This is the "doorway for the bathing room we made, on the right is the canvas tarp. It looks a bit rough I know... but after 6 months of bathing in the "great" outdoors it's like *coughs* heaven.

This is a picture of the interior, just wide enough for the tub to fit in, we have some logs holding it semi level and still.

Wow I must be on a role having 3 blog entries in one day LOL.

Be Well and Blessed Be...

Meet our kitties!

This handsome man is Stormy he is the patriarch of our kitties, he is a Siberian mix.

Here is where it get complicated the one on the left is Pagie my son's cat, the daughter of Stormy and our at present momma cat. The little one next to her is Tuffy a cat Mr. Ruby ridge gave my kids. the orange long haired tabby is, of course Crookshanks or "Crookie" for short; son of Stormy. He as my stroke kitty I wrote about before. The next one is Pagie's sister Bandit, the two girls' mom looked like Pagie except that the "black eye" Pagie has was on their mom's other eye. The final one is Smokey Crookie's sister, she is one of my daughter's cats, Tuffy belongs to my other daughter. This picture I took one day when they lined up in our outdoor kitchen waiting for us to feed them. I have one more picture of Tuffy so you can see him better.

Rambling....

Well... looks like the batteries in my camera are dead, right after I took pictures of our new "bathing" room; so once we get some money I'll post the pictures(if it rains it pours right?). We decided to try to make an enclosed bathing room with what we had on hand so we could have a semi warm bathroom. We have a canvas tarp that we have wrapped around two sides of our former outdoor kitchen roof. We have it up against the back end of our shed with a piece of the tent and a blanket to block the wind there and a normal tarp on the "door" side. We put the lamp we used to brood our chicks from New York, to help warm the room. We still have to dump the tub out so the "floor" is a piece of OSB with a rug on it and we dump away from the floor. With heating water it takes about 3 hours to prep a bath, but at least now we don't have to worry about cross winds or people seeing us now that our leaves are falling off the trees. We have decided to buy our "potty chair" from habitat as when we checked out their store in Springfield they were $3 a piece... muuuuch cheaper that buying one new at $70 for the cheapest. Then we are going to buy a 5 gallon bucket to use instead of the "cup" it has on it so I can change it less often. Having the sawdust toilet means the 2 and 1/2 ft (approximately) cesspool Silver dug will work for our kitchen sink for the winter. We just need to set up a curtain for the toilet for privacy(what's that?)

We are going to walk the whole of our property once all the leaves are off the trees completely so we can see if there would be a good spot aside from the foundation to put our house as now we are thinking we don't want to be so close to the road anymore. One day when we came home from spending an hour looking for an open laundromat (ever one was closed) our "Ruby Ridge" neighbor (the first one on the street) was walking up from the back of our shed. Seems he was searching for his chainsaw and thought we had it... actually started yelling at Silver about it until Silver told him that his neighbor behind him had it. Silver even drove him down and showed it to him, the man did apologize, but that wasn't the end of it. The one who had it was the woman who moved out here with her family and they left her on the property so they could live in the city. Well a couple days after "Ruby Ridge" came by complaining about the chain saw, the second neighbor's husband (back for his weekly visit) came to ask us how we knew the chain saw was on his property. Made it sound like we were "scoping out" his property and not-so-politely told us to not go near his property or wife again, because she thinks people are wanding her property and implied it was us... well.. to say the least Silver was not happy about that and surprisingly didn't toss the man off of our property just told him to leave and not come back. Then a few days later we made sure that we no longer had any of the first man's tools so we can avoid both sets of people. I mean why would these people think we want to scope out a piece of property that has piles of trash on it.. yes we need building materials... but we aren't that desperate!

Oh well...

Be Well all and Blessed Be...

Cold Morning!

Brrrrr.... Well it was suppose to go down below 38 last night, and while I am unsure if it did... it is very chilly this morning. I will be happy when we get insulation and do up the walls in here. One of the folks on the street thinks we could heat with just a space heater and I'm beginning to think they are right. It does warm up in here easily , during the day; and I'm sure once the insulation is in it will at night too. We are trying to figure out the best route for the children's beds bunks for my girls, but to save space we are trying to figure out the best place for my son's bed. Also I believe we can buy a convalescent potty chair at Habitat for $3.00, I do hope so as even with gas money to Springfield it would be cheaper than a brand new one.

Thats all right now

Be Well and Blessed Be...

Here We Go!!!!!

OK lets see we have a home (shed), our own water, now we have phone and internet on the property we are doing great now!

Here are the promised shed pics:

This is our clean up before the shed arrived.

This is the shed coming down the road

this is where they started positioning it

here they are putting the shed onto a smaller truck

here they are pulling it onto the smaller truck... it spooked me when the middle passed over I was sure they'd drop it.

here they are backing it into position

Here they are "dropping" it into position

Here is right before they blocked it up after they finished lowering it.

Seems I didn't take a picture with the blocks under it, however the back took a total of 10 blocks to even out the 6 infront. We are going to finish out the interior in about 2 weeks when Silver gets paid again, we are hoping to still get the kitchenette from Mark Chenail; I haven't been able to get a hold of him since the phone company has held us hostage this last week and a half while they dug a trench to run wire for us. Then back on Friday we were told someone would be out to connect the wire for us... well yesterday we found out they don't go inside... so Silver wired the inside and we waited this morning for the "supposed" arrival of the tech guy to wire the box in outside... then we call them by plugging our phone into the box to find out... they were just going to turn it on by computer and -we- had to wire the box. My question is if all they had to do was use the computer why not turn it on sooner?

The Bunk House

Established: 10-8-2010

Well folks our building arrived on the 8^th instead of the 15^th which was a pleasant surprise. Also it was brought an hour and a half before it was suppose to. It was also funny how we found out about the building arriving on the 8^th. We were at our neighbors house trying to find out when our phone will be turned on with our internet connection (which is why I haven’t been posting). We were told the phone should be on by the 20^th, seems they need to dig a trench to put it in. Anyway we called the building company after to ask if they had an exact date for our delivery, and they said they just tried to call our cell phone which is off due to thinking our phone would be on. They told Silver that they'd be delivering the next day that it was finished already but they were waiting on a oversized load permit. So we rushed back and tore down the tent and piled everything that was in it and tarped it, it took us all day but we did it. We did have to do some minor pick up right after the kids went to school but it was set before they arrived. They actually started down the road just as we sat down to drink a cup of tea. I will post the pictures after our internet turns on.

Luck?

Well.... we've had some interesting luck here. Well the well works, as I mentioned, then my son broke the back window of our car. So we wound up driving around for a few hours the next day without a back window, till we got to Wal-Mart and bought some plastic for the window. Before going there though we ordered our shed it is a 12x24 with 2 lofts in the back of it blue siding and green trim, the roofing will be what they call “antique slate”. Then we hit a few yard sales bought a fry daddy for a $1.00, and a waffle iron for a $.25. That evening after Silver put our frying oil into the fry daddy and left the extra in the cooker we had been using to fry in my “crooked cat” dumped the extra all over himself. We had to leave him covered in it till the next afternoon when it was warmer. And... saying “warm” was fairly a relative term. We've hit a cold snap with very low 40's and upper 30's at night, so we have been sleeping in sweats with all of our blankets on. We have also blown out a brake line and popped a tire over the weekend, that's to someone in a truck who decided to stop suddenly on a 55 mph road with us almost on top of him. We had to swerve off the road to avoid him and that's when we blew the tire and brake line. It was a FUN weekend. I hope everyone had a good one.

Be Well and Blessed Be...