Whew! It was the winter that never ends! Every week in March was another big snow storm. April wasn't much better with temperatures 20 degrees below normal and lots of rain, ice and MUD! Snow miser was clearly sucker punching his brother this year.
Now that it is the end of April the weather is starting to warm up. Depending on the weather we have been able to tie up some loose end projects from the fall.
We have finished the barn end of the electric and data conduit. The inspection is done and we got the sign off to back fill all but right up against the foundation wall. We need to add grounds for the steel sweeps first. Unfortunately, we still can't complete the road end of the trench but I will get to that in a bit. The connection went pretty smoothly once we accepted the fact that we were not going to be able to bend the conduit. We put in a few extra angled connectors instead.
Its possible that some big burly construction guy could bend it but it clearly wasn't going to happen with me as a helper.
One big take away from doing this ourselves: Make the excavation for the house foundation much wider than you think you need!
The hole will be open for many months while we toil away in the trenches building the great curved frost wall. We learned that if the hole is open for several months the walls slowly collapse on the edges. If you need all the available space you use a shovel more than you planned! We were constantly fixing the mini land slides. If there is already conduit in the bottom you dig with your hands!
The town just gave us a mailing address. The power company wouldn't connect us without an address. In fact, they wouldn't even order the power pole to be placed without a mailing address. Not sure the logic on that since we already paid them for the pole installation last fall. So our pole that was delivered last fall is still sitting there. Of course they didn't tell us we needed an address to have it installed until just a few weeks ago! This seems to be typical. It took many phone calls to figure out how to get an address. I called our local post office to ask and they had me call the post master. The post master told me to call zoning and zoning told me to talk to the building department. Whew.... who knew the building department would be in charge of assigning mailing addresses!
All our permits for the house have been sent in to all the town departments. Building, zoning and health all need to review and sign off on everything. There is a crazy story about the day I filed everything but that will be a post of its own. It has been almost a month since we filed so I expect to hear back soon.
We finished the conduit and lines for power and water into the barn. We also got our excavator up and running to place the culvert pipe where it needs to be for the automatic livestock waterer. It was a little sketchy. The culvert is super heavy and swinging in the air by a chain over my head. Mr. Dometastic drove the crotchety excavator while my job was to guide/place the swinging culvert in the gap. We achieved our goal without breaking anything. No cool photos of my pathetic attempts to control the culvert with my brute strength but you can just imagine it.
We still need to finish back filling the barn foundation. The mud this spring really delayed us. We needed the dirt piles to be relatively dry before we use them. They are finally dry enough.
Last weekend we dropped off our barn plans at the local building supply so they can figure out (and deliver) everything that we need to build the barn. Hopefully the order will be ready sometime this upcoming week.
Last but not least was our winter storm clean up. We didn't have any really big trees down but we had a lot of very large partially broken tree limbs. We used the skid steer and some chain to pull them down out of the trees instead of cutting them down. I drove the skid steer for this project and it was SUPER FUN! We added the big stuff to our wood pile and started a new bonfire pile will all the small stuff.
Mr. Domtastic figured out a way to wrap large bunches of big tree limbs with chain into a tree top burrito. Then he would drag them to the burn pile with the skid steer. SO much easier than dragging trees by hand!
I think that covers the bulk of our little spring projects. We had to fit them in around the crazy weather.
We have finished the barn end of the electric and data conduit. The inspection is done and we got the sign off to back fill all but right up against the foundation wall. We need to add grounds for the steel sweeps first. Unfortunately, we still can't complete the road end of the trench but I will get to that in a bit. The connection went pretty smoothly once we accepted the fact that we were not going to be able to bend the conduit. We put in a few extra angled connectors instead.
One big take away from doing this ourselves: Make the excavation for the house foundation much wider than you think you need!
The hole will be open for many months while we toil away in the trenches building the great curved frost wall. We learned that if the hole is open for several months the walls slowly collapse on the edges. If you need all the available space you use a shovel more than you planned! We were constantly fixing the mini land slides. If there is already conduit in the bottom you dig with your hands!
The town just gave us a mailing address. The power company wouldn't connect us without an address. In fact, they wouldn't even order the power pole to be placed without a mailing address. Not sure the logic on that since we already paid them for the pole installation last fall. So our pole that was delivered last fall is still sitting there. Of course they didn't tell us we needed an address to have it installed until just a few weeks ago! This seems to be typical. It took many phone calls to figure out how to get an address. I called our local post office to ask and they had me call the post master. The post master told me to call zoning and zoning told me to talk to the building department. Whew.... who knew the building department would be in charge of assigning mailing addresses!
We finished the conduit and lines for power and water into the barn. We also got our excavator up and running to place the culvert pipe where it needs to be for the automatic livestock waterer. It was a little sketchy. The culvert is super heavy and swinging in the air by a chain over my head. Mr. Dometastic drove the crotchety excavator while my job was to guide/place the swinging culvert in the gap. We achieved our goal without breaking anything. No cool photos of my pathetic attempts to control the culvert with my brute strength but you can just imagine it.
Last weekend we dropped off our barn plans at the local building supply so they can figure out (and deliver) everything that we need to build the barn. Hopefully the order will be ready sometime this upcoming week.
Last but not least was our winter storm clean up. We didn't have any really big trees down but we had a lot of very large partially broken tree limbs. We used the skid steer and some chain to pull them down out of the trees instead of cutting them down. I drove the skid steer for this project and it was SUPER FUN! We added the big stuff to our wood pile and started a new bonfire pile will all the small stuff.
I think that covers the bulk of our little spring projects. We had to fit them in around the crazy weather.
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