After a three week absence, mainly due to weather in Arizona and Mother’s Day, we finally made it back to the ranch.
Last we were on the property, the annual road maintenance had just begun, how exciting. Well, not sure how far that went. With two weeks of good rain, the roads are back to poor condition in many spots. It was plenty dry upon our arrival, but you can tell where deep ruts were formed in the road. We can only hope there is more maintenance to come.
With those spring rains also came water collection for us, YAY! I believe we collected over 400 gallons over the past two weeks. Very exciting to see. On Saturday we had a good shower come though where we collected a little more rain. Nice to see, and we haven’t even hit the rainy season yet.
Three weeks ago we had ordered a barn door kit and materials to create a barn door (style) bathroom door. We based the door structure on a 1/4″ piece of plywood and then went out from there. While Sheralee was working on the final look of the door, creating the frame with some 2×4’s and that plywood, I had to work on the framing to support the barn door rail.
I then worked on installing the rail for the barn door across the new studs I put in place. The kit was great in then it gave you large bolts and cool threaded inserts into the wood.
After the framing and rail were in place. We worked on getting the hardware on the door and hanging the door.
Overall we are very pleased with the outcome of the door. The look of the door really turned out better than we expected, and just for the record the design of the door was not the original idea, but that is what came out of Sheralee experimenting with different stains and whitewashing. If I hadn’t mentioned it earlier, you would think the middle of that door was some sort rusted sheet metal. Very cool looking.
This is the final look of the door with the floor. Looking good!! Once we have our planked walls in place, that will be a sort of whitewash, it will look great!
Another project that we worked on was the material shed. I had left it with only two roofing panels in place, so I finished that off and installed the gutter.
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The next phase of this project is to add water catchment off the one end to flow into the water tank that is there. Should be pretty simple.
Another thing we did for the material shed was add a couple hooks for the pitch fork and a shelf for the compost cleaning supplies.
The only thing left to do on this guy is the downspout to water tank, and that should be easy enough. Can’t wait.
Oh..and we had another visitor show up Saturday.
I like to refer to him as “Kaa”. All of a sudden, there he was. The gopher snakes up there seem to grow rather large…both we have seen have been this size, which I guess they can grow up to 6 feet in length. He eventually slid under the tarp there, which I am sure is where there are rodents and lizards…his type of “to go food”.
I was coming around the other end of our container and saw him again, or another one just like Kaa…and that one slithered under the container to get away from us biped mammals. Good times on the ranch.
We are going up again over the Memorial Day weekend….can’t wait!