I thought I had better post before heading back up to the ranch tomorrow (now today as I finish this) for the weekend. I went up last Friday with the intention of working through the weekend, along with Monday and Tuesday. I pretty much did, with some job ‘related’ getting in my way on Tuesday, more on that later.
Made it up Friday afternoon to settle in and I really wanted to check on the solar, to see how our batteries were doing. Well, good news. I think we may have recovered from our disastrous winter. For the first time that I can remember, or in a long long time, the charge controller indicated the batteries were too full to charge any longer. Wow! That is huge for us. It has been a long time since we have had reliable power. How nice it is to have the coffee pot go off in the morning, lights whenever we need them, and oh yeah…the flat screen working to watch a movie or two. We watched the latest Bond film Saturday night, not bad but not the best.
(my $.10 review included for free folks)
I was sitting by the fire Friday night, clear sky and a little windy. I checked the weather and this guy, I check some local weather stations on the ranch, had a snow flake for Saturday morning. I looked to the star lit sky and said…no way!
I heard the wind all night, and at one point sure I heard some heavy rain….ok I could handle that, but this is what I awoke to…
WTF? Yup, snow everywhere. uugghh. Didn’t even get to see it fall. It didn’t really last long, and whatever mud was created from the snow melt, soon turned to dry dirt in the bright sunny sky.
On Saturday morning I wanted to get some stuff done before Sheralee made the trip up. I framed in some more of the new container, Crusty, and moved all of the shelving we had over to it new (temporary home).
The day on Saturday, we decided to grind the first part of our opening between the two containers. If you haven’t guessed, our plan is to cut a door way in each container and seal them together. one will house our bedroom and bathroom, the other our kitchen and HUGE living room. The first part of this is cutting the openings.
and finally….an opening. By the way, if you have never done angle grinding/cutting…oh please do. It has to be one of our favorite past times. ha.
We started the other container, but quickly ran out of grinding discs. I had done some reading about people cutting holes in shipping containers using grinders, and what to expect from your discs. We were way off. I think the problem was that I went with the thinnest of ‘metal cut-off’ discs. You could literally watch these things disappear while cutting. This weekend we are taking the next thickness up, and two of the “Grinding/Metal Cut-Off” kind. We shall see.
On Sunday I started framing in the closets we will have in Rusty, the bedroom container. At the South end, we have our little Hobbit wood stove. Next to that on either side will be our closets. They are basically 2′ x 2′. I framed those out so that we could line them and then Sheralee can take care of the shelving this coming weekend.
Next, I needed to get rid of the extension cords we have been using for power. Those cords run from the utility shed, which houses the solar/electrical and is right outside the South end you are looking at above. The previous week, I had installed a conduit in the wall to run more electrical in the months ahead and still seal in the closets.
So, my task on Monday was to get rid of the extension cords, and tie in some existing 110v wring to our electrical. This really worked out well. Our container had been fitted with some metal conduit electrical wiring, that doesn’t really work for us in the end, but some of the wiring junctions could be used to distribute 110v power around.
I put in two outlets in the container for now. This is one that I plugged the refrigerator into. It really helps clean things up.
One of my final tasks was to use the 1/2″ plywood we had there to start constructing the inside of one closet. We are using that plywood for each internal wall, mount 2×12 shelves (8 total I believe) and then corrugated metal on the wall facing the wood stove. Should be awesome!
We were going to use a barn door type system. Each closet would have it’s own door, but share the same rail that would stretch across the entire container. That idea is now scrapped. If you have ever researched barn door kits, A) they are expensive and B) finding a rail the length we need was almost impossible. So, we will come up with another plan to cover the front.
That was about it for that trip, after finding out I was among the unemployed, I decided to clean up and head out. On my way out I saw the wild pig-like things hanging out by the big watering hole near the road.
Actually, there were a group of 5 or of them all hanging out, and didn’t give me a moment of their time. They are actually Javelina. We rarely see them, but interesting none the less.