Since one of us is on a sabbatical, and the markets were closed on Friday, we headed up to the property Thursday afternoon. We had a couple things to accomplish this weekend, the main ones being building our new indoor composting toilet, removing the stairs to the loft, and removing the old front door and framing in that wall.
Before Friday morning’s start, we enjoyed our deck again that evening. What did we find? Well, we know that some ravens up there like to hang out on our deck, and we found more evidence.
This would be the spinal column of some small animal, more than likely a squirrel. I mean who hasn’t gone out on their deck and found a spinal column? ha!
Friday morning Sheralee started off cutting out the pieces she would need to build our new indoor compost toilet. It was taken from the plans of our original one, but super sized for our indoor bathroom.
While Sheralee worked on the new ‘Loo’, I wanted to get a couple projects out of the way. One was to add permanent latches to the solar array and raise the angle a little bit more.
Something else I started that day, and finished on Sunday, was eliminating that tree that you see to the right of the panels. I found that in the winter time, the shadow from that tree would cover the panels in the afternoon, losing a couple hours of sunshine charging our batteries. So, down it goes.
By the way, that is our new Husqvarna 450 Rancher chainsaw. Now, I had been screwing with it for the past two weekends, bent the original chain, purchased the wrong Oregon chain, but finally have the right chain and it ROCKED! I cut more this past weekend with that new chainsaw, than I have in a year and a half with our crappy 18″ Poulan Pro chainsaw. blah.
The other thing I wanted to get done was add some OSB to our new container doorway wall.
I had added this doorway previously;
This past weekend I actually made it look like a doorway.
Just another step closer.
I think we ended the day by completely assembling the new Loo. It is awesome!!
Saturday morning we got up to start the day’s projects. Since the new Loo was in process, I needed to get the stairs to the loft out, remove the old front door, and frame in that wall.
I couldn’t wait. I was never fond of that door, and let me tell you it was a pain to install it, so good ridden front door.
This was before the stairs were removed. I took out the door first, and then the stairs. We had build those stairs in place, 2-2/12’s and some stair treads, and boy it isn’t light. Sheralee and I got it out though and I started the framing and adding the outside sheathing.
This after I closed in that door wall. We basically end up with a 4’x8′ bathroom. Very cool. I did add some additional framing on the container side wall, headers and footers, to get a better measurement of where we want things to go. Initially you can see the new Loo along the outside wall, but we changed that up once, and are changing it up again.
Sunday we took care of some tasks, such as compost and more tree removal. Finally we were able to burn some of the juniper up there as it was pretty windy all weekend. This coming weekend we have more plans. I will be working on removing the electrical from the loft and adding that electrical to the new bathroom layout. Sheralee is going to start the great project of creating our headboard/storage bookcase combo. It will be pretty cool when all done, giving us space for bedside items and also books/storage on the outward facing side. Cool.
Solar Update: Forgot the latest solar news. We didn’t have to touch the solar config the entire weekend, besides raising the panel array. So happy. We were fully charged each day, too full on the batteries, by mid day everyday. Woohoo!