So, the biggest news is, the deck at the house is done.  Well, close enough.  There are 2 boards missing.  1 is a little piece of trim,

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May was kinda busy here, but some of it was non-eventful for the farm.  Some of it was awesome.
I tilled and cleaned out the garden beds and planted seeds.  With such a cool and wet Spring, not many of them came up.  I ended up re-seeding the spinach, lettace, and double up on some peas.  The onions seem to be doing fine.  We got a bundle of leftover strawberries that seem to have mostly taken root.  We also have potatoes and a double row of sunflowers coming up.    Besides that, I have a garage and basement full of tomatoes, peppers, lavender, various herbs, and probably a few other things getting ready to transplant.

I’ve been saying that this Spring would be exciting for the corn crib.  There were a lot of structural things, demolition, and odds and ends that needed to be done that didn’t provide much eye appeal.  Several projects have been waiting on hold for Spring, which would make a lot of visual changes.  But, there was a requirement…

The house in town had 2 sets of concrete precast stairs.  Both were getting quite askew and cracked, not to mention the lovely astroturf covering the front stairs.  These had to be replaced before doing serios work at the farm.  3 days with a jackhammer, and these were gone.  Reagan’s dad, Steve, came out and helped frame out a new pair of stairs, that were connected with a wrap-around deck effect.  The deck does not provide much for sitting chairs out on, but make a great bench for plants, sitting down on them with the neighbors, or melting on to after a good bike ride.

Three weekends later, it is nearly complete.  There will be a little raised bench near the front door, and there are a few more pieces of decking to get laid out.

Back to the farm….

I have done small bits of work on the stairs over the past month.  These are nearly completed.  There are a few riser panels to cut and install, and a few last treads to nail down.  We tend to buy local, getting supplies from Tri-County Lumber and Ace, but I love checking out the Habitat for Humanity ReStore in Des Moines.  I had to take the truck into town, and thought I could finally find a missing door.  No luck there, nor in the last several trips.  I know the original door we found there was sold at Lowe’s, so I swung by to see what the damage would be.  $228 each.  But wait a tic, there is a sticker on the one I’m holding for $150 clearance.  I pay closer attention…the left handed, 36″, full glass doors are $91.20/ea?!?!  The right handed doors were still $228, but the lefts were $91.  I loaded up the last two they had and checked out.  One of these finished out the set of faux-french doors between the inner crib and greenhouse, and the other would seperate the greenhouse from the outdoors.

Finally, the South side is starting to look like something.  You might also notice the coupla window, which was the passageway for the pigeon family.  It is now plywood backed and bird free.  It took getting a 2nd floor laid down to reach this window from the inside.

What’s next?  4 windows facing west over the main door, a finished staircase, proper windows on the South side with additional siding.  We did have some visitors over recently who seemed to love the progress.

The barn lives on!  I’ve also managed to figure out how we’ll start tackling the rest of the barn remains.  Our good friend Kevin Wilbeck, who owns Camp Coyote, did visit the barn carcass with the proper tools.  He dug out 5 sections of curved beams, maybe 5-6′ long to make a roof over a kiosk at his campground.  I’m thinking of doing something similar to shelter our main door.

Full size pics of the deck and farm HERE

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Three steps baby….

Yes, the staircase is progressing.  Saturday morning, Mason had a 4H art camp south of the county.  I figured I could work at the farm or spend an extra half hour driving home.  Easy choice.  Not only did I get the 4th and final stringer cut and installed, I found enough plywood to cut out 7 of the needed raiser/toe-kick sections.  During the art camp, I got these cut and installed.

After I claimed a proficient basket-weaving and wire-sculpting Mason, I brought him back to the farm to handle the 1/2 tube of liquid nails I left behind.  Now this is trust….   I pointed a 10 year old Mason at a stack of 10′ 2×6′s, and told him I needed them marked at 57.5″.  After he marked a stack of them, I started cutting.  No double checking, I just started cutting.  Every one of them was spot on!  He even re-marked another 57.5″ on the remaining left over pieces, but I have not yet cut them.
These were to be the treads of our staircase.  It seemed the most logical to install risers from the top – down and treads from the bottom – up.  With the amount of glue we had on hand, I got 3 full stairs installed, in the middle of the staircase!  Every tread board fit perfectly.  I was never so proud of our little munchkin.  I don’t know how we will finish off these stairs (carpet, laminate, hardwood), but they lay out perfectly.  When we go back and finish cutting, the staircase will get longer.  Thanks Mason!

Fast forward a couple of days..  I decided at he last minute to remove a few random trees that was growing too close to our garage or our neighbor’s garage.  I dug these out carefully….do you know how much a small tree costs?!

I dug up these trees from our town lot ….roots are bad for foundations – really.  I took these transplants to the farm tonight, and Mason either dug the hole for or planted our 15 trees.  He was even giving instructions for the transplants!  I had to carry the water jugs around, or more importantly controlled the weed dragon, where I hoped a small clearing would give new transplants the chance.  Our transplants were between 8″ to 4′.
We had a great planting session, and I plan on re-soaking them several times this week.  Hopefully, they will turn into our permanent windscreen.  Long term operations look promising by having such a good helper.

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Spring….how nice.  And time to go find the farm again.

I have stopped by about once a month over the winter.  The snow is gone and the ground is dry.  The crib appears to have stayed dry, and the shed did far better then expected.  I still have got to do something about the bottom of those shed doors.  There seems to be quite a bit of rabbit poo in there.  Luckily, a little bit more of the barn seems to have settled lower again.  And of course, a few branches have been shed from the trees.

A few days ago, I had to get something out of storage in the corn crib.  While I was there, I mounted the end joist for the platform on the staircase, and cut out the 2nd stringer.  It was too cool to see the first pair of them line up after waiting all winter.  They were all traced from the same pattern of course, but this was the first 3D vision of them.

Yesterday, in the middle of a bike ride with the Cyclists of Greene (COG) a few of us made it as far South as our property from town.  My plan was to stop there and get a recent wood delivery placed inside.  While I was there I started a new project, the potato planter.

I de-nailed a stack of old board that used to line the galley under the corn crib and cut them into 4′ lengths.  I also used a couple of the old bin-wall studs (4×6′s) to make 3′ tall corner posts.  The plan/experiment this year is to plant potatoes inside this frame.  As the plant grows each week you nearly bury it again, adding more side boards as needed.  After a summer of this, you should have a large cube, full of potatoes.  All the lower leaves and branches are supposed to turn into roots and give layers and layers of potatoes in a small area.  All the hardware for the first few layers is ready.

The tractor has undergone a minor overhaul.  I’ll be hooking up the mower deck tonight, followed by a quick test – why not.  Then I need to get the truck from the farm, load the tractor in it, then bring it all back down to the farm.  We need some dirt tilled so that we can plant these potatoes and a bunch of onion sets soon.

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Wow, over a month has past.

Anything exciting happen?  Not really, and yes.

After a winter here in Iowa, that has put us near the top of any recorded snow record, it turned warm real quick.  From 20 to 40 degrees for a week, then a few days of rain, then more warm air.  The snow melted quick.  Another interesting thing we learned, was that farmers were not finding much frost.  The snow came so fast and deep, the ground was not exposed to the cold air of winter.  Apparently, this lets the melt absorb, rather then run off.  In our yard, even though there was not much snow against the house, the water table quickly shot up to about a foot higher then our basement floor.

How did we know?  The dog told us.  Really, during one of the first heavy rains, the dog started running around the house at 3am.  So, I got up and let him out for a quick piddle.  He then kept up with his around the house pacing.  Since the rain was hitting the windows rather hard, I thought this new sound, not heard since last Fall, was disturbing him.  I got up again and dragged him downstairs.  I was going to put him in his crate, but saw him ball up on the couch.  Good enough.  Then I turned around and my toes got wet.

I flipped on the lights and found a puddle in the center of the basement.  Did the dog pee here already?  No, it didn’t smell.  Did rain leak in the basement?  Nope, no trails coming from the walls, especially where we can get some water in during downspout failures.  The old water heater vent, it has a drip hole in the bottom of the stack, that just 2 feet away.  No, it was dry and no sign of water underneath it.

Where was it coming from?  Well, there was a faint hairline crack here, and it was coming from a corner near the cinderblock walls and the floor slab.  I threw a towel on it, and went and looked at the floor drain.  Now, I did notice that 36 hours earlier, that our furnace drains into it, and it stopped draining.  Every time the furnace ran, it would fill up the floor drain impression.  I had removed the lid and used a small cup to bilge it out now and then.  This time it was just overflowing and I gave it another bilge.  I took the now full pot upstairs to the sink to drain it and returned it back downstairs.  When I returned, there was a large puddle here.  The cup would not keep up, so I grabbed a nearby mason jar.  I filled the pot every minute, and could not keep up.  I started using the pot, and filling the shop vac.  (NOTE:  The floor drain appears to be connected to a french/tile drain that surrounds the foundation.  It was working in reverse.  Luckily, it was not hooked to city sewer)
MAYDAY!  I had to wake Reagan, and by this time, the water was ankle deep in this quadrant of the basement.  She bailed, as I thew water down the driveway.  At the 30 minute mark, I gave up and remembered there was a transfer pump over at my dad’s house.  I went over and woke him up (that’s a new turn) I came back with a pump that was draining the basement at high speed, right out the door and down the driveway.  When we made headway, I re-ran the house through the window so we could close the door.  Still, every 15 minutes, the pump had to be ran.

At 7:00, I hit the stores.  I found a pump controller that would sense water levels.  Perfect!  I brought it home, hooked it up, and it failed after 3 cycles.  Damn.  I found another automated floor-sucker pump.  However, it would not stay on long enough to get ahead of the flow, then take 5 minutes to re-cycle.  Fail.  I checked every store in town, and Grampy hit 6 stores in Des Moines before we found a solution.

Another water sensor, and a small pump.  With serious pumping from the floor drain, we could keep the floor dry.  The more we pumped, the longer it would take to re-flood.  We shoved the intake hose far down the drain, and throttled it back and let it run for a half hour before it sucked air.  We dried the floor best as could be and used epoxy putty and a underwater grade caulk to stick a 5 gallon bucket to the floor around the drain.  We had cut the bottom off this bucket and created an above ground sump pit.  It actually did work, as it would fill to a foot, before we saw any seepage.  This was enough to run a pump.  The controller let us sleep.

A few days later, we had no choice.  I had just gotten a hammer drill and we made 14 pilot holes in the basement floor.  There was water coming back up through all of them.  We used a hand-held air hammer, a chisel, and eventually a sledgehammer to create a deep enough score out and break open a hole for the sump pit liner.  This hole kept filling up rapidly, and we used this small pump and controller for several days.  On the next weekend, I got a new PVC line out of the house, and have gotten a permanent pump in place.  Luckily, just as we have finished, the water intake has slowed down, but the waterline is still a foot under slab level.

Damage…  A few nights with little sleep.  Sore backs from digging out concrete and moving anything important in the basement.  And a users manual to one device that we really do need.  Very little damage.  Luckily, we kept everything in plastic and raised several inches down here —-just in case.
Greene Bean Coffee did get a new roaster.  It’s amazing and I have it dialed right in to produce large, consistent batches.
Besides that….it’s starting to feel like Spring.  Bike tires hit the road today, birds are showing up, geese are flying north, crocus’s are blooming.  I’m sure we will be getting some real updates soon.

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