The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 50-56)

Day 50. (TFC Sealing The Shelter With Expanding Foam, Waterproofing The Shelter, Getting A Fantastic Visit From A Friend, Being Thankful For Having Helpers, Making A Midnight Move Out Of The Tent And Into The Shelter & Probably Being Too Damn Tired To Be Writing At Two In The Morning)

It Is super late but I am finally settled down enough today to write this out the best that I can. It is currently raining and for the first time in fifty days I am finally in (and get to sleep in) an actual building and not in a tent which is a damn good feeling.

First thing this morning I set to work gathering up the various things that I needed and then dove directly into getting the shelter waterpeoofed which was a many stepped process that I am extremely grateful that I had a couple of determined helpers to help me do all the many tasks involved in a relatively short amount of time.

Well that is as far as I got writing this last night before my vision started blurring and I started to doze off in the comfort of the shelter all snuggled up to the dogs so I am going to finish writing it on this very rainy morning and hopefully get it posted.

The next thing that I did was to use some expanding foam to seal all the cracks, corners (and anywhere I could squeeze some into) so that I wouldn't have drafts or places where bugs could enter the building. I also sealed the window as best that I could and installed some casing material on the interior of the window to further seal it. Later two helpers trimmed away all the excess foam once it had dried sufficiently to do so.

Anyway I had this big (at least what I thought was a big piece) of rubber roofing material (the material looks a lot like pond liner if you are not familiar with it) and I have had it stored all folded up for a number of years now (five or six years) and I have been lugging it around with me thinking that it was a roughly thirty by sixty foot piece and that I could always build a quick shelter with it if need be. I finally unrolled it yesterday to find out it was nowhere near the size that I thought it was and that it would not work to waterproof the shelter with which made me stop and have to rethink how I was going to accomplish it.

Since the rubber roofing material was basically a big mishappen triangle I decided to just cut it into roughly one foot wide strips and lap all the seams and corners of the shelter so that they would have a good seal against water and so that when I added house wrap to the building the corners and edges would not cut into nor tear the house wrap material. I even installed the material around the window to help keep it's edges sealed as well. Fortunately me and one helper were able to install the strips of rubber roofing while another helper cut the strips to the appropriate sizes which made the process super fast.

With the rubber roofing material installed we moved onto applying the house wrap to the exterior which was rather easy because it was a nine foot tall roll and we simply walked around the building in 'one fell swoop' and tacked it in place with staples as we unrolled it. We got part way finished with that when a dear friend arrived for a visit and brought me some building supplies as well as some nice roofing metal and too many other wonderful gifts to catalog here. They even helped me finish up my house wrap project and get the roof capped with one solid sheet of house wrap as well as a piece of billboard vinyl over the house wrap. It all came out marvelously well and by nightfall I had a water proof and sealed building.

It was not long after dark and dinner that I realized if I just emptied the tools and materials out of the building and covered the walls in plastic that I could move my bed and writing table into it and be out of the tent before the rainy weather came. So I set up a bright light, cleaned the place out, recruited some helpers to help install the plastic and move my bed and writing desk into it which we did in short order but it was thirty minutes after midnight by the time we were finished and the dogs were settled in the bed in the new shelter and completely content with the new scenario.

Well that's enough of that for now.

A friend of mine took this picture of me as I was applying the final piece of house wrap to the roof of the shelter.

Day 51. (TFC Having A Fantastic Night's Rest In The Cozy Shelter, Moving The PVC Dog Yard, Building A Ramp For The Shelter Door, Clearing Some Land Whilst Burning Some Debris, Spreading Grass Seed Followed By Spreading Straw, Installing Metal On The Shelter's Exterior & Transitioning From Camp Life To Shelter Life With Everything That Entails And Finally Making A Video)

Well as the title clearly states it was quite the productive day and after the most fantastic night's rest that I have had in the previous fifty days it is no wonder I got a lot done because I want to get more rest like that and as rapidly as possible.

Early in the day I awoke in the new shelter all cozy and warm with the dogs and jumped right into getting some coffee in me and starting my day before I could get all too cozy on a rainy and chilly day and fall back asleep.

After meeting up with some of my fellow homesteaders three of them helped me move the pvc dog yard from the camping area to the shelter area where I later moved it into it's final position and manicured the land, raked the entire area, added grass seed and covered it all with used straw from the camp area.

I also added grass seed and straw to the paths that lead to the shelter and did the same around the entire shelter. With all the rain that happened last night it was quite the beginning of a mucky mess in that area but the straw seems to have stopped it in it tracks.

After moving the dog yard me and a single helper set to work on installing two metal ramps as the framework for a walkway that was easy for both me and the dogs. I wound up attaching the ramps together with plywood and supporting them on logs. All in all it came out as an awesome walkway/ramp and makes it easy for all of us to enter or exit the shelter.

Late in the day I used some of the green roofing metal that I got gifted yesterday to start covering the exterior of the shelter and two panels fit perfectly oriented horizontally per wall so I am going to try to install the rest of them soon and get the exterior closer to completion.

All in all it was another productive day but now at the ass end of it I am tired and want to just wrap this up and let the video speak for itself. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.

Here is where you can view the video that I mention: https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-video-2

This is the ramp for the shelter entrance as well as a portion of the dog yard.

Day 52. (TFC Another Super Productive Day, Working On The Bio-Char Oven, Finishing The Dog Yard, Building A Partial Greenhouse/Shed, Installing More Roofing Metal On The Shelter, Cleaning Up The Old Camp, Setting Up The Coffee Cart At The Shelter, Installing The Heater In The Shelter & Tinkering With An Old Laptop)

Today was one of those days that went by in a blur of various activities centered around getting myself setup better at the new shelter site. Getting moved into the new shelter was the easy part but getting everything setup around the shelter is going to take some time but today I got myself a long way towards being setup well for the rapidly approaching winter.

I made another fire early this morning and while getting warm near it I decided to go ahead and spend a little time getting the fire enclosure setup for making some low grade bio-char and ashes for the compost piles. Mostly I just propped up the metal parts of the fire enclosure with rocks, dug out a channel under the front of the enclosure to act as a vent and place to remove the bio-char and ashes and another channel in the rear that connects to the one in the front. It really isn't the ideal setup for making bio-char but since that fire area is also used for warmth I tried to set it up to do both functions. I later hauled some rocks with the big wagon to the fire area and wrapped the entire bottom with rocks and used a large rock to span the entirety of the front channel. I like how it came out and am considering adding more rocks and completely encasing the metal parts of the enclosure.

The next thing that I worked on was getting the dog yard finished by adding another twenty feet of fence material and then adding a four foot wide gate beside the shelter that I can easily open from either side of the gate and below it I installed a water break so that water from uphill will be diverted away from the entryway and the shelter itself. Getting a secure dog yard setup is awesome because now I can keep them in the yard while I insulate and panel the interior walls of the shelter.

Some of the materials that I got a few days ago when that friend visited are pieces of black plastic from a radiant/solar pool heater and some of the pieces are roughly four feet wide by nine feet long. I was originally thinking to use the large plastic sheets as part of the roof system but decided instead to experiment with arching the plastic sheets to create a small room outside at the rear of the shelter so that I would have some outdoor storage as well as a place to run my water line to as well as perhaps installing a sink and my on demand water heater and shower. The plastic sheets worked amazingly well to create an arched room and one end of the room is now covered in greenhouse plastic but I am still debating on how to enclose the other end of the room. All in all it looks really cool and I am excited to see what sort of area I wind up utilizing it for.

Before I could build the outdoor room I had to install the roofing metal on that wall of the building and since the room more or less hides the wall I used some of the more bent and 'ugly' pieces to do it even though I probably should have hammered the really bad bends flat beforehand because it was a bit of a pain to flatten it out with screws.

The temperature dropped rather rapidly late in the day so I scrambled to get the old camp as cleaned up as possible by moving a bunch of stuff from there to the shelter site as well as moving my coffee cart which will make getting into a new morning routine at the new place easier because I won't have to hike to the camp to make my morning espresso. I wound up deciding not to move the solar shelter yet and instead I installed the canopy tent over it to help protect it's contents from the weather.

Just before dark I retrieved my propane heater and installed it on the wall in the shelter. I ran a usb cord to it as well to power the fans on the heater and whoa even without insulation the place is super warm inside even though it is quite cold outside currently.

Anyway after all that I started tinkering with an old laptop that someone gave me right before I moved and it turns out that it is faster and has twice as much RAM as any of my other devices so I have been tinkering with it trying to sort out some of it's various hardware problems. The screen on it is broken so I setup my external monitor and wow does it seem huge compared to the tiny netbook screen that I am accustomed to looking at so maybe if my tinkering is fruitful I can alleviate some of my eye strain. Well that is it for now. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.

This is how the bio-char oven came out so far but now I need to move it because it is in the way of the woodsehed!

Day 53. (TFC Waking Up Like A Slow Motion Train Wreck, Moving The WiFi Extender To No Avail, Setting Up Yet Another WiFi Router, Cleaning Up The Old Camp & Getting An Awesome Nap)

Ever since moving into the shelter my daily routines have all been once again skewed as I adjust to the new setup and shuffle stuff around from one place to another (which I have done all too much of since long before moving) and generally feeling slightly frazzled. The frazzled part assuredly comes from a combination of pushing myself too hard for too long (doing physically demanding work) and my ever precious daily routine being disrupted.

Late yesterday when I setup my propane heater in the shelter I used the only propane tank that I currently has fuel in it which is also the one that I use on my stove. Usually when I disconnect the propane supply line from a device I either attach it to an empty tank or cover the end of it with plastic and thus seal the orifice and the line itself. Well yesterday I totally forgot to do that and since the stove is outside (on my coffee cart) and the temperature dropped to near freezing last night the line got a bunch of condensation in it and this morning when I went to make my espresso the stove would not work properly to brew the espresso in my little stove-top espresso maker. I wound up hiking down to the homestead proper and after using the stove there to brew my favorite beverage I immediately spilled the entire contents of the espresso maker all over the stove. After getting the mess that I made dealt with I just added more water and used the same coffee grounds to brew another pot which although weak and watery was at least some coffee to drink.

The last few nights I have gotten to bed really late because the WiFi connection at my little shelter is utterly crap and I keep struggling with it to make my nightly post/posts and what should only take thirty minutes becomes a multi-hour process of frustration and annoying disconnections as I try to adhere to my writing, editing and posting routine. Last night it was two thirty in the morning and I found myself moving the WiFi extender around to several locations trying to get the signal stronger at the shelter. It all worked well enough while I was in a tent but now that I have actual walls around me it is an entirely different story in regards to the wireless signal strength.

So this morning (after several other slow motion catastrophes) I decided to move the WiFi extender around to several new locations and try to get the coverage area to reach my camp better but ultimately I failed to find a better location so I re-installed the WiFi extender in the solar shack and decided to try a different approach by connecting a second router to the single LAN port on the WiFi extender which worked out pretty well but the signal from the new router has an equal amount of difficulty reaching inside the shelter but at least between the two of them one of them works (for internet access from inside the shelter) occasionally, sometimes...but not always so the internet connectivity saga continues!

Anyway I was eventually feeling the cumulative effects of too much work, too much aggravation and not getting enough rest and fell the fuck asleep this afternoon and was in such a deep stupor that when I awoke I felt disoriented about whether it was morning or early evening but I shook it off and headed to the camp to continue cleaning up more of the stuff that accumulated around it during my fifty day stay there. I think that I am finally getting close to finishing the clean up there so that is good.

Well that is about it for now and if the great god named WiFi allows me to I am going to get this posted and finally get to bed early. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.

The WiFi extender and the secondary router installed in the solar shack.

Day 54. (TFC A Chilly Morning Followed By A Cold And Rainy Afternoon, Geeking Out On WiFi Routers, Installing Larger Antennas On A WiFi Router, Testing Old Hard Drives, Starting My 'Say It In Pictures' Experiment On Steemit & Mostly Just Staying Warm And Dry In The Cozy Shelter)

For a brief moment this morning I thought that I might be able to get some more building related stuff done but the weather just got more inhospitable for many hours and I resigned myself to tinkering with some old wireless routers in the hopes that one of them might provide me with a better signal.

While tinkering with the routers I eventually realized that if I just put the antennas from one router onto a different (operational) router that I might be capable of accomplishing my goal. I will spare you all the details and just say that I could not properly mount the antennas on the working router so I used part of the case from the broken router to act as a holder for the antennas wired to the other router. Since it is just going to be sitting in the solar shack this hybrid arrangement should be just fine. Since I did that with the router I seem to be getting a more consistent signal which is what has been problematic ever since I moved into the shelter. Sometimes things work and that is nice!

Since I have several old laptop hard drives and I have recently been tinkering with some old laptops I decided to test them out and see if any of them actually work. The results were not great because I only found two small drives in working order but at least now I know what I have available if I need a working hard drive.

Late in the day I decided to start on a new Steemit project/experiment which I am calling 'Say It In Pictures' which is something that I want to start doing on perhaps a daily basis once I get the backlog of Fantastica pictures shared. I had nearly 1700 new pictures on that phone and just sorting through the first month's worth was tedious and time consuming but I like the idea of sharing them in chronological order and without descriptions because it leaves it up to the viewer to use their imagination. I also figure that if folks have questions or comments they can always chime in on the post. Anyway that is about it for now and I hope that everyone is doing very well and has a nice day/night.

My hacky solution for adding larger WiFi antennas to this router

Day 55. (TFC Another Rainy Day, More Tinkering With An Old Laptop, Ordering A Long Range WiFi Router, Spreading Grass Seed And Straw & Prepping A Winter Trail)

Well today once again started off rainy and chilly but I was quite cozy in my new shelter with the dogs. Admittedly the place is much more comfortable than I am accustomed to (even though the interior is unfinished) and the last few mornings I have just wanted to sleep in and not stir from beneath the blankets. Given that it has been raining and chilly I am surprised that I have not just taken a day to sleep late and get rested up for the next phase of things here which I need to get started on soon because the days are passing rapidly and I have to finish the super structure (the pitched roof that will cover the shelter) before the first snow.

Anyway I spent much of my day tinkering with another old laptop and I might finally have found one that will work for my needs better than my little netbook. Although the netbook works well enough it is rather old and it is sluggish when I do any music editing. It is also only a 32-bit system and I am trying to get a 64-bit system setup because several applications that I want to use (like Esteem Surfer) work best on a 64-bit system and other applications (like Brave browser) only work on 64-bit systems. All the laptops that I have been working on lately have some kind of hardware malfunction(s) which makes them unreliable at best but the one that I was tinkering with today is only lacking it's keyboard because at some point in the past several keys on it got stuck so I removed the keyboard entirely and used an external keyboard with it which works just fine. My next step with that laptop is to take the other laptops and compare the RAM and hard drives and put the largest of both in the keyboardless laptop if they are compatible.

Early in the morning I decided to shop around online for a better WiFi router for the homestead because at this point I am totally over the intermittent signal and the ensuing frustration that it causes. I did a very broad search for a brand named Cradlepoint that makes good long range wireless routers and found a used one for eighteen dollars USD which is an awesome deal because that particular model retails at around two hundred dollars new even though it is an older model. It should be arriving later this week so I am going to contain my excitement until I set it up, configure it and test it out but supposedly it has a six hundred foot range so between that and my WiFi extender I should be able to blanket the entire property with a strong signal.

Late in the day the rain finally stopped and the sun actually came out so I went around the homestead spreading some grass seed around a bunch of bare spots and covering it with straw so that perhaps things will not become a mucky mess over the coming months. I also raked, seeded and added straw to that trail I created a while back which is the one that I want to use in the winter because it is the least treacherous of the trails that lead into the woods here. Since I had previously only cultivated the trailhead itself I used a hard rake to clear about two hundred feet of it of sticks, leaves and rocks before applying grass seed to it as well. Hopefully there will be some warm days ahead because after all this rain it won't take much to get the grass growing everywhere that I have spread it recently.

Well that is about it for now and I am going to wrap this up and wind down for the evening. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.

I am looking forward to the day this trail has grass growing on it!

Day 56. (TFC De-Barking Poplar Rafters, Building A Roof, Having Just Enough Purlin Material & Making One Hell Of A Mess)

Today was just one of those days that I got up super early, set about immediately working on stuff and got so far 'in the zone' of what I was doing that the entire day rapidly passed in a blur of uber productive activity.

Out of all the poplar rafters that I had gathered only three of them had been de-barked and admittedly I have sort of been dreading de-barking them but first thing this morning I put the de-barked ones up on the black locust headers for the shelter roof and rapidly de-barked and installed the remaining four rafters that I needed.

The installation of the rafters went rather easily and I was even able to get them mostly level just by eyeballing them as I put them in place. The black locust headers that they are resting on are by no means straight so I just put the larger diameter ones in the low spots on the headers and the smaller ones on the high spots which worked out really well. I did however wind up with a single low rafter but I just shimmed between it and where the purlins go over it.

As for the purlins I have really been wracking my brain lately on what to use for them because I have pretty much used up all my long material during the shelter building process but fortunately a fellow I know dropped off a bunch of previously used six foot long two by fours for me at the homestead and they turned out to be exactly the the amount that I needed minus one five foot two by four that I fortunately had been saving.

The entire roof building went very smoothly which was nice but I sure did make one hell of a mess along the way between the bark from the poplar, all the wood chips from notching the rafters with a chisel and all the excess pieces from the rafters that I trimmed off with that super handy electric chainsaw. I cleaned up everything but the poplar bark and I am planning to bundle it all up tomorrow and put it somewhere dry so that it can be utilized for basket making.

Anyway I am absolutely wiped out at this point so I am going to wrap this up and unwind for the evening. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.

I love doing this type of roof with poplar rafters and black locust headers and posts! Sorry about the stupid logos on the house wrap!!!

Thanks for reading!

Previous Fantastica chronicles:
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 1-7)
https://steemit.com/writing/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-1-7
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 8-14)
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-8-14
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 15-21)
https://steemit.com/diy/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-15-21
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 22-28)
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-22-28
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 29-35)
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-29-35
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 36-42)
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-36-42
The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 43-49)
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/the-fantastica-chronicles-day-43-49

Check Out My Say It In Pictures Project:
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/fantastica-say-it-in-pictures-volume-1
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/fantastica-say-it-in-pictures-volume-2
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/fantastica-say-it-in-pictures-volume-3
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/fantastica-say-it-in-pictures-volume-4
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/fantastica-say-it-in-pictures-volume-5
https://steemit.com/homesteading/@jacobpeacock/fantastica-say-it-in-pictures-volume-6

That Is All!