need for change

Saving Now To be Able to Pay Later

      I think I will talk about some other thoughts that have come to me as I start to visualize how this addition will be after I get done. I plan on revising my original drawings and add a few more real soon. This is necessary for you to visualize just where I am headed and hopefully clarify any questions you may have.

    Some thoughts come to mind and will add more as i go along discussing how I feel the need to unload my thoughts. My biggest concern is to get off the grid and be able to have all the amenities that life has to offer, including water features, like a hot tub and waterfalls, a greenhouse for light therapy during winter months. I propose coming up with a hybrid system of producing natural electricity from a green source and use the local power only as an emergency backup to charge batteries or kick in when the natural power gets below 25 percent of battery level, and still have a backup generator to provide power to recharge battery pack.

      I would like to use bio gas from wood gas synthesis to power a dual fuel generator that would only run when power is needed to recharge batteries when wind or solar panels are unable to keep pace with demand. This system is not unlike American Electric Power Company’s practice of kicking in a dirty coal fired generator that will rain acid rain and other particulate matter down on a broad swath of Pennsylvania and New York causing trees to die, as they defend their right to keep the light on in the fridge. We don’t want to let the people get cold in rural peacefulness of Ohio, where by generation of power from these coal eating carbon dioxide spitting metal megaliths located on the Ohio River, will light up that security light, and keep everyone safer. Well maybe all except the residents of New York and Pennsylvania who have to breathe the air we pollute. 

 do we really need this?

    And if the light irritates when you think it burns all night long, and usually there hasn’t been one documented case where this old farmer actually really needed the light to protect him or his property from vandalism or theft. Instead it was used by the farmer so that when he walked to the barn at night the light paved his way. I plan on installing motion detectors on all lights so that when you enter a room it will light up , if it is necessary or when the light level is such that the light would help you negotiate your way through the room or even outside on your way to the barn. In fact I had entertained the thought of installing motion detectors on solar security lights along the lane coming in. We have a long lane and if I had these placed right they would light up section by section as you drive up the lane. It would be like that movie where Dustin Hoffman makes the mound of mash potatoes in the shape of Devil’s Tower in the movie ET. The sounds of the space craft tones and the light lighting up the top of the rock tower, making a landing pad for the aliens to take movie stars into space. Too bad they don’t stay there. This same method of lighting my drive if it works could be used by cities also to reduce power needs by enabling street lights to only come on when cars are using the roads. At 3 A.M.  in the early morning are we really needing all these lights on at taxpayers’ expense.

     Anyhow I will call it my ET lane with the letters ET standing for extra time instead of extraterrestrial, in fact it was always extra time when we were kids. This is the same lane I walked all the time as a kid Most kids would be home eating mac and cheese out of a box , while we were getting off the bus in the hot afternoon steam of summer and would have to walk a half mile lane in that heat . Day after day we did this and never ever seemed to get a ride after our neighbors Nancy and Kenny Capes moved out and abandoned the City Farm. They were the last people to live in that old farm house at the other end of the lane, now tore down and gone including the glorious barn that stood there. They don’t build either of those any more. So many farm houses and barns now replaced with 5 ac. lots called mini horse farms. Farms are being carved up with regularity around here and plastic coated laminated glued stick houses are being built to replace them with. These places have a life expectancy of 30 years before major facelifts are required to make them relive again. So much energy and manpower was used to make these places and the carbon dioxide generated by the house in the building process and the cost to heat these places  will hardly make up for the necessity of keeping up with the Jones’. Still this is what ‘Amerca’ wants and needs, at least for now.

     The size and cost of these houses along with the land, and one must also include the damage to our agricultural system as we carve up old farms to make way for these modern houses that contribute nothing to the environment  but use energy to heat and cool, is something I can hardly understand. You never get done paying for this privilege if you want to call it that. The only way you could afford one of these places is to work for a company that produces some of the energy that is used by these colossal palaces in the countryside. In the process of everyone owning their own little piece of paradise, we end up carving paradise into smaller and smaller pieces until one day we have paved over everything there is left and we have no place to plant something to eat.

     Being on social security I am on a fixed income. My paycheck will never get any bigger and I doubt if the cola or cost of living adjustments will keep pace with the cost of inflation and my dollars will buy less. I need to spend what time and energy I have to making sure I am able to save as much as I can. If I can’t put it in the bank then I need to make sure I am living as cheap as I can.  Electricity isn’t getting any cheaper, as well as food and other things I need to buy to keep myself going on. I can see a time when my income will hardly be sufficient to keep me when I can’t do nothing at all and depend on others, if I ever have to come to that point. I am trying to avoid that. I take care of myself and spend my time thinking how I can make my life easier as I go along. I also want to do it as cheap as I can. I will do quality work but will use earthy materials or repurpose stuff and in the process help the environment by reducing my need to live. It would always be much better if multiple people were living and sharing the responsibility of keeping up with things. I would like to have someone else to share things with, but still find myself without anyone. Build it and they will come. I will as I can.

      I need to set myself up for my future. There was a time when I never foresaw myself getting as old as I am, still I made it. it was more dumb luck than anything and at any point it could have all went south but it didn’t, and being a logical person I have come to the conclusion I might just grow to a ripe old age if I try to make my last years the best I can . I don’t want more than anyone else. Instead I want to live in comfort and have my house be my space vehicle that transports me through this world as best it can in comfort, never taking and hopefully giving. Not costing me fortune and providing me with all I need to get along with in case of an emergency. You never know when that next meteor is coming. This is all I want and I think I deserve that much, if not then I will hopefully deserve it when I need it most as that is the direction I am headed. By sharing my experiences I hope I inspire others to bloom where they are planted and take stock of what you have in your own little place, and then go about making plans and changes to make your life better. If everyone adopted this same principle we could all be moving in a direction of making our generation, one of change when humans started a renaissance of intelligence and showing how greed and come-uppance isn’t nearly as important as living a healthy life.

      No matter where you live whether it be in an apartment in the city or in a house in the country. If enough people make changes in the right direction we will eventually make a change overall. We do this without any real plan, the trend will force society to eventually follow as that will become the new thing to do. Let’s change for everyone’s good in the future, it’s up to you. Think green.

     

everything good that lasts starts with a firm foundation

Moving Forward with My Farm Office

 

the girls outside my back door. hard to get out at times without tramping around animals 

    I know this is a blog and a lot of what I am writing sound a little dry, but it is also a way for me to document the total process of building so that maybe one day I might revisit and write a book based on observations I have made while building, drawing on my observations made, allowing me to write a very factual account of everything involved in the process of building. Hopefully this could be a primer for someone else considering building a home by them self in the future.

        Seems like when you have all the details pinned down on a project like building, inevitably you will have changes as you go along, but as in my case where I am mating one new part to an old part I need to consider both buildings and things like drainage. On hillsides like ours drainage behind the uphill walls is more important than below, as well protecting the surface of the wall is important also. You need to seal with foundation coating after applying a mortar coat all this needs to be applied before installing the visqueen or plastic to create one more layer of protection and this all needs to drain to a footer drain, sounds easy enough to get you a water free slab on grade floor. Backfilling with gravel instead of soil also helps water wick to footer drains, and away from your wall.

      This still all depends on how you install piping through your building to the downhill slide of the building. A floor plan would include gravel under a reinforced slab under a layer of plastic sheeting or moisture barrier and whereby this gravel leads to drainage lines installed under the slab. This will have positive drainage to outside of the building.  Downspouts should not run through your floor slab and should be separate of the footer drain, due to leaves and other materials accumulating in the drains causing a backup which may lead to intrusion into the floor slab. Any footer drain should also have a clean out for each straight length as an extra protection against blockage and eventual water damage to floor slab.

 

footer starting to show 

        I plan on having a gentle arched roof with downspouts on the backside to also consider. This I plan to shoot out the other way and I will make out of redwood with an aluminum insert to protect the wood. From the outside the gutters will look like old fashioned wood gutters and I will try and see if I can find some funnels to divert rainfall from one to other to eventually end up in a drainage line as opposed to using downspouts. The ideal down spout would be copper but that is beyond my present ability but will put on my wish list to try and find used.

       Yesterday I managed to get some more of the footer dug out and it seems to be going ok, the soil is a shale type and is easy digging as long as you like using a pick and a spud bar it isn’t a hard rock but instead is layered and if you are able to enter the layers from the side it digs up fairly easy. I try to do four wheel barrow loads or until my back is sore.  The footer has to be wide enough to support the weight of the blocks which are going to be 12x 16 in. concrete blocks. The footer by engineering standards should be 2 x the width of the wall, but you can slip by with footer 20 inches wide which will give you a lip of 6 inches on back side and 2 inches on front side. The larger lip is to be placed to the hillside and when reinforcing rods are inserted and brought up to the interior of the block cavities and then a grout mixture is used to fill the cavity, produces a solid wall that will resist overturning. 

 

babe and lily eating of same bowl while i am watching. babe was on her best behavior, but wanted to make sure she had the mother lode of her own food before lily the cat.

       The way it resists overturning is because the weight pushing down on the 6 inch side will be enough to keep the footer in place while the reinforcing and the grout in the block wall will also help hold the wall in place as one integral unit. For this reason I move the wall to the front side and this will also allow me more room to install the mortar coat and do the necessary water proofing I need to do to prevent a wet floor. On the front side of the floor slab where the footer and the floor slab migrate out of the ground it becomes important to frost proof the slab and when I get to that point will spend time talking about that. The back side being below grade will not have to worry about freeze proofing as it rarely will freeze below grade to the extent of the back walls depth. The back wall of the addition is the one against the hillside.

      For those of you who follow my blog bear with me as I will occasionally divert to other subjects as I go along in an attempt to keep interest in my blog. Sorry if it seems as if I am using this thing as a tool. But in ways that is what it is. In fact it is anything I want it to be. I use it for storage quite often and at times it is quite raw as it should be. I am writing without a plan most of the time and edit as I go along choosing to get my thoughts down on a daily basis or as often as I can. Thank you for following me. Your input is valuable and let me know by offering opinions of what you think I am doing wrong. I don’t always agree but take all opinions in consideration.

another day, another change.

Farm Office Renovation

       Well I need to change what I call the now farm office upgrades from addition to house. Farm office sounds better and this is to root the original structure to the farm,I can  grandfather it in as agricultural and outside legal mumbo jumbo designed to mess with average Joe. Farmers were here before politicians and a lot of politicians are farmers. This is an upgrade to the farm’s value and eventually will help all in the family. This is a structure that isn’t going anywhere and will be here for a while. I would hope a 100 years before having to be replaced. I am trying to make it maintenance free but in reality when using logs, you have to seal the logs regularly against our weather we experience in Ohio, and there is yet a building to be built that is 100 percent maintenance free. Even stone masonry is subject to degradation due to acid rain. Go to a cemetery and look at the stones in the old section and see that nothing is perfect in nature. The old stones of just a couple of hundred years ago are barely readable. Mom’s house being a log cabin built sometime in the early 1800’s still had to have renovations and is just a shell inside of another house my grandpa built in the 1950’s. The farm office as I now call it was built in the 1950’s I assume also. And originally had an outhouse and required a major renovation by my brother that resulted in a new sewage system and a trailer being added to the original house. This occurred somewhere in the 80’s or 90’ as far back as I can remember.

 

       As I do the floor and drainage and begin to look at the heating system , I again have to look at radiant floor heat as opposed to using ventilation type heating system using forced air.  A floor heating system may in effect drive moisture out of a wet sub floor from intrusion by water if that were to occur. I had to think about how I was going to accomplish this in a maintenance reduced situation.

     But first I need to explain what my current floor plan will consist of . How I plan on designing a passive floor heat system without investing hundreds or thousands of dollars I don’t have to blow. Some problems like how you want to do something, but don’t really have the money, can be solved simply by working off the knowledge of others and sticking to your guns on a project. There are always workarounds in everything you take on in life. lousy marriage , divorce lawyers out there will tell you that is not a problem, too much money for a lawyer, wife or husband moves out on their own and then validates an income where he is now in poverty condition therefore eligible for legal aid, I am sure there is always a work around to everything.  I was thinking yesterday that if you look down from space and look at the Great Wall of China and start to imagine that this is the greatest earth moving and building project by man still today. And it was accomplished by man alone, well a bunch of them, ok it was thousands of them and mostly slaves but still there wasn’t one gas engine that even spent a dollars’ worth of fuel in the effort of building the wall. Unemployment was 0, and people were literally dying to work there, and materials hardly cost a thing, in real money today.  Yet is still one of the most wonderful marvels of man, all it took was work. I am just doing some farm upgrades, should be easy enough. 

 

    A friend of mine gave me about 500-600 ft. of ¾ inch plastic pipe , and I thin k it is rated to 200 degrees and I am thinking about using it in the concrete layer below the finished layer of cordwood floor . Looking for a total floor thickness of 3 inches, so this means the pipe and its outside diameter will rise 7/8ths of an inch high from the grade of the unfinished floor. A total of 2 inches of concrete will be placed in subfloor and then covering the pipe by about an inch and an eighth of concrete (1.125 in.) and this is over a moisture barrier separating the unfinished floor from the above concrete.  Below that is the drainage system which will still have floor outlets or drains that will make sure that if there is ever a floor water problem at least it will still drain to an extent and prevent major damage to contents of house. 

       The back of the reinforced concrete block walls will also have a perimeter drainage system that will prevent water from ever getting to the subfloor and will also have cleanouts to make sure the drainage system is operating as it should be. Again this is preventative maintenance if you care about making sure everything is operational. One could visually check the pond feature in the front as you walk in to see if drainage is working properly including the runoff from the roofs which will be temporarily held in a water feature in front of house till level requires either pumping it to another feature or long term storage. This in turn will make more of the water I need for waterfalls and accessories available from natural sources and requires no pumping to surface. Pumps for recirculating water features will be run by solar, and will have an overflow if water exceeds overall system capacity. 

     Anyhow as I build the house I need to build a thing called redundancy into the system to back up other systems. This, much like the primary system of floor drains and underfloor drainage system will also serve as a back up to underfloor heating system should the floor ever develop a leak. I plan on testing it with air prior to covering with concrete to pressure of 100 pounds per square inch and must last for 10 minutes without substantial loss of pressure to system of more than ten pounds per sq. in.. This assures me that the system is airtight and sealed properly. I will check every aspect and try to design in safeguards as I go along. Time spent thinking this out completely will be of importance to the longevity of any building system.

     Overall it is going to be a story of patience to get it right, and knowledge that one day I may enjoy the feeling of being in a farm office, and I truly could find no reason to be elsewhere, to be able to sit and work in the comfort of a house designed by myself.  I have no other major projects going on. still have real issues with war , gun control and a host of other topics but no one seems to need my help , so I will just help myself.

we are the plastic generation, and i dont mean just credit cards.

Writing at Night 

  a dry bear w/ fish just finished

     It seems the opportune time to write, to wait until the eve of day when you are all relaxed. Where your thoughts could lazily escape your mind’s confines and magically appear on the puter screen. In theory, maybe that is right but I would tend to disagree with the notion it is any easier. In fact my hands and my eyes are tired but I feel I have need to grudgingly give up some thought as  to what I may say. Noting is pouring out except dribbles of days gone by.

     It is harder to write at night, but after watching my readership die when I am not writing is disheartening to me in the least. So I need to start writing on a 5x weekly schedule, and it should include some of my daily adventures with the house addition. I intend to chronicle and take pics of work, either I or someone under my direction has produced as a result of my effort to make my life easier.  And to that extent, I intend to update daily my progress with the addition as lately I have been able to work on it daily at least a couple of hours.

     Today I was working on the S.W. corner of the house. This is the farthest corner on inside of house. This end needs to be built first. A wall designed to hold back the hillside needs to be built; also I need to be able to pick up any water either coming down hillside or in the floor pad area of new house. I have checked for level and was able to get an idea of where I need to fill yet. I need to get all lines of the addition laid out so I can see the spatial arrangements of all components of the house.  My main accomplishment was to dig out more the soil to make way for reinforced concrete block wall, behind this wall at the surface of the footer I need to locate a drainage system to reduce the water buildup and possible failure of the wall due to intrusion of water.  As I go along I will try and detail the wall showing all components of the reinforced wall and its drainage system so that any who would think about doing the same could take my drawings and experience and use it as a means to develop their own plan.

     I think sometimes we put too much faith in builders who do shitty jobs and then cover up their mistakes. The building process is way over done with materials and building practices designed to only last 30- 60 years and then the building needs torn down to make way for a newer technology. I intend to make this addition last 100 years or more with the right construction process being utilized in the complete process of building. Making houses last longer that are thermally efficient and utilize proven building methods should be the standard building practice but disposable homes are the norm instead. Plastic and technology have created living spaces based on technology that utilizes man made materials that degrade and lose their luster over time. Heating and cooling systems based on current availability of petroleum based or electrical generation methods of heating and cooling based on coil , natural gas, or nuclear,are used making inhabitants dependent on a grid of utility companies to provide the majority of their comfort. Neglecting and refusing to incorporate even the most minimal amount of passive solar or wind generation to supplement the power needs of the average home.

     With increased focus on green technology to offset climate change predictions and global warming, more attention is being paid to eventually wean one’s housing needs off the grid and make themselves independent of utility companies.  This allows the homeowners freedom to reduce their overall cost to care for themselves and also to reduce their ecological footprint. Through careful and calculated use of our resources we move into an era of technology based on saving our planet and reducing our need to exploit all resources. To reverse the trend of mass degradation based on new resources and focusing on renewable resources based on past usage of materials.  The aluminum can is an example of renewable resources. Yes it has to be remanufactured into another can requiring more energy but not nearly as much as when the materials were originally mined and bauxite was smelted to derive the first round of aluminum.  Copper and other metals are recycled as a norm  and in turn this reduces our need to deforest and degrade our environment.

    Plastic is increasingly becoming a commonplace occurrence in our ecology as recycling efforts are not keeping pace with the amount of plastic being generated. Plastic is being worn down in our environment when it is not recycled and ends up in the bellies of animals and restricts their ability to digest anything, with fish and birds, dying of malnutrition due to large amounts of plastic being disposed of in a careless manner. With the onslaught of climate change and increased intensity of storms we find tornados and hurricanes ripping and shredding vinyl siding and scattering plastic of all types contaminating even farther than before into parts of our environment we never thought they would reach or even expected them to.  Even on top of Mt. Everest the highest mountain in the world, plastic under those conditions carried into the mountains by climbers fails to degrade and is presenting itself as a problem nuisance that is spoiling the environment at even such a high level.  There is an old adage about how shit rolls downhill. Even from the tallest mountain in the world, the problem with plastic seems to snowball the closer to the sea it gets, and then becomes worse once it enters our oceans.

     Plastic is a degradable form of oil by product that requires energy to make and depends on its fuel source as a means of its very existence. This doubling down of energy usage is what is driving our global warming, and climate change. Yet we shield our houses in it and make our cars out of it and it is found in so many facets of our everyday life, which one could hardly ever think of a time when we had no plastic, or if we could ever live without plastic again. Yet it is probably our single most nuisance polluter we as humans could ever have invented. It occupies space in our landfills and is not necessarily the best recycled product due to its many forms and its widespread use in society including being used just recently as a micro bead additive to toothpaste where its remnants that didn’t become embedded in your gums was allowed to be washed down our sewers to end up in the ocean in the bellies of fish and other aquatic wildlife. Why because it was a good filler and reduced the cost of a tube of toothpaste by increasing the bulk of the product and stretching out the quantity without actually increasing the effectiveness of the product. It helped the bottom line by increasing profits while creating another market for plastic products.

      Instead of recycling we just make more product as it is cheaper to make new instead of reusing old product. Also it is dirty business reusing and reheating old product to make new plastic. Instead more research effort has been generated at combining plastic materials by means of epoxies and using beads of recycled plastics for this purpose to make a variety of products that does replace some natural products. Plastic nonskid decking and lawn chairs made out of recycled plastic are the latest use . The need for recycled plastic is far less than the need to use new ingredients of crude oil to make more. This increases our need to explore new areas and develop new methods to extract oil from places we never thought of before. Houses should be made of natural materials and should be designed not with profit in mind but instead for longevity of the structure. Again we as humans have a need to live within the confines of our planet , to not exploit for profit any part that will in the future cause consequence to come back and haunt us. This is much like coal and oil are doing to us today.

    We are still in an industrial age and it is that age where machines made possible mass exploitation of natural products for profit that is still fueling our economies and upon which war is still being waged today. When and only if we ever realize the importance of saving our hide from our own destiny with death, will we ever start to learn how to fully enjoy our intelligence. Oh by the way I fell asleep and kept nodding off while writing last night. Morning thoughts are much better for writing.