Move-in day: Saturday

On Saturday, January 23, we move the horses to the property.

All in all it was a fairly uneventful move. While Fuzzypony and I went to pick up the four-foots, the husband and the father-in-law did a few last-minute tasks to get ready.

They filled up the water trough in the sacrifice paddock.

And hung the gate, properly (with bolts!) this time. (Horse blanket are the blob in the picture.)

We arrived with the boys around 10 a.m., and they promptly dove into the grass.

Red did sample to round bale to see if it was edible. He gave it two hooves up, but decided that the grass was more exciting.

After we dropped off the horses, we headed to the feed store. A neighbor recommended J & B Feed and Hay, which is about 15 minutes from the house. While their Web site is nothing to write home about, the store itself is great. Nice hay, very reasonable prices, and very, very helpful folks. I got two round bales and they are going to keep the other one for me until next week, when I can get back to pick it up.

The new feed room is in the shed. We got 300 lbs of grain for Saga since he gets 3x as much as Red does. Here are the spare bags stacked on a pallet.

And our neatly-stacked feed bins. One for Saga, one for Red, one for Anie, and one for the chickens. We decided to put everything as close as possible to where the actual feeding would take place. So far (after three feedings) it seems to be working well!


Starting to look like a real far... barnlike object, horses, fencing... yeah, we're going to love living here!

It was a good, good day. It finally feels like this place is coming together!

What engineers talk about over beer

I'm sitting in my living room blogging, and my husband is chatting with a friend of ours from the SCA who happens to be an engineer.

The hubby is describing our new electrical system and mentioned the handy voltage detector pen that we have. Basically you move the thing near a wire, and if it glows red and beeps, the wire is live. This is super-handy when you have no idea whether the wire you just uncovered in the wall you're ripping out is in fact connected to anything - it's nice to know if it's live before you grab it.

So as we're talking about this handy volt detector gadget, our engineering friend looks puzzled and says, "Cool, but how does it work?"

"You're not closing a circuit, so what's making it work?"

Of course he's right - you just move the detector near the wire and it beeps and glows. There's no circuit, especially if you're wearing thick-soled rubber shoes. So... I do what any intelligent person does in this day and age - I look it up on Google. And here's the description I found, available at http://en.allexperts.com/q/Physics-1358/2008/12/Voltage-detector.htm.

'The "circuit" that is being created to light up the LED is not between the 120 AC voltage and ground. It is a circuit going through a looped wire and then through the LED. What does a looped wire do? When you change the magnetic flux through a looped wire, you create a current in the wire. And where does the magnetic field come from? From the wire, carrying a current, which changes direction sixty times a second. That is a measurable change in the current, which causes a measurable change in the magnetic field coming from the AC wire, which causes a measurable change in the magnetic flux through the looped wire, which induces a current through the loop, which causes the LED to glow.

This induced current would be nowhere near enough to cause an incandescent or fluorescent bulb to glow. However, you don't need a lot of current to light up an LED. Thus, you can safely detect AC in a wire, without having to short the wire to ground.'

Well, that's it for your physics lesson for tonight. And now you know what engineers talk about over beer. :)

Oh and if you don't have one of those voltage detector pens? You need one.

Beeeutiful!

Now, before we got this house, I did not consider myself a connoisseur of exciting things like... electrical panel boxes. Conduit. 200 amp service. Neatly wired junction boxes. Labels on stuff in the panel box. 50 and 30 amp outlets. Whether or not you need a GFCI outlet or an arc-fault breaker. You get the picture.

But now... now, not only do I find beauty in nice electrical work, I also look at other people's electrical panels to see how they are wired. "Wow, look at how neatly that conduit has been run," I said to the hubby the other day while we were driving past an impressive setup on 35th street. On one hand I suppose it's kinda ridiculous, but on the other hand, I now have a much, much better appreciation of a master electrician's handy work.

Let me 'splain.

Look at my beeeutiful new 200 amp meter and can (top). Under which lies the panel with the cutoff switch to the house, with space for the cutoff to the (as yet nonexistent) barn and the guest house.

At the bottom, we had a 50 amp, 30 amp, and 110 plug installed. The 50 amp and 30 amp are for RV plugins (we have a truck camper and the NC in-laws have a very large RV that needs a 50 amp), and the 110 is for plugging in anything else that might need to be plugged in.

Check out that pretty green sticker. That says "City of Austin INSPECTED." We're actually legal now!

New pole on the roof gets us the 15 feet of overhead clearance that we're supposed to have. Woohoo!

The shiny new panel box for the house. We had to put it outside because you need 3 feet of clearance in front of any panel box to meet code, and we didn't have that inside the utility room.

And look! Everything is sooo neatly labeled and everything! There's even plenty of room to expand when we put on the addition.

It's just to the left of where the meter, can, and one sub-panel used to be (you can see it on the left of the picture). We'll have a mason come out and brick this in.

Remember this mess? Three panel boxes on the inside wall?

Now it looks like this. Obviously I have to replace the drywall and all, but it's so neat!

Junction box (neatly labeled, you can see it in the picture above) on the inside wall.

Here are the old panel boxes that got pulled out.

And remember the leaning posts of Pisa? Notice the fantastic electrical line that it's "supporting". We took both the overhead wire and the two backmost telephone poles out. (I didn't take a picture of the finished product, but here's the before picture.)

So, we have 200 amp electric! Now, you too can come over and admire my beeeutiful panel boxes, conduit, and other stuff! Just don't look at the inside of the house, OK?

Ded Dawgs

Just wanted to share some cute pictures of the dogs in various "ded" poses.

Elais says, "I'm not getting up yet and you can't make me."

Elias has gone belly-up - he's ded for sure! (Note: he's really just trying to get someone to rub his belly)

Even guardian dogs like Anie must sleep sometime. I'm just not sure how many of them sleep upside-down in the ded dawg pose.

Reba: not quite ded, but displaying near-perfect ear floppage.

My personal favorite - the night of the living ded - "vampire dog" edition.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled house blog.

Update on Anie

A number of you sent e-mail congratulating us on adopting Anie, our Great Pyrenees guardian dog. Unfortunately, we did not have a chance to introduce her to our chickens the night we got her, and the chicken's yard area didn't get locked that night. I'm sure you can see where this is going - the next morning when I went out to feed Anie and the chickens, only to find her standing over four dead chickens.

I have to say, it was one of the most horrible moments of my life, and my husband's as well. Here we had invited an animal into our home to guard, and instead she had killed our pet chickens. The chickens were still warm, so it had just happened, and one of them was still slightly alive. My husband ended up having to drown that one to end her suffering, which was just awful. The kids were absolutely devastated, and there was immediate discussion as to whether or not to keep Anie.

In the end, we decided that the chicken incident was probably our fault. We left the gate unlocked, and she simply pushed her way in. We didn't lock the coop (we normally don't) so the chickens didn't have any protection. We also didn't introduce them because it was night and the chickens were asleep. Anie seemed to think that they weren't supposed to be there, so she took care of them. As soon as I saw her, I told her "NO!" and she immeditely left them and looked chagrined. And in general, she's such a sweet girl it's really inconcievable that she would hurt something unless she thought she was supposed to do it - she is a guardian dog after all, and it's her job to take care of anything that's not supposed to be in her territory.

So, we decided to keep her and introduce her properly to chickens. First, we had to get several more chickens, so we found someone who was selling older laying hens on Craigslist and picked up 5 of them (as an aside, they're really laying well!). We also got some younger "nuggets" who will be our next batch of layers. Over the last week, we've gradually been introducing her to both sets of hens, mostly by holding them up to her and letting her sniff them.

Generally, Anie doesn't like to come in the house. However, we've lured her in a few times to groom her. Here the hubby is keeping all three dogs occupied with bits of cheese. Attentive dogs!

Surprisingly, Anie is not that much bigger in size than Elias is. However, she seems to be broader in her body and is definitely much, much poofier! We're not sure how much she weighs though, but we're planning to take her to the vet this weekend.

Anie after her second grooming. The mats are almost gone, except for a few on her haunches which are very hard to get at because she spends so much time sitting or lying down.

For the past week, we've kept the new chickens in their yard. We've shown them to Anie daily and introduced them as friends. She's sniffed them but was otherwise uninterested. We took her into the yard, supervised, and she watched them a bit but was otherwise more interested in being petted. So far, so good.

Today, we let the chickens out into the main part of the backyard and supervised Anie while she was out with them. Again, she wasn't very interested, and after we went back in the house, took up her customary spot on the back deck.

Chickens getting closer. Anie continues to do her imitation of a doormat.

Still getting closer. Not very interested.

Anie looks mildly interested that a chicken is on her doormat.

All five chickens in close proximity to the Poofy White Doormat. Doormat seems completely uninterested.

The chickens were out for the afternoon and the entire time, Anie layed quiescently on the deck. When the chickens got close, she watched them, but didn't make any moves toward them. Eventually they put themselves to bed in their coop and Anie reminded us it was time for her dinner. We locked the chickens in their yard for the night but will let them out in the morning for some more supervised time with her. However, overall, it seems like a very successful introduction and we are hopeful that Anie will turn out to be a good chicken guardian.

During the last week, we've gotten to know her quite a bit. She's only barked once, a deep "WOOF" sound, immediately after which we heard a loud rustling sound in the woods behind our house - so something was back there and she was letting it know not to come any closer. She doesn't get excited when the dogs on either side of our house attack the fence - unlike Elias, she just ignores them. She spends most of her nights in her bed in our shed, apparently keeping watch. During the day, she likes to lay on the doormat by the back door. She spends so much time there, we've taken to calling her the Poofy White Doormat. Certainly she just looks like a big lump of fur!

She's a sweet, sweet girl and likes her pets, but has no interest in running with the other two dogs. She nearly always lays on her right side, I think because there's something not quite right in her right hip or right leg. She's stiff when getting up, but she can bound around if she wants to. I think she may be older than the 6.5 years she was advertised as being, but we'll know for sure when we take her to the vet. Even if she is older, that's OK... she's a good introduction to the breed.

So right now, it looks like she'll be staying with us. Please keep your fingers crossed that she continues to guard the chickens, because we'd really, really like her to become a permanent member of our family!

Fun (haha) with plumbing

Over the holidays, we were gone visiting family and had turned off the water to the house and drained the pipes. A big part of why we chose to turn the water off was because we weren't certain that we had done the plumbing for the bathroom fixtures correctly and didn't want them to leak while we were gone. We ended up leaving the water off until yesterday, which turned out to be a good thing because last week we had three days of weather where it didn't get above freezing. We had three friends with burst pipes, but both of our houses came through just fine.

Or so we thought. Today, we had turned on the water to mix mortar and whatnot, and things seemed fine. About 30 minutes later, the husband was showing his sister (who is in town visiting) and her SO around the property, and they happened to include a tour of the guest house... where he found water fountaining from under the kitchen sink. Awesome! Apparently, even though we had turned off the water to the house and drained the pipes there, we didn't drain the water in the pipes in the guest house. With the freezing temperatures, a pipe had burst somewhere in the wall behind the kitchen sink. We quickly turned off the water to the house again and decided to deal with the mess later. After all, we plan to gut the kitchen in the guest house sooner or later - with the termite damage in the walls and the floor with the impressive topography, we expect to have quite a lot of work to do there. I guess we'll be replacing the plumbing there too. Sigh. We also want to install a cutoff valve for the guest house water so that we can shut it off independently of the main house. Of course, first we have to FIND where the water comes into the guest house first...

Back at our current house, we had a rather nasty backup in the kitchen sink drain. After pulling out the p-trap and finding nothing, we got out the toilet plunger and went to town. One of the kiddos helped the hubby while he plunged.

One technique - using a toilet plunger to unclog your drain.

Although we eventually got the sink to drain, we discovered about 5 minutes later that it had backed up into the laundry area in the garage. We had nasty, disgusting gunk from the drain all down the wall where the laundry drain is and under the washing machine. The husband and I spent the next half-hour cleaning up the muck and hosing out the garage. Fortunately, the nastiness didn't spread too far in the garage, but it was still really gross. Unfortunately, our garage still stinks and so does our backyard where we hosed everything out. We've put out vinegar and sprinkled baking soda everywhere, so hopefully the stench will clear up soon.

I believe out next trip to Home Depot may include the purchase of a pipe snake so we can finish fixing the clog. The sink drains, but it's still not totally right. Oh well, I guess we'll add amateur plumbing to our list of talents!

Houston, we have tile

Friday, our friend Alexis and his wife very kindly came from Houston for a day to help us get started with the tile in the house. Since the hubby and I had never tiled before, we were pretty hesitant to get started, but Alexis has done a bunch of tile and has all the accouterments, so he offered to show us the tricks of the trade.

The day started at Lowe's, where we realized that the tile the kids had picked out for their bathroom would be way too dark for the size of their bathroom. We quickly picked out another option and hoped that the kids would be OK with it. We went with an 18 inch tile instead of the 12 inch because apparently bigger tile is more "in" these days. We also snagged mortar and tile spacers for the job.

Once at the house, we started by cutting a single tile in half diagonally, since we were doing a diagonal lay. Despite all the tile books saying to start in center of the room and tile outward, Alexis assured us that in such a small space, you could start along one corner and work your way from there. So we started out in the back right corner, by the toilet, and worked from there.

After cutting the first half-tiles, we marked where we needed to cut out on the tile to fit around the toilet. Alexis showed the husband how to use his amazing water-cooled tile cutter, and holy cow is that thing cool! It makes really quick work of cutting tiles, both in straight lines and in curves. We cut and fit the first two half-pieces, then worked on toward the whole pieces around the toilet. We put spacers in between each piece as we went, and cut each tile to fit as we went.

Drawing a line on the tile as a guide for cutting it in half.

The husband with the tile saw. Having the right tools makes this job SO much easier. Thank you Alexis for loaning this stuff to us!

Halfway done cutting and fitting the tile.

After we cut every tile for the bathroom, we moved the entire thing to another room and reassembled it on the floor.

T. mixing the mortar (women with power tools... be VERY afraid!)

First two corner tiles laid and mortared in. You can see how we had to cut bits out so that they would fit around the toilet.

We also ended up putting in marble trim around the tub to make the transition from tub to eventual tile surround. We chose to do this in part because of the fairly large gap between the backerboard and the tub itself.

You can see the marble transition better here.

An embarrassing picture of me laying tile. Fortunately it's not entirely a "plumber" pic, otherwise it would not be appearing on this blog.

The finished product. It's starting to look like a real bathroom!

We still have a lot of work to do on the bathroom - putting in the grout, running the wiring for the lights, putting up the drywall, tiling the tub, etc., but this is really a huge step toward having a usable bathroom. It's very exciting!