Pictures!

2009

This was the year of Heavy Equipment!  Anticipating our ranch operations we bought a large (30,000lb) bulldozer - a Liebherr PR721.  It's a nice dozer - all hydrostatic operation - running it just requires moving a couple of joysticks rather than hauling back on steering clutches and brakes.  Very easy to use.  And as you can see it's a modern dozer with an actual cab.  Unfortunately it developed some alarming characteristics - once the engine ran away and I had to shut it down before it threw itself apart - so the last week of summer I pulled the diesel injection pump and sent it in for overhaul.

We also bought a Caterpillar 613B motor scraper.  This is another large machine that can scoop up dirt (a lot of dirt - 11 yards for this model), carry it a long way, then spread it out, all in one operation.  We have a lot of dirt moving to do on our place - dredging out the lake, reworking gullies - so we need a machine that can do it quicker than a loader and a dump truck.  Those tires really are that big - the machine weighs 30,000 lbs and it can carry 30,000 lbs of dirt.  The scraper is run by a big Cat 3206 engine and all the myriad hydraulic controls seem to work fine.  I'll give it a complete service next summer and put it to work.

Lastly, we bought our new farm tractor!  It's an almost-new Kubota M6800, about 70hp, 4wd, with air conditioning and a front-end loader (I took the front end loader off - we use our other big Kubota for front-end-loader work).  It's a cushy machine!  I can mow or disk all afternoon on a 100 degree day in cool and quiet!  We bought another little Kubota for California, but much older and needing some work.

Naturally, we did some construction - what's a summer without putting up a barn or two?  This summer we built the equipment shed, a 2000 sq ft structure with simple construction and a dirt floor.  It was cheap and quick to build - my father and the kids and I worked on it every morning from 6:30 to 9am for a month and got it done.  It's not very pretty but it keeps the rain off.

The kids also helped pour the chicken house slab and some other concrete slabs we did this summer.  Here are Patrick and Robert and Madeleine bending some rebar.

2007

I taught this summer, so not much else happened.

2006

Here's the barn going up, here we're lifting the trusses into place with the forklift (I built the 10-foot tall crane arrangement that sits on the forks to hold the truss), and here it is done.  Here's the inside of the barn - it has 14-foot clearance in the middle part.  So now we have more than 5000 sq ft of rodent-proof, concrete-floored space.

2005

On another note, here is a picture of the first house I built, back in 1982.  It was my parent's place until they sold the property to a developer in 2003.  There were dense woods around it too - all gone - bulldozed to rubble.  The garage-apartment and barn too.  They were good structures - almost no maintenance, very energy-efficient, also heated with wood.  You know you're getting old when a house you built gets torn down!

In other news, we bought the adjoining property to ours in Texas, so it's now 115 acres with a 5-acre lake, lots of woods, and some big open fields for pastures.  A lot of the land needs work - gullies need filling, and old tumble-down cabin needs to be burned and dozed, and weedy trees need to be cleared out of the pastures.  Plenty to keep us busy for the next N years!

We burned down the old cabin.  I tried and tried to think of a reason not to, but I couldn't.  The wood wasn't worth salvaging and the structure was too hazardous to leave standing with kids around.  So... a few pieces of newspaper and cardboard, a quart of diesel, and a match - 30 minutes later it was gone.  Here are some pictures.  It was actually pretty interesting watching it go up - I had to get farther and farther away from it as it got hotter and hotter.  The galvanized roof started incandescing white as the zinc oxidized.   In this picture it's just getting going, now it's "fully involved", here it's died down enough for the kids to get closer (they look pained but they're just saying "Cheese!"), and here's all that's left.  The roofing tin went to the scrapyard the next day - got a good price, too.

We also sold the mobile home we were living in while building the house - one less structure to maintain, and we always worried about it in high winds.  Here it goes, down the driveway, and out the front.  It was a good house - cheap, quick to set up, nice layout, and quick to take down.

The new barn slab is getting poured - 70 yards of concrete.  This is very typical of how we pour - #4 bar every 18 inches, on top of vapor barrier, and a 6-inch thick slab.  I don't remember if we specified 5- or 6-sack mix for this pour.  We usually like 6-sack mix because it's stronger, but it does set up quicker.  We learned about this when we did the first wall pour on the house a year before; it was spec'ed to be 6-sack mix but it was actually about 8-sack mix; the concrete supplier had a problem with their scale.  No wonder it set up so fast!  But it'll sure be strong.

2004

These are shots of the walls going up in May, 2004.  The styrofoam forms are set up to eight feet and then filled with concrete.  Here is a shot from the kitchen to the living room.  You can see the colored concrete floor (the acid-wash later on darkened the color).  This is the pantry, alias the tornado room, which also gets a concrete ceiling.  You con see lots of rebar - we used 1000 bars all told - almost 4 miles.  Here is a shot from the outside; you can see the wooden window bucks where the windows will be.

Now it's after the first wall pour.  You can see concrete slopped over everywhere; the colored concrete floor is covered with OSB for protection.  We only had two blowouts (form failures that needed immediate fixing) and they weren't too bad.  Here's the living room again.  This is the outside of the same wall, where the porch will be.  In this picture we've formed up the top eight feet of wall and we're ready for the second pour.  You can see the concrete forms in the center of the house - this holds up the roof beams that extend to the gable ends (the saddles where the beams will sit are at the very tops) and also surrounds the tornado room.  There are a couple of buttress walls that extend from this center square to the outside walls - just for extra stoutness.  Here's the inside of the same wall showing the bracing and scaffolding.

The second wall pour.  That's me on the end of the boom directing the concrete down into the forms - what a messy job.  Concrete spatters everywhere.  My glasses get so covered with concrete that I can barely see.  No blowouts this time - I did an extra-good job of bracing.  The boom truck lost its clutch during this job and could barely limp away.  Here's another shot - that's my father on the ladder placing concrete in the brick ledge where the gable rock will rest.  There's another 90 yards of concrete in the walls, plus the 90 in the floor, for 180 yards all told.

Now it's time for roof beams and rafters.  The roof beams are 30 foot long 5"x16"s; we lifted them in place with the forklift.  The rafters are 29 foot long Trus-Joists - the first time I've used them.  I think they're great - relatively light, no warp, bow, or twist.  We placed them with the forklift too.  It took about a week to set the beams and rafters, and another 4 days to deck and tar-paper the roof.

After decking I put on the green metal roof.  Took me just four days, working by myself.  (The forklift helped.)  After that, I stripped out the scaffolding on the inside, leaving it bare.  One reason I built the house this way was so that the roof could go up with no interior structural walls (besides the concrete).  The advantage of this is that I could put up the tongue-and-groove pine ceiling from one end of the house to the other with no walls to get in the way, and finish the floor the same way.  After I got the roof insulation in and the vapor barrier put up (another week), my father and I got busy on the ceiling, which took us just five days, plus a day for me to shoot the stain and another day to shoot the varnish.  Here's the ceiling where three of the bedrooms will go - the whole area is open because there aren't any interior walls yet.  The rafters that don't have wood on them will be above the hall and bathroom ceilings, ordinary 8-foot sheetrock ceilings.  The floor is covered with plastic for protection from the stain.  Here's the living room, here's the front wall, and here's toward the kitchen.  That ceiling looks nice if I say so myself.  The windows are Marvin windows, one of the only brands that will supply a factory-installed 13-1/4" jamb which we needed for those thick walls.  And they're great windows.

Here's the floor after acid-washing, sealing, and finishing.  It looks like buffed leather to me - a little irregular, but that's part of the charm.  We had some problems when we poured the colored concrete topping (including running out of color 5 yards before the end of the pour) but I think it turned out fine.

Now for the stonework.  I bought the rock almost a year before and we hired a crew to lay it.  They took seven days and did a great job.  This style of stone is very common in Austin; in fact, the stone itself came from an Austin quarry.  I really like the look, and it didn't cost a whole lot more than any other siding material we could have put on, such as Hardiplank.  And of course it's durable.  Here's the front wall being worked on, and in this shot they're done.  That gap from the 8-foot to the 10-foot level is where the porch roof will go.  They also laid up an interior wall that the wood-burning stove backs up to.  The hole in that wall is the air return for the air handler in the attic.  This picture looks toward the kitchen.

Next came all the interior work - we built the interior walls, installed the plumbing and installed the electrical.  My brother wired the electrical panel and installed all the plugs and switches.  I hired a crew to install sheetrock (I hate doing sheetrock), and I hired the air-conditioning installation done.  After all that was done I painted the interior (I sprayed 51 gallons of paint in two days).  Then interior doors, trim, and cabinets, along with plumbing fixtures.  All this took about three months, but it wasn't very picturesque.  We moved in January 2005, with not much work left undone - just a few details that we'll finish during summer 2005.

Here are some pictures of the finished house - keep in mind that we just moved in, so it's still cluttered from the moving process.  Also, it's furnished with our garage-sale furniture.  It's been a great house so far - it's so well insulated with so much thermal mass that it doesn't drop but 4 or 5 degrees during a 20-degree winter night, and that's without any heat - we let the woodstove go out at night.  The kids each have their own room, there are three bathrooms (1.5 more than we have in California), and the large living-kitchen-dining-homeschool area is wonderful, especially after being cramped up in the 1000-sq-ft mobile home for a year.

This is the outside - you can see that the porch is now finished.  This looks toward the front wall (where the porch is).  Another shot of the front wall, toward the dining area.  There are eight of those ceiling fans scattered around the house - we got to where we could install one in just 15 minutes.  Here's the kitchen, complete with Millie, Madeleine, and dog.  There will eventually be a bar which will hide the backs of the cabinets and stove.  Another shot of the kitchen.  The drawer pulls and the rosettes at the corners of the windows and doors are cast iron that I got at a local flea market and painted green.  Here's a shot toward the homeschooling end of the room - you can see the stovepipe in the picture as well.  This is the stove itself - it may not look it but it's actually quite large, and can heat the whole house with one hand tied behind its back.  That hole in the stone wall behind the stove will be covered with a stained-pine louver.  Here's a closeup of one of the rosettes - there are 72 in all over all the windows and doors.  This is a bathroom - nothing remarkable, but there are THREE of them, all new, everything works, with built-in heaters - all improvements over our CA house. 

2003

Here's a shot of the slab in late 2003.  It's 62'x54', almost 9" thick (for thermal mass), and contains 90 yards of concrete over 140 yards of fill sand.  The rebar sticking up marks where the concrete walls will be.  This is the rough slab; there's a two-inch layer of colored concrete that goes on top of this.  These forms were really hard to build; the site is solid limestone so all the concrete stakes had to be drilled in.

2002

   The John Deere is now in Texas and I used it this summer (2002) to doze out and grade the road (2/5 of a mile).  I also damaged the rippers by trying to rip out some rock that was too hard to move and I broke an engine mounting bolt.  A dozer's life is hard.

This last spring I rebuilt a Toyota forklift, from the ground up.  It was about as worn out as a machine can get.  I had to overhaul the engine, replace the clutch, resurface the flywheel, rebuild the brakes, new seals on the transaxle, rebuild the carburetor, fabricate a parking brake... about the only thing that didn't need work was the hydraulics.  It's now a great machine - we used it this summer for building the barn.  I don't know how I lived without it.  Here's a picture with all of us on it in Texas.  It'll go a lot higher than that, but the kids were getting nervous.

We spent the summer of 2002 in Texas building the road on our place, building a barn, and demolishing an old junk mobile home that came with the property.  The barn turned out very well.  It has a 6" concrete slab (thick enough for semis and heavy equipment), 30' x 40', a 14' high ceiling, insulated walls and ceiling, paneled interior, a 12' rollup door, even an air conditioner.  We built a number of shelves, lumber racks, and a mezzanine for storage.  The outside is the usual metal, of course - pretty nondescript, but durable.  It took us two months from the time we poured the slab until it was done.  My father and I did all the work, with the son of a family friend to help sometimes.  Here's the outside.

It's really more of a workshop than a barn, although we've already got it stuffed up with things.  Here's a shot of the inside looking at the shelves, lumber racks, and mezzanine.  The windows you see near the ceiling are polycarbonate skylight material, which lets in a lot of light while blending in with the barn metal on the outside.  Combined with the painted interior, it stays quite bright on the inside.  That's my father's tractor you see there to the right.

Here's a view from the mezzanine with all the equipment parked inside for the winter.  And no, I didn't steal those highway signs - I bought them at a garage sale in Atascadero for $10 each; they seemed to have a lot of damaged surplus signs.

 
 2001

Two of the large iron pieces out here - the small Caterpillar Fifteen is a 1929 model crawler that weighs 2.5 tons; the big guy is a Caterpillar D8 built in 1953 that weighs 20 tons and pushes an 11-foot blade.  The blade alone weighs more than a Suburban.  Some specs on the D8: the 21-liter diesel engine takes 8 gallons of oil and 28 gallons of coolant; it's started with a 1.3-liter 2-cylinder gas pony motor, which is started with a hand crank.  It's a wonderful dozer - after 15 years of sitting, it only took four days to get both motors running and the machine driven cross-country to our place (with one short stop to restring the cable that lifts the blade).  Since then I've cleared some acreage and dozed out the undergrowth in the creek.

Since this picture was taken I've sold the Fifteen, but I bought a John Deere 450B dozer (currently getting some frame repair and paint) and a small forklift.  And here's our new truck, an International 7-ton.

I took the box off the truck and put a flatbed on.  Since then I've welded up some dovetail ramps and installed them.  Here's the truck now with the John Deere up on it, ready to go to Texas.  And of course, all the family is there too.