Tag Archives: Building

Permits!!!

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What do you do when you’re in the middle of a construction project and learn that your building permit is ready to be picked up?

Why, you drop the tool belt and get your rear down to the building department asap!!!!

And then you come home and have a photo shoot to show your excitement.


For those of you who haven’t been following along, or just forget, it’s been almost exactly six months since we initially turned in our plans to be approved for a building permit.
Six months!

We haven’t exactly be twiddling our thumbs that whole time, but we really thought we’d be further along than we are by now.

But God had other plans and here we are now, at the beginning of winter and just getting the permit.

But, we have a mudroom to build (the project I was working on today). And a well shed. And then we’ll probably start on the septic system. So we’ll keep busy this winter as weather allows. And come Spring, we’ll break ground on our house!

Now back to our regularly scheduled program… building a mud room!

Water, water everywhere…

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…and hopefully safe to drink!

The well is in! 

O. M. Goodness, we are so excited! 

If you follow us on facebook, you’ve probably been keeping up with our well journey, but if not, here’s a quick recap. It took them three days of drilling and several more days of prepping the well, having to go down 461 feet, but we hit good pressure water. The water down there is flowing at about 60-70 gallons per minute, and the well head (how high up the pipe the water is being forced by the pressure) is at about 230. So half the pipe is filled with water. This is a very good thing.

Drilling in action

They put the pump in the well last week and I didn’t even know it. So I didn’t have the generator and storage tank down there for them. So they came back today to hook everything up. 

So. Very. Exciting!

That’s water from our well!!!

WAAATERRRRRR!!!!!

So, since we’re not set up to run water to our house, (because, you know, it doesn’t exist yet), we are just going to pump water into our 250 gallon storage tank to use as needed. Also, we’ll be able to run a hose from the well directly to the trailers to fill tanks and barrels. That will be so nice.

Of course, all of that is providing we can drink the water and don’t need to do anything extra to it. We have to flush the whole system for a while, then send some samples in to the state lab to have it tested. So far it looks and smells very clean. We’re hoping and praying that it is drinkable as-is. That would just be absolutely amazing. And of not, if it has some high mineral we have to filter out, we can deal with that, too.

Our set up

So right now the pump is controlled by the breaker, which is powered by the generator. When the pump is on, it fills the tank, or alternatively can be diverted to a garden hose. 

We are working on getting gravel delivered over the next couple of days, then we will begin constructing a shed around the pump and tank, etc. The Pump House will hold the well pump, holding tank, generator, and probably the laundry washing machine, too, for now. This shed will provide the insulation to keep the tank from freezing. Although, we learned today that our water is actually a bit on the warm side. Not sure if that’s because it just naturally stays that warm that far under the ground, or what, but today when we were flushing the well, the water was decidedly warmer than the ambient temperature outside as the sun was setting. But then, it IS November. At any rate, the fact that the water is not frigid will help keep the tank from freezing as easily. That’s our hope, anyway, as the overnight temps are supposed to drop into the 20’s this week. Brrrrr.

So that’s it for now, folks. It’s a monumentous day. And a huge step forward.

We have WATER! 

How do we…take showers

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We are a family of 5 (while our godson is living with us) living in an off-grid camping trailer while we build our house. 

And we ripped the shower and toilet out of the trailer long before we ever started living in it.

So, how do we de-stinkify ourselves when the need arises? (And believe me, living all together in 280 square feet, the need arises quite frequently!)

However, in reality, we all take fewer full showers than most people do. Being that we have to haul in our own water, we try to conserve as much as possible. The girls and I only wash our hair once a week, and the water always gets turned off while soaping up. And in between those several full showers a week are the “rinse offs”. This is where we basically only wash off the truly stinky parts. You know, those areas you’d hit with a quick sponge bath.

When we lived here two years ago for those few idyllic months, we mainly took sponge baths and went to my mom’s house when a full shower was needed.

But we knew that couldn’t last for too long, so when we moved back to the homestead this summer, we knew we needed something more permanent. And yes, there’s always Pajii’s trailer, but we don’t want to constantly be using his water and power or crowding his space every time we need to clean up. Not to mention how tiny those trailer showers are!

So Hubby built us a shower room constructed from 2×4’s and plywood.

This 4×4 mini-shed makes a very spacious and wonderful shower. We use a 20 amp hour, 12 volt battery connected to an RV water pump which sits on top of one of our 50 gallon barrels of water. 


A 100 watt solar panel is hooked to the battery to keep it topped up. The pump brings water through a propane powered instant hot water heater.


Right now, we only have the ability to turn the water on and off while inside the shower, not adjust the temperature. So showering can be quite the adventure depending on how warm the ambient air is as well as how warm the water inside the barrel has gotten. If you’re taking a shower mid-afternoon on a warm day, you’d better turn that puppy waaaay down before you get in there. 😀 We have plans to rig it up so we can adjust the temperature from inside. But we’ve had a few, more pressing projects.

And speaking of the inside…


The reason we have a shower curtain in there is so we can hang our clothes and towel on the hooks and close the curtain around them so they don’t get wet. 

There is no floor built into the shower. Rather, we placed pavers on the ground inside so the water can drain easily. 


So far, the whole system has worked almost seamlessly. Once the temps drop, we will need to do something to keep things from freezing, but for now, and probably at least another month or so, we’ll be fine.

And hopefully we’ll have the well in by then and can move our whole base of operations down to the house pad (we’re still camped out on the upper pad about a quarter mile away from where the house is going to go.)

Oh, and the latest news on the well is that the drilling company has a broken rig, putting them further behind schedule and they’ll contact is when they can get us back on the schedule. *Sigh*

But it will happen when it happens. There’s nothing we can do about it, so why stress over it? God has his reasons. In the mean time, we’re keeping busy.

So anyway, now you know how we get clean here on the homestead.

Adding on and making room

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We have an addition to the family. At least for a few months. Meet our godson, Raven Boy.

He’s 13 years old, can drive a vehicle, is great with electronics and tools, and is a ginormous help around the homestead. He and his family visited for the summer, and when his family went home, it was decided that he would stay here with us for a while to help out with building the house and other projects. 

So, as I looked around our trailer, I realized we didn’t have enough room for another full sized person to sit anywhere when we’re hanging out inside. (He has a separate “bedroom”in our extra trailer that we use as storage.)  And with winter approaching, spending all our time outside isn’t going to be an option for too much longer.

So, Hubby and I had a talk, and figured out that with a little bit of rearranging in the living room, we could build a bench to comfortably seat another person or two. And it wouldn’t take up any more space than was currently being used.

I forgot to get a before picture with all our stuff there, but here’s the area cleared out. We had Scooter’s kennel, a couple of file boxes, and the toy chest in this corner.


We cleared out and cleaned the floor. Then started building the frame for the bench. This is where Raven Boy really shined. He already knows so much about using tools, etc that he cut all the wood for the bench, as well as helped put it all together.


Once the frame was together, and the door in for Scooter’s cubby, we covered most of it in plywood.


The left side was left open and put on hinges so that we can lift it out of the way and still deploy our couch into a bed. It was Raven Boy who came up with the design for that section.



We also left the top plywood unattached on the right side in order to easily access the area underneath for storage (and to be able to clean out the dog cubby when needed).


We bought pillows and pillowcases as the cushions for the bench. And we downsized Flower Girl’s toys to fit in a small tote and put the rest of them and the family heirloom toy chest into the storage unit.


I plan on painting the bench and sewing up the ends of the pillow cases so they look a bit more like cushions.

Overall, though, I’m very pleased with it. And since the weather has cooled off considerably recently, it’s been nice that the five of us can sit comfortably in our living room. We can also go over to Pagee’s (now spelled Pajii) trailer to watch a movie or something.

And Pajii put the full dinette back in his trailer after Bachan passed away, and all 6 of us can sit around the dining table when the weather (or yellowjackets) is not conducive to eating outside.

So that’s one more thing checked off our list of things to do to in order to live comfortably in the trailers for the winter. Next up is heat! Pajii’s trailer has a working furnace. Ours does not. We have several ideas of how not to freeze over the winter. I’ll keep you up to date on what we come up with.

We have a house! Well…kinda.

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Our house was delivered earlier this week! Well, the outside shell of it anyway.

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We decided a long time ago that we wanted to buy a steel building and use that as the shell of our house and finish out the inside. There are a myriad of reasons we chose to go with a metal building; fire resistance being high on our list. But also, the maintenance is low, it goes up very quickly, and we like the look.

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And once again, we are so blessed in the family God gave us. My dad loaned us his flatbed trailer. Which we ended up not needing, but it was great to have it just in case. And my step-dad operated the fork lift. That was great. ‘Cause it would have taken waaaay too long for us to learn it and operate it.

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So even though we don’t have a building permit yet, we do have a building. That building is sitting near our house pad in a bagillion pieces, waiting to be put together like a big erector set.

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It’s totally awesome and a little bit surreal to see the pieces there with my name on them. We’re getting closer to actually building!

Maridy

“I lift up my eyes to the hills, where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.” Psalm 121

Plans

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We are scrambling in the planning stage of building our house on the homestead in Nevada. We learned last week that in the county we are building in, we HAVE to build a garage! We were planning to wait for later to build a large garage/shop. Now we’ll be building a small garage along with the house and we’ll build the large one later. Just one more expense. Well, you can’t have too many outbuildings, right? 🙂

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I talked to the power company this week to see just how much it would cost to bring in power. We were going off the assumption that it would be just the same or even cheaper to do solar than to bring in power. But our information was about a decade old. So we’ve been doing our research and turns out we were correct. Whew! At least that was as we expected.

This week I’ve been calling the building department and the health department and the planning department and every other department they might have to get the final information we need. Hopefully in the next couple of days we will be able to dig our test trench for our septic system and once we have the results from that we can submit our plans for our permit. But in order to make that happen, I have to coordinate schedules with my dad in Reno so I can rent a backhoe, have it delivered to the property, he can dig the trench, we can order the inspection, and then back fill the trench.

Oy, I’m going crazy. Things would be so much simpler if we lived there. But it is what it is. And it is actually an exciting time. Things are actually happening!

Next time I’m feeling overwhelmed, I just need to remember that. It IS exciting. And we are so blessed to be able to build our own house. And one day in the not-too-distant future, we’ll be living in that house on our very own homestead. Exciting indeed!

Maridy

“I lift up my eyes to the hills, where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.” Psalm 121