Category Archives: Homesteading

Anything and everything that has to deal with living on the land – critters, 4 leggeds, flowers, gardens, canning, off-grid, solar, building our house, and making a home.

At the land

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Back in town for the weekend. Mostly catching up on errands, housework, laundry, but giving myself ‘quality time on the computer as well *lol*’.

I did add a few photos to my gallery, EyeSee, there’s some of the dragonfly and a couple more of the Agave. I guess the layout and look of the gallery will have to wait until I have more time, but I have more photos I would like to get up and they won!

The week went well, no major problems with any of the systems. We are using a generator for power, and it is louder than I would like and so we don’t use it all day and all night. I made some progress in the house with shelving and finding homes for stuff. It’s funny in that, there are no cabinets as yet, creative storage is the key here.

I started pulling the dead stuff out of the garden.. we still are harvesting tomatoes. The weather has been great, high 80’s and with a breeze in the afternoon and cool (low 50s) nights. Clear as a bell too with a full moon coming on…moonlight streaming through the bedroom window.

I started the huge process of cleaning out and organizing the storage shed. The shed was the first thing built on this site. It’s been there for 10 years, and it holds 10 years of stuff that wouldn’t fit in town (remember 1 room town house), or flea market finds that I knew I would use one day…and I did find a few things to actually bring into the house. This project will take weeks I am sure.

Mainly it’s quiet there. There is stuff to do at every turn and look, so it is hard for me to relax. I was busier than I would of been in town, even with out my computer. I get one tv channel (nbc) which has mostly lousy early evening programing. I do have a vcr/dvd combo on order at the local radio shack, I need to check into that.

I miss my cat, Kaya.

We’re not settled enough to bring her out there yet. Russel is spending time in both places, he is on the road a lot with teaching at the schools and bringing me ICE for the ice chests as we don’t have a refrigerator there yet either. Nor do I have a vehicle with me, Russel needs the truck for work and the ’71 VW bus would shake apart after just a couple of runs down the road, so those things are high on my list when work picks up this year.

Homestead Update

In other life, I am done with the major painting of the interior, still have touch ups to do and certain access areas.

We got the prefab (cheap) 10′ counter and sink installed last week in the kitchen. Still have to hook up to the drain on that.

Because we don’t have real cabinets I am having to do the curtain thing around the bottom –ugh– but Hey! ya do what ya gotta do. Having a working sink in the kitchen it worth it!

The main room floor is still not painted and it doesn’t look like that will happen this summer either. We have made a lot of head way towards living there more full time this winter though.

I will be there a lot, without the computer for at least the first few months, so that isn’t something I look forward too on that level, but again, it’s what has to happen to move things along.

Any way..sorry it took so long to post. I am just fried and tired and hormonal and busy.

My House is my Palette

To change my mindset a bit, I have been painting, very slowly, section by section, in the house. I think I mentioned the bathroom blue we did this summer.

There’s a narrow hallway between the bedroom and bath, in front of the utility closet, this was painted the very bright chilled lemonaide. And the wall extending from the bedroom past the hallway got to be perennial sweetpea! (check out the floor plan)

The lid (ceiling) in this hallway is:

As this is the only area of the house that can take deep dark bright colors, I went a bit wild. Being off the grid, we need to use as much sunlight as possible to brighten the rooms, so the whole front of the house will be a very light color to reflect the sun and add light.

The yellow wall will have a pantry/storage unit on one side and textiles or wall art of some kind on the other, so you won’t be hit with so much of a bright thing.

The purple/periwinkle wall is very short, will have wall art as well as either a chest of drawers/ book shelves, or some kind of storage there too.

Any way, it is fun, finally being able to just do what i want.. Russel is being very agreeable about it, even though he personally likes more muted (dull) tones.

Getting Ready for the Coming Rains

Today Russel finished insulating all our water pipes under the house. Tight crawl space under there, with his bruised rib and bad back, not really a good time, but good to have it done. I pulled all the dead squash and tomato plants out of the garden. Last weeks rain and coldness did them in. There is still more to do in the garden but no time.

We also need to move the solar panel that powers the battery that powers the little pump that lets us have water in the house for good things like showers and flush toilet.. we had to charge the battery today with the generator. We will be out there all week end so it will eventually get a good charge. Russel also did a pump, (we pump water from a lower gravity fed holding tank) to a tank up by the house. Full tank… lots of showers 🙂

With the bathroom happening there I like staying out there more and more. Power is still an issue. I miss not having my computer there. Once that happens I will most likely shun town and only come in when i really have too.

We leave tomorrow (Wed) for the VA clinic in SF again. The pain is still there. We are leaning towards thinking this is GERDs.. and hope to get some help. Prilosec hasn’t helped. Diet change hasn’t either.

Wish us luck.

Bathroom – finally water!

This is the color we painted the bathroom.

I don’t think the computer/camera gets it quite right, it seems to be a brighter bluer blue in real life.

This is the vanity we quickly got on Friday.. i do like the maple and mission style of it.

The faucet we bought is chrome, with toggle handles, not knobs. Very simple, with a curved spout.

The hot water heater and propane tanks are set in place and and hooked up, the vanity is going into place as i write this, then they will run water into the house and HOPEFULLY there will be no leaks and all will be good to go!

Amazing, after all these years of working on the house that we will finally have a fully functional bathroom!

Hot showers/flush toilet/an indoor sink!!! Oh my… i may be spending lots more time out there now. If only we could get a power system in place that would accommodate my computer habits, we could move.

Moving On – Home Improvement

Fire Update…and other stuff

The fires have been contained, although they’re still burning and the smoke is still a major problem.

We finally have an appointment for Russel to see a doctor at the chest clinic at the VA hospital in San Fransisco, Fort Miley. This is on Wed the 8th. Please pray for ‘good news’ and something fixable.

After waiting the whole summer and not getting it done, our builder Alan finally agreed to come out to the land and hook the water up to the house and put in and hook up the propane hot water heater. We rushed out yesterday to get a bathroom vanity and top and faucet, as since he was gonna be there, it seemed prudent to have him put that into place at the same time.

What this means is… we will finally have a flush toilet!!! and hot/cold running water to the shower and a sink in the bathroom. This is really cool. It elevates the time spent there from ‘hi-end’ camping to a low budget motel. 🙂

The timing couldn’t be worse, as we leave Wed and i have to pack Tuesday, but he will be out Monday and Tuesday…and so it goes..

Today we go out and paint the bath room. Russel wanted blue, not my color at all, but we have settled on a pale sky blue for the whole thing and later i will come back with either darker blue accents or maybe deep violets/plums type accents. At this point it just needs to be done before the water is hooked up.

Russel is really not feeling well for most of the time now, so i will mostly be doing this. More later, and maybe pictures this week.

Last week one day i started trying to figure out what photolog package i really wanted to use, Amy’s or Gallery. No time to learn Gallery now, and i think i can make Amy’s guide work without using the tables as layout… if i have any spare non-crunch time i will be working on that.

I Learned how to run and action and batch process in Photoshop5, it’s what i have 🙁 which i needed to do cuz i have lots of folders full of photos and wanted something quick and dirty to get them to size, until i have time to really work the ones i want to keep and frame.

Painting Again

I mentioned in this post about some colors we used to paint the shed. Here’s the picture:

The closet became multi-colored, and it is a very bad paint job .. but here are the colors:

I also used the ‘too pink to be mauve’ color on the top of the lid of the closet in the now bedroom… to create a ‘rose-glow’ of reflected light. Worked rather well, will be especially nice when the cream/apricot color is applied to the ceiling.

Painting Day

We painted all day yesterday. Russel’s been working on the shed for a few days now. Finally it’s done. You can’t tell it from this picture, but it was a green color in bad need of paint and no trim color at all… now it is yellow with a raspberry color trim..i will have pictures next week and post the before and after here.

I started working inside the house on the water heater closet.. a tight enclosed space with no ventilation and no light. And because I have bought several quarts of paint to test the color for the walls, i had several we were never gonna use anywhere we had to look at them .. *lol* So the closet is at least three of these colors, a pale aqua (too blue for me), a supposed to be medium mauve (that was way too pink), and a color called Olympian Fields, that we may just use on the lid in the living room if we can tone it down one notch. hummm ..photos would help and i will take my camera out the next time and get this shot as well.

The garden is giving us more zucchini (one plant) and yellow squash (one plant) than we can eat. The tomatos, mostly Early Girl’s, are doing well. Friends gave us an unknown yellow tomato plant that just produced it’s first ripe fruit… the next one will get a pic as they are very unusual looking, but quite tasty in a non-acid way.

The eggplant parmesan I made a couple days ago was superb. My neighbor brought over fresh baked apple pie as a surprise dessert. We did eat well that day.

Well gotta go defrost, yes you heard right, the freezer. It’s the small Hotpoint refrigerator in the town house, the freezer builds ice up outside the box! So defrost actually means a total cleaning out, that isn’t that bad really, in that at least this way it gets done several times a year!!

On My Beat

Living in the hills of southern Humboldt