Author: Tim

• Solar array update #1 – Now what? 😅

  We’ve been finally making the moves to get the solar array initially set up and the first shipment just arrived – 24 panels and the GSE ballasted mount system (essentially big metal buckets that hold heavy aggregate so the panels hopefully don’t blow over in the wind). Our plan is to also anchor them into…

• Let’s get this thing started again!

  Well it’s certainly been a hot minute since we last posted (September 2023) but it doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy! We’ve had quite the year: many more improvements to the house, trips to America and Sicily with Grandma and Grandpa, K going back to school to learn furniture design and woodworking, a new car,…

• We put up the red room ceiling! 💪🎉

  We’ve been slowly picking away at the (no longer red) red room for some time now and have struggled to get the ceiling sorted. First, taking the existing ceiling down involved painstakingly clearing the metric ton worth of grain husks that were shoved into the rafters as “insulation” – It was… not great. It then…

• Fixed the (other) Leak! 💪💧

  There are plenty of nuisance jobs to be done around the farm that eat away at me ever so slightly until I finally say enough is enough – the drippy roof in the old workshop has been one such niggle from the very start. We have a couple of corrugated plastic skylights that got a…

• Sorted the sink lights (finally) 🤩💡

  Its a small thing but we’ve had these blue pendant lights sitting close by ever since we had the kitchen done.. waiting for our electrician to provide the ceiling points so we could wire them up. Well… he put the points in ages ago but we simply couldn’t figure out how to wire them so…

• Fixing The Leak – part 2 🎉💧

  Round two and a fresh determination to find the source of The Leak and lo and behold- thar she blows! Only a bit more chiseling out and I finally found it! Such a relatively small thing but a huge morale boost to find something that’s been annoying us for over a year. I quickly realized…

• Time to finally fix The Leak 💧💪

  Ever since day one of living on the farm, we’ve had a leak welling up from underneath the concrete in the tractor barn that’s been a perpetual nuisance and a mystery regarding its origin; Is there an underground spring? Did we somehow burst a pipe? Is our septic tank leaking?? Well that last one was…

• Opened up the red room fireplace a bit 🔥💪🪨

  We have this lovely little open fireplace in the (no longer red) red room that we’re planning on fitting a small stove into but it needs a bit of demolition/masonry love before we can get woodstove Owen in (another Owen!) So I spent a bit of time in March clearing out the debris and removing…

• Taking the chimney down! 💥⚒️

  We have a couple of chimneys on the side of the house, one to a fireplace in the living room that needs to be opened up, and another to an old wood stove we took out of our dining area: It’s obviously a wreck at the moment but we’ll get there! The red bag is…

• Finally turned the boiling tap on! 🚰☕🫖

  I over eagerly bought a boiling water tap before our kitchen was even installed and it’s been sitting under the sink for nearly a year, just biding its time until we could fix up our water supply and ensure we wouldn’t damage the tank. Well.. with our new well working… well 😏.. and our initial…