It looks like spring has sprung in Minnesota.

But I’m not going to say winter is over quite yet because there’s still plenty of time left for a little more snow…

The temperatures have been slowly warming throughout the week, starting just above freezing to the unseasonably warm low 40’s by the end of the week.

That means a lot of snow melt, and we have a lot more snow than normal on the ground this year so it’s going to take a while for it all to disappear.

The warmer weather also means I’ve been away from the computer more working off my cabin fever, which means a lot less time for blogging.  I think very soon it may preclude me from doing weekly updates…

The thaw also means we’re into the mucky muddy period of the year, where the frost is starting to come out of the ground but the ground is still frozen enough that the water doesn’t soak in.  Instead the water just sits in the top few inches of thawed ground creating a layer of slippery mud.

Fortunately at night the temperatures are still dropping below freezing, which means the ground firms up by morning so I am able to do chores with the tractor in the morning before the ground thaws and turns into mud again.

However, when I took the snowblower off the tractor  last week to put on the hay bale spear to move hay I found one of the three point lower link arms was badly bent.  It’s not the first time one of the arms had gotten bent, but the first time it happened with the snowblower attachment.

I’m assuming I hit something unyielding at an angle while blowing snow that bent the arm.

The first time one of the arms was bent getting in the way of a hay trailer hitch tongue, the Degrosses straightened it for me.

When it got bent again last year I bought a small shop press to straighten the arm myself.

This time it was an easy repair because there was no twist in the bend.  Once the arm was re-bent it needed some paint before I reinstalled it.

They’ve been working on the new building all week on an I.O.U. basis, since we’re still out of building funds right now.

One of our ongoing exploits is trying to get Menards to credit us back for some building supplies that we were charged for but haven’t yet needed, including the radiant in-floor heat materials.  Menards has been sitting on some of those supplies (and thus the money we paid for them) for months; money that we now need for other materials.

Right now they have charged us for thousands of dollars of supplies that we don’t need (or weren’t planning on buying from them) and we haven’t been credited back for them.

I haven’t been that comfortable all along with the purchasing system Menards has been using.  They have credit cards from us on file and simply have been charging for materials as they went on sale and/or as we needed them.

The problem with this system is that they don’t give us any receipts or details of the charges without us requesting them, and even then they’re not getting us the receipts.  The first I usually find out about the charges has been when I get my credit card bills.

We’ve essentially given Menards a blank check to spend our money without any accounting of the charges.  I can’t imagine other contractors actually allow Menards to work that way, and given we’re out of building funds that now has to end for us as well.

Ultimately we might be forced to block charges on our credit cards to Menards and dispute the charges they’ve already made.

By the end of the week most of the roof on the new building was done, with the exception of one section of ridge cap along one of the dormers and a short section of the main roof line adjacent to that dormer.  They were trying to get the roof finished because they’d been predicting rain and/or freezing rain this weekend.

The fascia and soffit work are almost all done as well.

Completing all the trim and roofing on the dormers was a lot of work and very time consuming.  There are lots of angles and small pieces that needed to be cut and fitted.

Although the warmth has made the steel roof a little less slippery, in the mornings they had to wait until the frost was off the steel before trying to work on the roof.

Next week it sounds like they may start putting on the vinyl siding as well.

Since we can’t put in any of the doors until the concrete floor is in, the building won’t really be sealed up yet.  Now we’re waiting for warmer weather and the frost to come out of the ground before doing the radiant in-floor heat system and the concrete floor.

The melt has given us an early look at how the drainage around the new building is working.  Some of the grading seems to be working as intended with the melt-water running in the proper direction, but it looks like the northeast corner (by the garage doors) is holding a lot of water that is supposed to be draining around the north end of the building.

Since the project ran so late in the fall last year we knew this spring we would have to refine some of the grading.  But the ground started freezing and we had snow last year before that work was really done.

Last week we were informed by the Scott County Attorney of the charges they were filing regarding the shooting of our horses last fall.

The horses both seem to have recovered, but Duchess has been in a barn stall since the shooting because of her injured hoof.  Once the ice and snow disappear she’ll be put back out to pasture with the other horses.

They are charging the boy with two counts of first degree criminal damage to property and discharge of a firearm.

(Apparently since we didn’t realize right away that the cow had been shot or any of the other ill effects to the animals caused by the shootings they didn’t factor into the charges, nor did the bullet holes in our buildings.)

So far the parents haven’t made any attempts to contact us or reimburse us for expenses, in spite of their initial assurances that they would.  I suspect now that they’ve filed charges against their son we’re going to be out of luck and will have to take them to court later to recoup our expenses related to the shootings.

We had been waiting to see what the County Attorney was going to do, but I guess we’ve got nothing to lose now by sending the parents of the boy a bill for some of the vet bills anyway.  I’d love to be proven wrong about them paying our bills related to the shootings, but I’m not that naïve; it’s a lot of money.

Our standard poodle, Basil, also had minor surgery last Friday to remove a small dime sized growth from his back near his right hip.  I think it was just a lipoma.  He was really out of it all evening from the general anesthetic after he came home but has recovered just fine.

Filed under: Basil, Building Construction 2009-10, Farm, Home, Home Projects, Weather on March 6th, 2010 | No Comments »

I’ve been a bit lax in getting out this latest entry, in large part because I haven’t had that much to write about.

After the snowstorm that started out the week, dropping 3 more inches of snow overnight Sunday into Monday, the weather improved with sunny days and warmer temperatures.

I spent Monday afternoon moving snow again.  I had taken the day off from work and Kim and I had made plans to have a belated Valentine’s day movie and lunch that was postponed due to the snow.

We’ve made several half-hearted attempts to see the movie Avatar but still haven’t managed to see it yet as other things keep coming up.

While I was moving snow I had to stop and repair our mailbox which I found lying in the road.  Rural mailboxes are at risk to being whacked by the snowplows, and some rural mailbox post arms are therefore designed to move when struck instead of breaking.

Our mailbox is mounted on a wood post.  My first movable/swinging mailbox mounting arm was made of wood as well which I replaced years later with a short welded steel swinging arm, based on this design chosen because I didn’t want to move our post further from the road.

Apparently the plow hit the non-movable portion of the arm breaking it  off, so I had to re-weld it.  I took the opportunity to replace the house number on the mailbox that had weathered off as well.

The house number on the mailbox was the only one we had (we needed to make sure the pizza delivery guy could find our house!), since we were forced to remove our emergency/911 house number sign post when the trusses were delivered last fall.

Our construction crew took the opportunity with the nicer weather to spend the week working on the building.  One of our carpenter’s (Frank’s) goals was to finish the roof before it snowed again.

They’ve already shoveled snow off the incomplete roof a few times previously, and it’s difficult and somewhat dangerous (slippery) work.

As it stands the roof is almost done, and they’ve been working on the soffits and fascia.  Once both of those are done they can put in the exterior doors and install the vinyl siding.  Then all that would be left to finish the exterior of the building would be the two garage doors.

Once the exterior is done it will be on to work on the inside of the building, including installing the radiant in-floor heat system and concrete floor.

Meanwhile we’ve managed to burn through all of the loan that we got for construction that was supposed to cover the house addition as well as the new building.  We’re still working on our next course of action to get more loan money to cover the remaining construction, which will also involve us sitting down and trying to carefully tally all the remaining costs to finish the project.

Filed under: Building Construction 2009-10, Home, Home Projects on February 24th, 2010 | No Comments »

Compared to last week, this week was pretty uneventful.

The weather continued to be unpleasant, and we picked up lots of snow early in the week due to a storm that started Sunday night and lasted until midday Tuesday.

By Monday night there was eight inches of snow on the ground, so I got out on the tractor and moved snow then to try to stay ahead of things.  I also had to feed the cattle hay, and with all the snow I found pushing the hay bales across the ground (I call it “skidding”) impossible since the bales themselves act as big snowplows.  So I had to snowblow a path to the pasture and the feeder first.

At storm’s end we had picked up a total of around 11 inches, which to put a bright face on things pales by comparison to the storms out east of last week.  However, unlike out east, most of the snow we get is going to remain for some time.

The additional snow added to the growing snowbanks created from previous snow removals.  Even the snowblower on the tractor is having a hard time throwing snow over the tops of the highest snowbanks.

This is a photo just south of the barn where there are some of the highest snowbanks, but there are several places where the piles of snow are over my head.

On Wednesday I spent the better part of the afternoon moving snow again as a final post-storm cleanup.  In the areas I had cleared on Monday night there was only about 3 inches of snow, but in the other areas there was the full 11 inches of snow, and that’s not counting the drifted snow which was a lot deeper.

I spent a lot of time clearing snow from the front of the new building, which I hadn’t done for the previous week’s snowstorms either.  That meant there was over a foot of snow there, including the banks of snow that had come off the roof on its own.

By the time I was done moving snow I had a pretty serious crick in my neck from all the time I’d spent looking over my shoulder in the cold at the rear-mounted snowblower on my tractor; a pain that persisted for the rest of the week.

I cringe to think about how wet it’s going to be this spring too due when all the snow starts melting.  The new building site will undoubtedly be a real mess.

Because of the snowstorm, not a lot of progress was made on the new building this week.

They came later in the week to remove snow from the roof, which still isn’t finished and doesn’t have all the roofing steel sheets on it yet or any of the trim.

Since we’ve accepted that Old Man Winter isn’t going to cooperate with the building project, we’ve decided the only course of action is to just take things as they come.

As a coincidence while I was outside this afternoon taking some photos of the snowbanks, a hot air balloon flew overhead not far away, so I took some photos of that as well.  It looked like it was descending and may have landed near the Elko Speedway around County Road 2.

Mid-week we had to get more propane delivered.  We had a natural gas meter installed on the house when we found out a natural gas line was just across the road.  Since our water heater and furnace have propane orifices on them but are old, instead of replacing the orificies we decided it made more sense to replace both of them outright.

We had propane delivered last fall, hoping that would be the last propane we’d need prior to the switchover.  We didn’t fill the tank completely figuring we wouldn’t need it.

But since the replacement project wasn’t happening, I’d been watching the gauge carefully on the propane tank.  This week it was obvious we’d probably would run out within a week or two, and we weren’t anywhere close to getting the furnace and water heater replaced.

So hopefully this is the last time we’ll have to buy propane.

Kim and I visited the Ranchero Supper Club in nearby Webster again last night for a late dinner, and since it had turned foggy that night and was late the restaurant wasn’t very busy.  We had our usual Friday night all-you-can-eat fish fry and were sharing a Paulaner Hefeweisen beer when the waitress came up and said someone in the restaurant wanted to buy us a beer.  So we ordered another Paulaner.

At that time the area of the restaurant we were in was empty, but we could hear some guys talking at the other end of the restaurant, an area we couldn’t see.  The only people I could think of who would buy us a drink were the Degrosses, and indeed it was Chris and Joe and some friends who had ridden their snowmobiles down for dinner.

They stopped by our table as they were leaving for a chat and we got a chance to thank them for the beer.  Thanks again, guys!

Filed under: Building Construction 2009-10, Home, Weather on February 13th, 2010 | No Comments »

(I apologize in advance for the length of the following entry but it’s been a busy week and since I hate to dice a weekly update up into sections, here it all is!)

Although we got a couple of minor snowstorms this week the temperatures warmed up a bit getting closer to average for this time of year, so overall I’d have to say the weather was an improvement.

That meant they were back to work on the new building.  They started working again on Monday, in the midst of the snowstorm.

I think they were trying to finish the steel roof installation before it got buried in more snow, as the roof was relatively clear of snow prior to Monday.

They are working on the roof section with the dormers that involves a lot of valleys and cutting, so it’s time consuming.

Additionally they started putting on the fascia and soffits, completing most of that work on the south section of roof.

By Tuesday we had gotten another 3 inches of snow, which means the incomplete roof got buried again.  By the end of the week another snowstorm had dropped about 2 more inches of snow as well.  Now they’re forecasting another big snowstorm for this coming Monday too, so it’s obviously a losing battle against the snowfall.

When I checked out the building later today I noticed they had moved a lot of the roof steel sheets inside, presumably to keep it out of the wind and snow.

Some time back I also noted that they had built a rack to hold the various pieces of metal trim and took a photo of that today.

I don’t know if they had been using this saw before for the roof steel, but I took a photo of it as well.

I’m not sure of the proper name of this type of saw, but it’s an older model that has two tubular rails the saw slides on.  It’s functions like a radial arm saw or a sliding miter saw, but since both ends are closed the material needs to be pushed under the carriage from one end or the other.  I can’t see that design as being very convenient really, and probably why I’ve never seen one before.  They’ve got a fine-toothed steel cutting blade on it.

While I was out taking photos today the snow was melting off the south roof and sliding off in chunks.  It’s a good thing we decided to do the entryway roof as it protects the front door from that same occurrence.

I also noted all the dripping off the edge of the roof that is going to demand the future installation of gutters.  In the following photo the white spots on the right edge are drops of melted snow falling from the edge of the roof.  You can also see some of the snow sliding off in a sheet where the roofs join.

Tuesday night on the drive to work I was the victim of what I’ve been calling a road rage incident.  About midway through my drive on a relatively straight and level section of County Road 80 I noticed someone tailgating me, about a car length behind.  Normally I would have slowed down, but I was a bit late getting to work, so I drove the speed limit on cruise control (actually a bit above the speed limit to be honest).

We stopped at a stop sign, and I turned left onto Cedar Avenue and accelerated.  The other driver followed.  I was going about 50 miles per hour when I saw the tailgater abruptly swing out into the left lane to pass.  When he pulled back into my lane he did so aggressively and only about 6 feet in front of me.

I thought, OK, so he’s clearly a bit annoyed for whatever reason.  But then it got really stupid.  He was only about a car length or so in front of me when he slammed on his brakes.  I had to do the same to avoid rear-ending his truck.  Had I not been paying attention I’m sure I would have hit him.

He didn’t come to a complete stop before accelerating away again.  Since at one point I was within a car length of his bumper I got his license plate number and a good look at his truck.  It was a gold Ford F-150 pickup with Minnesota license plate 193-BNK.  I scribbled that information down on a piece of paper.

When I got to work ten minutes later I called the police to report the incident.  I didn’t really expect them to do anything about it at the time, but maybe if the guy is involved in another incident or accident it will be on record to be used against him.  Just FYI, psycho-road-rage guy…

This last week has also been a busy week for me running back and forth to the dog grooming shop.

Last Saturday the firewall/router on the DSL line at the shop inexplicably locked up, possibly related to a loss of the DSL service that afternoon.  Of course the DSL provider denied they were having a problem (when in doubt they usually deny there is an outage), but adjacent businesses apparently had Internet connectivity problems that evening as well, many of which closed early because of it.  I’m sure it was just a coincidence…

The grooming software I developed and wrote is supposed to run without an Internet connection but the loss of the connection caused some weirdness in the program anyway, which I’ll have to investigate.  Of course Saturday is usually their busiest day at the shop as well, so the timing was horrible.

On Sunday before I had to go to work at my other job I went up to the dog shop to fix the problem, hoping the problem would be easy to fix.  When the problem first arose they had called our DSL provider (Integra) and he had helped them “troubleshoot” which in the past means he might have had them change and screw up the cabling in the process.

When I got there I found it wasn’t a problem with the cabling and that instead the router wasn’t working.  I checked it with another power supply as well without success, so I assumed the electronics had been fried.

Planning for that possibility I had brought with me an older firewall/router I had used at home years ago, but had some difficulties getting it configured the same way as the original router, so I eventually ended up working around it and changing some settings in the dog grooming software so it would work properly.

I took the original router back with me to check out before giving up on it.  After a reset to factory defaults I found it worked just fine.

But something had caused it to lock up, so instead of looking for updated firmware, I decided to flash the router firmware with DD-WRT, a freeware replacement for many popular routers.

Since I had the old router working again I opted to wait until my weekend to swap the routers back out, replacing the old one with the original one with updated firmware.  I wanted to be available if the problem was going to reoccur.

So I was planning on going back up to the shop on Wednesday, swapping out and reconfiguring the original router, as well as doing a variety of other repairs/chores there.

But on Wednesday Kim got her new “scratch and dent” front load washer and dryer for the dog shop.  They go through a lot of towels washing dogs, and the consumer top load washer and dryer they had been using was taking forever to wash and then dry the towels.

She’s also been working on reducing her energy bills at the shop, including replacing the dual electric hot water heaters with a single natural gas one.  Until she was sure there would be sufficient hot water she left one of the electric water heaters hooked up as a backup, but Steve the plumber removed it on Wednesday when he came to install the new washer and dryer.

Here’s the new washer and dryer.  The fact that they’re stacked saved a lot of room too.

The plan was to swap the old home washer and dryer with the original dog shop washer and dryer, since they were newer than the ones we had at home.

However, when Kim and Steve Degross were unhooking the water hoses on the washer at home a coupling broke inside the water line in the wall, flooding the wash room and basement before they shut off the well pump.  That’s another disadvantage of having a bigger well pressure tank as it holds a lot of water that drains even after the well pump is switched off.

So after Steve (the plumber) hooked up the new washer and dryer at the dog shop he headed down to our place to fix the leak.  I started cutting out the Sheetrock around the water hookups before he arrived.  It was a plumbing repair I could have easily done but I didn’t know if I had the parts I would need and we needed the water back on ASAP, so there was no point in screwing around with it.

It didn’t take him long to make the repair, and with the water back on it was time to hook up the old new washer and dryer from the dog shop.

But before we installed them we had to clean out all the dog hair that had accumulated inside of both of them.  I did that chore outside.  Once that was done we brought them inside, only to find the cord on the dryer was a four wire cord and we had a three wire socket on the wall.

I had assumed that the fourth wire was simply a dedicated neutral wire which for all intents and purposes is the same as the ground wire in our case, and a quick online search confirmed that.  In fact the fourth wire was actually connected to a terminal that already had a wire running to the chassis ground, along with the cord ground wire, so there was clearly a redundant wire on the four wire cord.

Fortunately they had taken the three wire cord off the old drier, so I just had to remove the four wire cord and replace it with the three wire cord.

Once the drier was hooked up and turned on we got a whiff of burnt dog hair, as what loosened hair we missed got cooked in the heater coils.

That done, we headed off to the dog shop.

One of the jobs I had at the dog shop was to add an air switch to one of the bath pumps.

To wash dogs the pros use a pump system that generically is called “Hydrosurge” although there are other manufacturers.  They’re pump systems that recirculate the bath water and soap like a washing machine to clean the dogs; eliminating hand scrubbing.

They have three wash tubs/stations at the dog grooming shop, and one of the pumps broke.

Since they’re essentially submersible utility pumps as an experiment Kim went and bought a replacement pump at a local home improvement store, but there was no way to turn it on and off other than just plugging it in.

The dog washing pumps are turned on and off with an air switch (they’re mounted on the wall adjacent to the tubs at our shop).  I found a generic air switch here and ordered one.  The pumps also have ground fault circuit interrupters (GFCI) they’re wired with.  I had a plan to add that as well, but not having completed that part of the project just initially installed the air switch so they could easily turn the pump on and off.

I also hooked up the original DSL router and did some configuration before Kim and I headed off for a late dinner and then home.

Unfortunately when we got home around midnight I realized that I had forgotten to configure the router to allow access to the dog grooming database from home, and would have to go back.

So on Thursday at home in my shop I completed building the GFCI/enclosure box for the dog washing pump out of a 6 inch square PVC junction box, and returned to the shop to install it, as well as make the changes to the router.

The GFCI box has the air switch tucked inside of it, as well as dual GFCI’s.

This makes for a homebrew dog washing/”Hydrosurge” system for about half the cost of the real thing.

The only thing lacking from our configuration is a piece of hose they add over the cord where it enters the pump, presumably to prevent damage to the cord, and to possibly keep a stupid dog from chewing on it.  In order to add that though I’d have to cut the plug off the end of the cord which I would prefer not to do, so I’m trying to think of an alternative to that.

Filed under: Basil, Building Construction 2009-10, Dog Grooming Business on February 6th, 2010 | 4 Comments »