(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 | 1 Comment »

The last week’s weather has put us back into the deep freeze, halting building construction again.

We believe that at the current rate we’ll be well into spring before the building is completed, and without thinking too much about it we were planning on having the concrete slab poured after it started warming up, saving us the money to heat the building in preparation for the concrete work.

However, someone at work reminded me that there is a restriction on trucks hauling heavy loads on the roads in the spring starting at the “first significant thaw” until all the frost is out of the ground.  Historically it looks like those restrictions have started in early March until mid May.

They can still haul the concrete during the road restriction period, but they will have to bring more smaller loads, which once again will cost us more.  It we want to avoid the hauling restrictions we’d have to wait until mid May to pour the slab.

So it looks like one way or the other it’s probably going to cost us more than we planned to put in the concrete slab.  We could have poured in the middle of winter, and spent extra money to heat the building, or we can wait for warmer weather and save money on heating the building but pay extra for the additional truckloads of smaller loads of concrete.

To avoid the extra expense completely would mean waiting until mid May to pour the slab, and although that’s still a possibility, we didn’t really want to wait that long.

I was talking to Rob about how the metal roofing fit together and I took some photos of the roof steel to ease explanation.

The following photo shows the bottom rib and tab of one of the steel panel with the slots for the screws on the left.  The screws end up hidden beneath the next panel.  (The sheets are stacked back to back alternately, so you can also see the rib for the other side of the panel on the panel inverted beneath the top one.)

Here’s the other side of the panel.  The lip on the rib on the right of the following photo locks onto the channel of the rib above, and the panel thus covers the screws of the previous panel.

It’s not a very good picture with the frost/snow on the panels, but here’s some scrap sections assembled that gives a general idea of how the panels fit together.

On the farm front, we discovered last week that one of our cows had a calf during our mini thaw.  I’m well past thinking this sort of timing is just a coincidence now, since it’s not the first time I’ve noted that our cows have calved during a warm spell in the middle of winter.

The calf was a healthy male, and although we were concerned about whether or not he would survive the bitter cold streak of this week, so far he’s still doing fine.  We’ve had seemingly healthy calves die however within the first few weeks after being born in the winter, so he has another week or so before we can be reassured he’ll likely survive in the cold.

There’s still a lot of winter left for him to make it through though.

Unfortunately for him, the fact that he’s a male means he’s destined to be food for the table in a few years.  The male calves get castrated (turning them from bulls into steers).  We usually band them (I won’t get into the details of that – you can read about the process here if you prefer) although most ranchers perform the process surgically.

Because we don’t have chutes or any way to handle the bigger cattle safely they have to be banded early when they’re small enough to handle; something that we haven’t always gotten to in a timely manner in the past.  We have one or two other younger bulls that didn’t get banded when they were small and still need to be castrated before they get big enough to try to breed the cows.

I thought about banding the new calf right away as he let me walk right up to him, but don’t want to stress him during the cold weather.  I’ll wait a week or two.

Since the Degrosses are old ranch-hands they’ve offered to help us castrate the older bulls, including trying to get the big bull that’s been doing all the breeding into a trailer to be sold.

But all that will have to wait for some at least slightly warmer weather regardless.

Our vet, Dr. Davison, came out Thursday to tend to a sick goat and took a look at our horse, Duchess, as well.  Since Kim was at the dog grooming shop she sent Lynn in her stead to meet the vet and brave the cold.

The vet thought Duchess was doing quite well, and although she’s still treating her injured hoof gingerly, he thinks we can get her out to pasture soon so that she starts using it more.

However, with all the ice that’s around from the mini-thaw and rain of a few weeks ago we think it’s best if we leave her in the barn stall for a while longer, until there is a lot less ice around.

Hope seems to have recovered fine and we’re now starting to rest easier assuming that there won’t be any more problems with any of the animals related to the shootings last fall.

Filed under: Building Construction 2009-10, Farm, Home Projects on January 30th, 2010 | No Comments »

The warmer days are on their way out now.

It was nice for a break to have warmer than average days, even though the end of the warm streak brought a fair amount of rain.

The problem with rain in the middle of winter is that it can’t soak into the frozen ground.

It caused miniature lakes near the new building, and turned a lot of the snow into slush.

Since the warm days don’t stay around long enough after the rains for the water to evaporate, when the warm days end all that water just freezes.

We’ll be going through the same cycle again in the spring, but at least then we know that winter is almost over.

We’re in the middle of winter now, and all the ice and re-frozen snow will be around for several months now.

It’s dangerous to try and get around once that water starts freezing, so we can only hope for some snow to make the ice less slippery.  Fortunately we’re getting some of that snow today already.

Filed under: Building Construction 2009-10, Weather on January 25th, 2010 | No Comments »

We went from unseasonably cold just a few weeks ago, to unseasonably warm the last few weeks.

At first it was assumed that the warm spell would be brief, but to our pleasant surprise it still continues.  Of course it’s folly to think that winter is over this early in the year though, so we’re still bracing for more winter weather to come.

It looks like we’ll return to normal/average temperatures early this next week again.

However, the warmer temperatures have brought their own problems, including freezing rain and drizzle that have fallen the last two days.

Tuesday morning there was frost on the trees that lingered throughout the day that made a stunning winter landscape.

Work on the new building restarted when the weather improved two weeks ago, and they made finishing the roof a priority.

The roof is now about half finished, with the north section of the building, including the dormers, yet to have steel on them.

This week Rick and Rob continued working on installing the steel on the roof, while Frank and the rest of the crew put up the building felt and worked on the fascia and soffit framing as well as other miscellaneous work.

Frank had plans to leave Thursday on an ice fishing trip up north with friends, and freezing rain was predicted for Wednesday night, so Rick and Rob finished as much as they could on the roof on Wednesday before quitting for the week.

Friday drizzle and rain fell again and as the temperatures dropped after dark it started freezing.  The resulting ice made it really treacherous outside.

The poor dogs struggled to walk across the icy deck last night, which didn’t bother Basil that much, but traumatized Cleo, who for some reason doesn’t like walking across the deck in even good conditions.

But by today, the temperatures had risen above freezing again, and it rained through the afternoon.

The rain however highlighted something we hadn’t thought of before for the new building:  we’re going to need gutters.  Because the roof is so big and so high, the rain water was cascading off of it (especially in the valleys) and without gutters it’s going to do some serious damage to the ground below, which will also spatter mud onto the building.

We’re still in the process of determining how much more money we’ll need to finish the building as we’re running short now, and that’s another expense to be added to the list.

I spent yesterday afternoon at the dog grooming shop doing miscellaneous repairs.  It’s not really the way I wanted to spend part of my weekend, but I hadn’t done any repairs for some time so there were quite a few things that had piled up.

As I was leaving I took a picture of the lobby.  Kim’s done a really nice job of tiling the front of the lobby counter and otherwise decorating the area.  She’s working on another shop decorating project that I’ll post a photo of once it’s completed.

I’ve been working in my shop again now that it’s heated, enjoying the extra space created by having some of the tools and other stuff moved into the garage in preparation for the home addition work.  The space had been pretty cramped previously.

I’m looking forward to my new workshop in the new building, although it’s going to be some time before that will be available.  I can fantasize about working in the new shop next winter I guess.

Filed under: Basil, Building Construction 2009-10, Dog Grooming Business, Home, Home Projects, Pets on January 23rd, 2010 | No Comments »