Electric burial is done. Labor Day weekend I rented a mini-excavator and did a bunch of work, dug this 150 foot trench and installed some culverts for the new driveway.
My in-laws came to visit for the week, and helped out with all the projects. F-I-L and B-I-L in the first picture.
Laid down 3" and 2" SCH80 conduit, the larger is for electric and the smaller for cable internet (and my future use). Covered it all up and the electric co. came out to set a new pole (the old one was pretty bad):
With the overhead lines gone, it not only looks much nicer, but I can bring larger / taller equipment back here with no fear of snagging power lines. This was step #0 of the house build, not really part of it but definitely a prerequisite. All told, doing the work myself, I have about $2500 in this part of it.
I should really update this again. Not as much obvious progress this year, but a few things worth mentioning:
New Suburban
My foray into 21st century vehicles has been with… mixed results. This spring I managed to run our old 1995 Suburban completely out of oil, and the engine has a bad knock. The cost of a new engine is more than the truck is worth. I wanted to take the opportunity to upgrade to the GMT800 series, and also move into a 3/4 ton instead of the usual 1/2 ton. My reasoning for the latter, is that I have a house to build, and I have a need to move heavy equipment and building supplies.
I found this 2004 Suburban for $2,000 in Knoxville TN. Keep in mind these go for 8-12K in good shape, so I knew this was a fixer-upper. And immediately I started having issues. On the way home the alternator went out, and I replaced that on the side of the road, which wasn’t hard to do. But then I was seeing “reduced engine power” on the dashboard, and it would idle but not accelerate - which I ultimately solved by unhooking the battery for a few minutes, clearing the computer and it ran fine all the way home. It has done the same thing periodically ever since - and continues to be a source of frustration…
Over 2 months, I deep-cleaned and restored the interior, replaced a broken window, got new tires, and generally brought things up to spec. It runs and drives very well except for the above issue, the steering gear which needs replaced, and some electrical gremlins I’ve not chased down yet. I hauled a mini-excavator an hour each way from the rental shop, as well as two pallets of concrete at a time. It gets around 10 MPG towing, maybe 13 MPG unloaded. To date I have around $6K invested in it, so I am pretty happy as that goes. But the wife won’t drive it, and I can’t blame her… I’m probably going to restore the old Suburban for her to drive. It never had any of these computer related issues.
Culvert Retaining Wall
The excavator and concrete I mentioned were for this project. There is an existing culvert in the path of our driveway, which is about 4 1/2 feet in diameter and 20 feet long. I had the bulldozer build up dirt on top of it, to strengthen it and raise the driveway level for flood purposes. But he was only able to go up about 4 feet before the top was too narrow to drive on. The culvert either needs extended, or retaining walls built for the dirt. I opted for the latter option.
I did quite a bit of research, and came across stacked-bag concrete walls. They have been used by the forest service for decades for low impact trail maintenance and minimal equipment disturbances. You simply dry-stack the bags in place, overlapping like a brick wall, and the bags become wet with rain (or garden hose) and set up in place. Eventually, you can strip the paper away and you are left with a rounded stacked-stone look. Of course dry pour concrete done this way is much weaker than wet-pour, but for a retaining wall we barely need strength, it’s more about erosion resistance and sheer weight.
Once I backfill the dirt, we will have around 16 -18 feet of driveway width. What you see there is two pallets, I have two more in the barn which should finish the first side, then I need to haul four more to build the other side up. It’s a lot of work. These are 60 lb bags, each pallet has 64 bags.
Eagle eyed readers may have noticed the shiny bags. They are indeed plastic not paper, much to my chagrin. I didn’t realize this until they were already here. So I’m making the best of it, I poked dozens of holes in the tops of each bag as it was stacked. Then I drove rebar down through the stacks, into the creekbed. Now that it’s had a chance to set up, the wall is surprisingly strong. But I will give it maximum time to set up before I try to remove the plastic, probably with a weed torch.
Mowing
It’s been a slow process getting a running tractor to stay running, but I’m now back in the game with bush hogging these fields. To recap, we bought the farm with two tractors. At the time, the red Massey Ferguson was the bush hog tractor, because the 3-point lift controls didn’t work (always up). The blue Ford 7000 has been the push-pull tractor, because the PTO isn’t working. So we worked the Massey doing some bushhogging, until one day I drove it up the steep logging road, and it lost oil pressure due to the grade. It took about 6 months to get it off the mountain, a very tricky procedure. It took another year to rebuild, in my spare time. Then it mowed gloriously well for about 2 months, and gradually started smoking and losing power. I assumed the headgasket was blown, and punted another year on fixing it. However, it turned out just the rocker arm had broken. That story is over here:
By the time I got back to mowing, some of the fields were overgrown by 3 or more years. I love trees. But I need usable land too. So, I compromised, and mowed the thinner areas and left strips of trees in strategic places for animal shade, shaped in such a way that I can easily mow around them. In the more overgrown areas, I have dedicated about 12 acres to completely revert to forest. This will eventually be our woodlot. I strongly disagree with the modern tendency to clear every inch of flat land for pasture and plowing… so this is my (small) protest of that. We have plenty of other land for hay and pasture, having flat land for tree harvesting will be very nice in the future. Some of these trees are now 6-7 years old, having never been mowed since we owned the land. We are going to have plenty of fuel and timber for future projects.
House Design
This is finalized. I put so much work up front into the 3D model I created, that the finished plans I got back from the structural engineer was basically the same as what I sent him. But we do have an engineer’s stamp of approval now. I didn’t strictly need that, we are not under building codes here. But I wanted the assurance anyhow. I also got cut sheets, each timber is marked individually with measurements so I can cut them with the right joints to fit each other.
Here’s a walk through of the model as it stands.
The masonry stove is still in design phase, and will probably shrink a bit. Also note there is now a full basement, not shown but definitely planned. Going with ICF walls and insulated slab with PEX. A portion of the basement will be walled off as a cistern, around 30,000 gallons.
Upcoming projects
I’m pulling back a bit on construction, as finances have tightened and the economy is less certain. We are instead turning our attention on the current house once again, to make it livable for awhile longer.
Things like:
Water system upgrade. The system works well enough, but is prone to freezing, and has limited capacity. A bigger tank, “real” water pump instead of the 12V RV pump, and insulated walls, relocated plumbing, etc.
Mini-splits. These are awesome, we have some at work and they are efficient, quiet, and unobtrusive. There are several DIY options now, and a few of them can run on direct PV solar, which is a nice option for future. My brother now lives year-round in the small cabin, and he needs something more automatic (and safer) than a space heater and window A/C. A second mini-split in the bedrooms will help with supplemental winter heating and summertime cooling.
Garage floor & insulation. This will help with the water system freezing, as well as making winter time vehicle projects more doable. I want to pour a partial slab, and insulate the walls, which are currently just sheet metal. I’ll install a small stove for heat, possibly a masonry batch-box style.
Vehicle / Tractor repairs. I have a Suburban with a blown engine, a Ford tractor with broken PTO, a second Ford tractor with massive oil leaks, and a woodgas truck with transmission problems. All of these are handicaps to effective farm work, and once the garage is usable again, I’ll be investing time in these repairs.
You might invest in fence and raise animals. You have plenty of pasture. They figure around 2acres per cow. Then it starts to look like income property which is what you need for a homestead. I don’t know what you would do for water for the animals though.
They have gps/rtk 33" tracked mower from china for 5300 dollars which means you wouldn’t have to spend much time to mow it. people that pasture also use pasture mowers. I don’t know if it cuts too low or not. I don’t know if the hardware is compatible with things like ardupilot or if it is proprietary like DJI Drones uses.
That’s always been the plan. For the moment, it’s going to take several more mowings to get the pasture in good shape for animals to graze on. I intend to mow regularly this next year to develop pasture.
Your “Reduced Engine Power” problem on your 8.1L V-8 will be a real head scratcher, alright ChrisKY.
The real clue is by battery disconnecting you can get then computer to go back to the factory base-line settings; versus running learned adapted values.
Begin with searching out the owners forums for similar complaint problems. Only jump-in and try a change, if you can find multiple successful fixes.
All brands and makes I’ve experienced similar problems with will have had the problem fall into these broad categories:
An OEM sensor or a funky aftermarket sensor skewing an input value until the computer reaches its pre-set adaptive limit too long. Computer then finally freaking-out; shouting to you; “Houston we have a problem here”
A wiring harness; especially at a connector pin plug end gone corroded or overheated bad. Can happen inside individual wiring harness insulation with vibration flexing breaking the majority of the wire strands. Then the insulation hiding broken stub ends making and beaking contact. When it is running OK you individually twist and pull on harness branches seeing if you can induce a change in running. Ford even had a special programed Wiggle Harness Testing mode you could go into to test specifically for this. Their FWD Taurus’s with gone bad hydroelastic motor mounts forced them to develop this. The bucking engine/tranny then flex killing the engine electrical harnesses.
While on harnesses investigation; do look over the transmission suppling harnesses for hanging loose, and rubbing after a transmission R&R or kicked up sticks and limbs damaging. Bell housing harness quashes are all too common on tranny R&R’s.
In the PCM power supplies some supplies feed both engine and transmission sensors. One shorted, can kill all on that common power feed.
Then internally within the control modual itself. The previous like your 95 it was replace the PCM swapped-in with a different know-good-one to diagnose. Some risk to that if a harness short circuit would damage the subbed-in PCM too.
On an older tow-hauler vehicle as this it is hard to tell if someone has hot-rod re-program power boosting the OEM PCM. And that re-program setting up for a running problem. When in seasonal longterm Hot. When is seasonal long-term Cold.
Not luck. Perseverance. With slowness just throwing parts at it.
A true $300.- 900. bidirectional scanner would allow you to sub-in while running sensor values; data trap intermittent’s; give you data-base normal range values; even give you harness plug ends termination pin-outs.
21st Century systems you will need as good of 21st century scanner tool as you can afford.
ICF’s are an excellent Choice Chris. I built several large houses with them when I was doing residential building. The in floor PEX is also excellent. I built my house with it on both levels. At the time it was still not widely used and there was a lot of debate about weather using the earth below the slab as a heat sink was more efficient and of course cheaper than placing styrofoam over the dirt and pouring the slab on top of that.I chose option 1. If I did it again I’d go with the foam. My way takes longer for the floor to heat up and the gain from the thermal mass of the dirt is negligible until maybe 2 months into the heating season.
The one thing you need to know about using ICF’s is that if you start with your footing dead level, and I’m talking laser shot everywhere, then your walls will go up easy and perfect. If you are even half to three quarters off it will be a fight all the way, compensating on every course. When I started using them I had to take a two day training session from the particular manufacturer we were using. The instructor never quit harping on it. Having done a few you learn real quick why.
Thats a nice house design Chris. I have always loved the wrap around porches that are common in the southern US.
I do have a few things for you to think about and perhaps you already have but here they are anyway
Hard to make out if this is already the case but if I were you I’d install wheelchair width doors with thin thresholds (if any) on the whole ground floor for hopefully a reason that will never happen and make sure the on-suite or the other toilet on the ground floor is easy to get on from a wheelchair. Those changes are pretty expensive should they happen later on but is pretty cheap at this stage.
Don’t know if you are planning pex heated flooring upstairs but as it is still nice and a low-temp system it is more expensive than under-window radiators which you can also design for as low-temp and the floors are not as cold as the bottom one. However they are going to feel colder when you go from ground floor-heating to upstairs radiator-heated. Especially if you’re not going with a solid wood floor (or carpet). Wood flooring with the soft parts sanded down to get the harder grains ’sticking up’ as a structure has a nice warm feeling to it.
All your choices of course, I just wanted to raise the thoughts now as it is easy to possibly change with a few pencil lines.
Good choice with the master bedroom on the ground floor, we did that too and we have never regretted it, a house to truly grow old in.
Oh, and as Tom said, definately go with styrofoam under the slab, here it is normal with a foot thick styrofoam with at least 4-5 inches of capillary breaking washed gravel under that.
If you have animals, they will eat most of it. Cows around here are turned into the woods to eat the saplings and brush. You just have to make sure nothing is poisonous to the cows in there first.
The OTHER way to do it is with intensive grazing, where you move them every day or so to a new pasture, but you make the pastures really small. . They will eat -everything-. where as if you just let them graze, they won’t eat down thistles and stuff they don’t like quite as much, then you have to use a pasture mower.
I’ll put in a good word for goats. Good for milk, good for meat. Tastes do vary of course, both for the product and the consumer. Goats have a reputation for being hard to fence in. It is a well-earned reputation. In our experience this is also true for cattle. At least with the goats, most of the fence remains when the animals are gone. Most things things scale with size. Milk and meat production, but also infrastructure damage and injuries , or maybe .
If you’re making charcoal from slash, cows, goats, and chickens will do a great job of leaf removal, which I think reduces smoke. Probably would be helpful before chunking, but I’m not there yet.
I love goats. Great converters of junk in to meat and milk. I also hate goats. Great converters of non-junk (fruit tree bark, saplings, flowers, garden…) in to fuel for their purely satanic evil. That about summs my relationship with them.
Also, its important to know and l did not know this till recently, that goats are not actualy ment to eat grass. They eat mostly brush. Wich is good, but will leave the grass largely intact and trampled. They will eat grass ofcorse but its not ideal for them. Sheeps do a better job at that.
Im experimenting with donkeys for the last year. I got a pair and a foal and it seems that goat and donkey combo is a winer for our land. Lots of brush growing out of the sawed stems, thats goats job, and the gras is nutrient poor mountain grass wich the goat wuldnt even touch. Closer to straw thain hay. Donkeys thrive on that kind of food. Now l know equine consumption is a bit of a tabu in the US and its not hugely practiced here neither, but thats the plan. Homeslaughter of cattle is strictly forbidden here, and every calf needs to be tagged at birth and gets an actual passport. A human being here literaly has less papers thain a cow. B but there is a loophole when it comes to equine so thats preety much the only choice for me to put some homegrown red meat on the table.
Sorry for highjacking the thread a bit l like the cement structure but l got a question. Here our bags got a layr of foil between 2 layrs of paper. Is this a problem or do you dont have foil?
Sounds like coppicing by accident. We tried coppiced willow last summer. Run-off water flowed through that spot all summer (new irrigation pattern across the road ) and the few that survived seem to have been a delicacy for the deer.
Coppice has the “tree” cut at ground level where the fresh shoots are easily browsed by animals.
An alternative is to cut the tree at head height so that the shoots are harder for animals to get to. That is called “Pollarding” and was used in England to allow animals to graze woodlands at ground level but leave new tree shoots to grow. Deer can reach pretty high so the pollarding would need to be that much higher for protection. It may not be viable. 17th century England had very only had deer where they were protected for a later hunt.
New coppice needs fencing to survive as a general rule but harvesting is easy, especially with a brush hog or similar, since it is at ground level. Pollarding avoids the fences but makes harvest a lot tougher. Pick your poison.
Yep, that’s the plan. I want to age in place in this house. All exterior doors are 36" wide and the master bedroom is 36", the master bath is a 32" pocket. That should fit a normal wheelchair just fine. I like the American Standard Champion 4, it’s difficult to clog and is ADA height.
Yes, PEX throughout the bedrooms, both floors. We will do wood flooring where possible, but I don’t know how well that interacts with the constant low-grade heat. The basement insulated slab being PEX is a no-brainer, even if we don’t use it immediately. I have plans to eventually install ground-source heating (loop of tubing in the bottom of a large pond) and using water to distribute the heat is nice. Looking at water to water heat pumps for this.
That’s my goal. It’s just not quite the top of the priority list yet. I’ve done strip grazing previously, the main challenge is moving their water supply daily. You basically need portable waterers hooked to pressurized pipe of some sort. A central “watering hole” is too hard to reconcile with moving them to new ground every day. Return corridors etc. are tricky to design and generally stay muddy. And I don’t care how intensive you graze them, you still need to mow behind the cows if you want to kill the nastiest weeds.
Yeah, I’m looking more at cows than goats at the moment, but remember my situation is different. I have a househld of 7 (and growing)… we have 80 acres of mostly flat pasture. Cows exert significantly less pressure on fences than goats. Electric keeps them contained quite easily. Here in rural Kentucky there are no papers or restrictions unless you are selling finished meat, and even then it’s just a requirement for the butcher to be USDA certified. We can consume a lot of meat and milk, and the extra grazing area is no problem, and frankly we love beef.
My sister keeps fainting goats and swears by them. They don’t push so hard, or climb on things as much, because they are prone to fainting. Yes, they literally faint if they get spooked. So they are risk averse… and apparently that makes them easier to keep. The meat is supposed to be excellent.
No foil. We used to have just paper bags, and significant waste from wet bags that hardened. Also most hardware stores had a pallet of damaged bags at a discount. I didn’t know anything had changed. Menards for one has switched to thick plastic bags, like water softener salt comes in. This comes on a pallet shrinkwrapped with more thick plastic. It seems very effective from a waterproofing persective, but annoying to my purpose. I wanted the paper to get wet and harden the concrete! Now I hope water will fill the bags from the holes I made in the top. There is no escape for the water through sides or bottom, so it should stay wet, and eventually set reasonably well. Getting rid of the plastic eventually will probably require melting it with a weed torch… uggh.
I’ve seen some hydro-heated floors with the PEX stapled under the plywood sub-floor but have no personal information about how well it works. I build my second floor with a sub-floor of 2x8 lumber, then 14lb felt, 2 inches of concrete with the PEX in that and then laminate on top. Back then the laminate was tongue and groove, so a little thicker than what is sold now. It all works great and with our water heated with the wood heater for only 12 hours of the day it is good that the floor stores heat and releases it through the night. Toward the end of my house building career we started getting a lot of calls for bamboo flooring. I would probably go with that over the laminate now. They have some types that can be floated like laminate rather than glued down. Of course we are going back 18 years to the end of my business so there could be a lot of improved products I’ve not kept up with. My house is 26 year old and everything works fine. It’s good to overbuild IMO.
It is common here with wooden floors together with low-temp floorheating, it is usually sawdust/glue boards with already made grooves for the reflective and heatspreading metal layer to press the pex into to get the support for a thinner wood floor.
Most likely you guys have the same system on your side of the pond.
The one problem you could have with true wooden floors and floor heating is the differences in moisture and humidity during winter and summer which will make the wood swell and later crack.
Most here are using parquet floors like kährs (or kahrs for you guys) to eliminate that problem plus still be able to sand the floor three-four times if necessary.
Thin porcelain tile is a nice option for underfloor heat. It comes in big sheets that are easy/quick to lay down. They make some that simulates wood flooring that is more convincing than you would guess.
. Everthing is bigger in America 
, or maybe 
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) and the few that survived seem to have been a delicacy for the deer.