Preparing for the Arrival of the Buildings

We are erecting two pre-fab metal buildings each of which will be 20 by 50 ft.  Both buildings will have a full lower level (basically a walk-in basement) for a total of 4000 sq ft of space.  These buildings are delivered on a series of pallets on the back of a flat bed truck.  The buildings are basically like a big erector set.  You put them together with screws, bolts, and a bit of caulk.  The buildings are scheduled to arrive on Tuesday, August 23.  We are not ready to use them yet; we have not even dug out the foundation yet much less put up the lower level walls.  However, if we wait any longer for the delivery the supplier will have to charge us more because the price of steel is going steadily up.  So we will just have to store the pallets until we are ready to use them.  This would be no big deal on flat land, you would just set them on the ground off to the side and out of the way.  On the other hand, when you are building on a hillside there is no convenient "off to the side" place unless you make one.  So we had to make one.  We chose a place next to the road we are constructing leading up to the build site.  We dug it level using the excavator and the tractor and put down a layer of crushed stone.  The size of the area should accommodate all the pallets.  A flatbed truck is 53 by 8.5 feet.  Standard pallets are 4 feet square allowing two rows of pallets on the truck.  Most of our pallets will be four feet deep but up to 12 feet long to hold the steel building panels and beams.  Nevertheless they will still fit the long way on the truck and does not affect the area calculation.  Our pallet storage area is 34 by 13 feet.  That gives about the same area as the truck.  Our plan is to put the pallets in three rows rather than two so everything should fit nicely.  We will find out next Tuesday if our math is accurate.

The graveled area to the right of the car is our newly completed pallet landing area.

Another view of the same area.

In less than a week this area should be full of building parts.

This is looking uphill from the pallet area showing the road that is under construction which  leads to the build site.

Water: A basic necessity

One rarely thinks about water in town where unlimited quantities are available at the twist of a tap.  Out in the undeveloped wild, however, things get very basic.  We do not yet have a well.  A well is one of the very first things we wish to acquire but it cannot happen until we have a road onto the area of land where the well will be drilled.  Until then, every drop of this basic oxide of hydrogen has to be carried in from northern Virginia 120 miles away.  We initially were doing this in 5 gallon buckets (5 at a time) but soon realized that we needed a more efficient way to get larger quantities of water to the land.  I am not even talking about drinking or cooking water.  Potable water can be easily obtained from local grocery stores in 1 gallon jugs for reasonable cost.  Wash water is another matter.  A typical shower in town can involve the use of several dozen gallons of water.  When you have to bring in water in 5 gallon jugs, a shower becomes an extreme luxury.  The washing of hands can be essential for maintaining healthful sanitation, however.  To help bring water to the wilderness I purchased a 60 gallon tank to transport water.  Showers are nevertheless a brief and frugal experience but at least we can get through about a week of use out of a single tankful.

The 60 gallon polyethylene tank mounted in the bed of my pickup truck

Nick prepares to pump the contents into the holding tank of the trailer.

3/8 inch PVC hose connects the tank through a pump to the trailer

We bought this 12 volt diaphragm pump from an industrial surplus dealer.

We pump the water directly into the holding tank of the trailer.

Bug in a Bottle

I had just finished drinking a beer when a very large hornet, attracted to the sweet scent of imported Belgian brew, decided to buzz around seeking the origin of this aroma.  I had set the bottle down on the picnic bench and to my great surprise, the bug landed on the lip of the bottle and crawled right in.  It fell to the bottom and could not get out.  The sides of the bottle were too slippery for it to crawl out and the interior diameter of the bottle was too narrow to fly out.  Angrily, it buzzed and clawed at the bottom of the bottle.  It occurred to me that I could help it out by inverting the bottle, but I was a little concerned about exactly what its attitude would be upon emerging from this confinement.  So I decided to let nature take its course and allow this particular creature to win the insect version of the proverbial Darwin award.  After all, I didn't coerce or invite its exploration of the interior of the bottle, it went in entirely of its own volition.

At least I had already finished the bottle.

The six-legged monster was at least 3 cm long!

Summer Drought

Our land is normally quite dry in the summer.  It lies on the lee side of Sideling Hill and consequently gets only a fraction of the rain that falls further to the west.  This year has been a bit worse than normal.  Although nowhere near as bad as the heat and drought hitting Texas this year, the dryness has caused some difficulties in our efforts at developing the land.  The biggest problem has been the dust that is produced when we dig.  In places, the soil has become a two inch thick layer of material which we have been comparing to Moon dust.  Merely walking on it or especially driving the equipment over it produces clouds of dust like a fog.  We have resorted to the wearing of respirators whenever we work on excavation.  Also, the dryness has made it dangerous to have open fires to burn the brush we regularly produce when we cut down trees to clear the land.  I have instituted the rule that we cannot burn except on days after a rain or during a rain.  Since it has barely rained for the past four weeks, we have slowed our brush clearing efforts because piles of dry brush are in themselves a fire hazard.  I really do not want to be responsible for burning down my own forest.  Hopefully as we move into the late summer and early Autumn the rains will come more frequently.

No, this is not the footprint of Buzz Aldrin in the regolith of Mare Tranquillitatis but my own footprint in the dust of West Virginia.

This stream-bed on our land contains a raging torrent of water over a foot deep in the spring, but here, two months later, there is not a drop of water to be seen.

Tractor Repair

One of the advantages of owning your equipment rather than renting it is that you don't have to pay for it on a daily basis.  This is especially economical if you plan to keep the equipment forever.  One of the disadvantages is that you are financially responsible for all the maintenance of the machines both routine and breakdowns.  We bought our excavation equipment used and we knew the units were not in perfect shape.  But we got a really good price on them and we knew we would still be money ahead even after some of the existing problems were fixed.  For example, our Kubota B21 tractor with the front end loader had a leaky hydraulic cylinder when we bought it.  This is the kind of problem that will only get worse and sooner or later we knew we would have to replace the cylinder.  A couple of weeks ago that day came.  I was moving some dirt when I noticed that the slight leak in the bucket cylinder had become a steady stream.  I was out of commission until I could fix it.  I pulled the cylinder off the machine and took it to Winchester Equipment Co to see if they could repair it.  Usually, this kind of problem is straightforward, they just dismantle the cylinder and replace the hydraulic seals at a cost of about $100.  Unfortunately, two days later when they took apart the cylinder they could not get the correct seals to make the repair. (There was some confusion as to what the correct seal diameter was for this old machine.)  They could send the cylinder to a company which specialized in repairing hydraulic cylinders but it would take two weeks. I had them do this but meanwhile I didn't have a tractor and that was going to slow me down considerably.  Now I did have another tractor.  It's an older Honda mini-tractor I bought about 16 years ago.  It's smaller and lighter than the B21 but I could use it in a pinch if I had to.  Unfortunately, it had broken down the previous week.  I didn't really care at the time since I had the B21 to work with and I figured I would fix the Honda when I had a bit of spare time and desire.  So now I had two dead tractors.  Sometimes you have to throw money at something to fix it.  I could buy a new cylinder for the B21 from Kubota.  I could get it in two or three days but it would cost me $665.  I decided to go for it.  Meanwhile, since I reluctantly had some time on my hands I looked into fixing the Honda.  Fortuitously, after a couple of hours with wrench and pliers in hand I ascertained the cause of the problem.  There is a coupler connecting the splined shaft of the Power Take-Off unit on the Honda to the 5/8 inch keyed shaft on the hydraulic pump which ran the loader.  The coupler had worked loose and the 3/16 inch shaft key had been lost.  Basically, no power was being transmitted to the hydraulics so nothing was happening.  A trip to Strohmeyer's Hardware in Winchester and the massive expenditure of 60 cents was all it took to get the Honda back in action.  Two days later the new cylinder came in from Georgia for the B21 and at that point I had two working tractors.

My old Honda mini-tractor after I repaired it.
Honda hasn't been in the tractor market in North America since 1995 so parts are generally hard to come by.  This tractor is getting more and more jerry-rigged as time goes on but I still get a lot of good use out of it.

The Kubota B21 sporting its nice new bucket cylinder.  It's the one on the left with none of its  paint scraped off yet.

A close-up of the new cylinder showing nice fresh moly grease.

Electricity

The only natural forms of energy that come to our land are sunlight and wind and we do not yet have practical ways of harnessing these forms of energy yet.  We have plans and dreams to utilize these sustainable forms of energy in the future but for now we need basic electrical service.  We are in communication with Allegheny Power Company but the nearest active service pole is over 1500 feet from our land so it will be some months before we can get electrical service to our build site.  In the meantime, we have to make our own electricity.  We purchased a 3000 watt generator some time ago to serve as an emergency power source in case we lost power at our house in northern Virginia.  Out here in the wild every day is a power outage day.  The generator is fairly efficient and reasonably quiet so until the power company can bring a service drop to our land it is our only source of electrical energy.

With this handy device we can make coffee and run lights but we still don't have internet or cell phone service.

A West Virginia Tradition?

Perhaps it's just a tradition or perhaps it's a state law but almost everyone in the countryside of West Virginia seems to have at least one disused vehicle on their property.  We are no exception.

I bought this Toyota pick-up new in 1990.  I drove it for years.
  Nick drove it for more years.
It doesn't "go" at the moment but does serve a a handy dry storage shed for some of the messier tools we use.