Plate Lickin' Good

Ah, the things you can get away with when you're two...

How can someone so mischievous and messy be so adorable... ?

Evie Turns Two

Here are few pics from Evie's birthday party.  Snow and icy weather kept distant family away, but our neighbors were here to help us celebrate:

If you look closely, you can see a tear on Evie's cheek. She was upset because she didn't exactly know how to eat her cupcake.  As soon as I cut it into smaller pieces, she was a happy camper!  Samuel on the other hand had no problems and was cramming cupcake into his mouth as quick as he could.  Their friend Gideon (on the right) ate his cupcake like a normal child.

Evie's first barbie doll, Ariel from the Little Mermaid...

How many people does it take to help a 2-year old open presents?...

Evie seemed a little embarrassed by all of the attention.  This face sums it up...

Christmas 2013

Yes, we're still alive.  Yes, I realize I've not posted anything for three months.  I told myself that I was just going to let the blog go, but I've thought more about it and decided against it.  However, my posts will likely be simpler and shorter.  I have to remind myself that Samuel and Evie won't be  all-consuming two and three year-old's forever and someday we'll be out of the trenches and able to resume normal life - which will include time for more in-depth blog posts. 

Someday. 

I hope.

For now, here are some pics of our Christmas.

 The train set/table was Samuel and Evie's big present:

A little over excited...

Evie got lots of board books that she (hopefully) can't rip...

Evie helping me make Christmas cookies...

Danny, Courtney and Brian arrived in the afternoon.  After dinner we had Christmas round 2...

Who doesn't love Curious George?...

Hard, double yolk

Have you ever cracked open an egg to find it had a double yolk?  It happens to me pretty often.  However, it never occurred to me that I'd never hard boiled one....

until now........





Note: the egg was a little "weird" (notice how it's grey at the top), so I decided against eating it.

Sandbox play

Not really a lot of back story to this post.  It's been such a long time, I just wanted to get a few updated pictures posted.  So here is some summertime fun...

 

Brother, can you spare some screws? Part 4

Step 6: Screwing down the deck boards.

It's been almost three weeks since my last post, and this is what I have to show for it:

As I mentioned last time, you're looking at 82 deck boards and 2,460 screws (give or take.  Several were inadvertently dropped under the deck, never to be seen again.)  The three weeks in between the first board and the last included a lot of work at my real job, quite a bit of rain, several trips to Lowe's for extra supplies and some replacement deck boards, several other projects around the house, several barbeques on the unfinished but still usable deck, and a whole lot of thinking about the next phase of this project: the railings, which I'll get to in a moment.  First, please note the rather ragged looking edge of the deck on the right hand side.  Tomorrow I will snap a nice straight chalk-line about 3 inches in and then run my circular saw all the way down the length of the deck, leaving a nice straight edge.

Step 7: The Railing.

The main reason I wasn't in a huge hurry to finish putting down the deck boards (other than the ache in my back and knees after about the fifth board each session) was that we didn't really know how we wanted to do the hand railings.  Well, Google Images to the rescue!  I could post a picture of the design we decided on, but that would ruin the surprise, wouldn't it?  

The downsides to our choice of handrails are it's complexity and cost.  I'm not concerned about the complexity, but this project is already over budget, and this would put us WAY over budget.  But there is a solution, and the main cost will be time.

Enter the sawmill.

In an earlier post I mentioned that I used our sawmill to make the posts that are holding the deck up off the ground.  Now I'll show you how I used the sawmill to make the lumber for the handrails.  It began with logs:

The three smaller logs are white oak, a fairly decay-resistant wood that is frequently used in outdoor projects.  The bigger log is red oak and won't be used for the deck.  There's a fourth white oak log already on the sawmill.  All of the white oak logs were cut down about 3 years ago.  The good news is that they're very dry and ready to use (checked with a moisture meter).  The bad news is that they're much harder to saw than they would have been when still green.

Here's that fourth log being squared up into a usable timber:

 

Here's a closeup:

 

After each slice is removed during these squaring cuts, the timber gets rotated:

Once all the bark and any defects are removed, we can start sawing out boards.  In this case 2x6s, 2x4s, and 4x4s:

And here's a completed 2x6, 14 feet long.  Oak is heavy!

The wood is not quite ready to use at this point.  It comes out of the sawmill rough, so I'll run it through my surface planer both to smooth it up and to bring it down to the same dimensions as the lumber we would buy from the home center.

Total cost for the wood for our handrails?  About half a gallon of gas, a pair of disposable earplugs, and a kilowatt-hour or two to run the planer.  White cedar from Lowe's would have cost almost $800 for the same amount of wood.

Next time: Building and installing the handrails.  Or the steps.  Or maybe both.  Stay tuned!

It's a Wonderful Deck, Part 3

Last Saturday morning dawned bright and beautiful, a perfect day to work outside in the fresh air.  The following pictures capture the work that took place on the deck.

Step four, continued: Setting the posts.

This picture shows the purpose of all those strings and poles in the earlier posts; they're there to make sure all the support posts line up perfectly.  This picture also help to show how all the time spent earlier paid off now, as this post lined up perfectly.  (They all did, thank goodness!)

This picture shows the bright red color of freshly cut heart cedar.  It smells awesome too!  Sadly, the wood  turns brown after being exposed to the sun for a few hours.  (Sharp-eyed viewers will notice that the string does not line up with the post.  That's because I was leaning against it while taking the picture.)

Step 5: Framing the deck.

For a while on Saturday I had a helper.  Our neighbors came over to use our chicken processing equipment to butcher some chickens for their family.  The neighbor's dad wandered up to see what I was working on and ended up lending a helping hand during a break in the chicken operation.  It was nice having some help lifting those 2x12 ledger boards!  He ended up staying even after the chicken processing was done, and finally called it a day when it started raining around 3pm.  In this picture the perimeter is complete and we are starting to hang the interior joists.

After the rain stopped the sun came back out, so I went back to work, solo.  I couldn't resist laying down a few deck boards just to get the feel of the thing, even though I wasn't ready to screw them down yet.

 

 In this picture you can see the rubber waterproofing membrane installed on top of some of the joists.  It's purpose is to prevent the joists from rotting due to water sitting on them.  It's cheap insurance and should extend the life of the deck for many years.  At the top right of the picture you might notice that there are two more center posts to be installed.  In the bottom of the picture you can see that I've started screwing down some of the deck boards.  Here's a little math: 30 screws per deck board times 82 deck boards equals 2,460 screws that need to be driven into the top of this deck.  Yikes. 

Next time: Installing 2,460 deck screws!

Building our deck, Part 2

When we left off last time, our footing forms were being lined up and leveled.  Now it's time to fill 'em up with concrete.
There are several ways to get concrete.  You can order a truck load.  You can buy concrete mix in bags to which you just add water and stir.  Or you can get some sand, gravel, and cement and make it from scratch.  This is the route we're taking.  A big thanks to my dad for his generous donation of his old cement-mixer!  There's no way I was going to mix 18 double batches of concrete by hand!

Step one: Making concrete.
 Concrete starts with sand, gravel, and portland cement: the standard recipe is three parts gravel and two parts sand to one part cement.  This mixer holds enough for two batches at a time, so here I'm tossing in 6 shovels of gravel and 4 of sand.

 
 Next comes the cement.  Two shovels full.

Now we add water.  Exactly how much water will depend on many factors, such as the temperature and the humidity.  You want just enough water to saturate the mix and make it easy to work with.  Too much water will weaken the concrete, so take it easy!

 Success!  This batch looks just right. 

Step two: Filling the forms.
This first round they will only be filled half-way to allow faster curing.

 I inserted three, 3-foot long pieces of rebar per form.   The rebar is needed to strengthen the footings  and reduce the chances of them cracking.  Once the forms were filled half way I drove the rebar into the wet concrete, also half way.

After I finished filling the forms halfway I put some buckets upside down over the forms to keep rain out.  It ended up raining off and on for the next two days, putting a temporary halt on further progress.  When the weather cleared I spent an evening after work filling the forms the rest of the way, and installing J-bolts at the top.  Here's the finished product:

And here's one of the bases that will support the post.  The purpose of this base will be to keep the bottom of the post off the top of the footing, which will reduce the chance of rot.   Not shown in this picture is the rubber membrane that will go over the top of the footing under the base.  The purpose of the membrane is to prevent water from seeping down into the concrete in the winter, freezing, and causing tiny cracks to become large cracks.

Step three: Ledger boards.
The ledger boards are bolted directly to the house, and are considered the backbone for the deck.

The ledger boards are attached with these special fasteners.  Unlike lag bolts, these require no pre-drilling and have a coating that is guaranteed for life against corrosion.  And if that's not enough, they are also cheaper than lag bolts, stronger than lag bolts, and they're made in the USA!

 I used a cordless impact driver to zip them in, one every 12 inches, and staggered top and bottom of the board.  Also, according to the instructions, it's important to not counter-sink the heads.

Step four:  The support posts.
I only had time on this particular day to get one post cut and installed, so the rest will have to wait until the next post.  (Ha-ha, the next post, get it?!  It's a pun!)

I cut the posts on our sawmill from red cedar trees grown on our and our neighbor's land.  The posts were cut only from the heartwood, so they should last just short of forever.

Homemade BBQ sauce

A few years ago when we started paying attention to what we ate, one of the first things we started doing was label reading.  If we couldn't pronounce the ingredients and/or they weren't "natural" we stopped eating it.  By not natural I mean things like high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), caramel color, monosodium glutamate, etc.  This one step removed a lot of everyday foods from our pantry and fridge.  One of the items that used to always be in our fridge was BBQ sauce.  If you have a bottle there too, go grab it and read the ingredients.  Chances are you'll find HFCS and caramel color at the very least. (Look these up if you're not familiar with the health issues!)

So, we stopped buying BBQ sauce.  No big deal, we'll make it.  After trying several recipes - some simple and others with pretty odd ingredients, I determined BBQ sauce was one of those things that I just liked commercially made.  So we went BBQ sauce-less for a couple of years.

About a year ago I found a brand, Cookies, that had nothing I couldn't pronounce, no HFCS that was going to make me obese, and no caramel color that was going to give me cancer.  Eureka... we're back in business!  Last summer, we went through quite a bit.  I even found it in an enormous half gallon jug.  In case you're not aware, St. Louisan's like their BBQ sauce.  I heard somewhere recently that we eat 3-4 times the national average.  I'm not exactly sure how a study is done to determine how much BBQ sauce people eat, but I'd venture to say it's probably correct.

And then, Cookies disappeared. I can't find it at any of my usual stores.  Now granted, I live in a tiny town with only a tiny Wal-Mart available.  But when I do make the 50-minute trip to a Schnucks, they don't have it either.  So I was back to square one.

With summer here, I was thinking about BBQ sauce again.  And then, last weekend I was watching a cooking show and the host whipped up a BBQ sauce in a matter of minutes.  I went to the website and found the recipe.  I made it almost as the recipe was written and it was good, but really sweet.  After a couple of tweaks, I have what I think is one of the best BBQ sauces I've ever had.  Change it to suite your tastes.  If you like sweet BBQ sauce, add a little sugar and/or about a tbsp of molasses.  This recipe will make about 2 1/2 cups.

Whisk the following together in a non-reactive sauce pan:

2 cups ketchup (organic, of course!)
6 tbsp. lemon juice (also organic)
1 tbsp. worcestershire
2 tsp. liquid smoke
2 tsp. dry mustard
1 tsp. onion powder
1/2 tsp. pepper

Simmer the mixture over low heat for about 10 minutes.  Remove from heat and let cool slightly.  It will thicken as it cools.  Enjoy!

Finally, a deck! Part 1

We bought our home almost three years ago.  The previous owners, who were also the builders, had intended to add a deck to the back of the house but ran out of both time and money.  We also intended to add a deck right away, but a myriad of other projects has always taken priority.  Well, now that the kids are a little older and the farm is more or less established, I decided it was finally time to get started on the deck.  Since I'm having to work on it on a few weeknights after work and a few hours each weekend, it will take a couple of weeks to finish.  Not to mention the suddenly very rainy weather which has put a hold on the project for the last two weekends in a row.  So sit back, relax, and follow along as we finally build our deck!

Step one: laying out the footings:
It's hard to see in this picture, but there are strings running from the house to each of the H-shaped structures on the right.  There's also two strings running parallel to the back of the house, one 6 feet out and one 11 1/2 feet out.  At every point where these strings cross there will be a footing; nine in total.

Step two: digging the footings:
I started each hole by hand with a post hole digger, only about six inches deep, to accurately mark the location of each hole.  Then it was time for the tractor-powered auger.

The auger turned a back-breaking, miserably hot job into a 30-second breeze.  Each hole was drilled down three feet.

Step 3: Installing and leveling the forms.
These are the forms that will hold the concrete for the footings.  In this picture they've just been tossed in the holes.

Each form must be precisely located at the intersections of the strings.  This is by far the most time-consuming part of the entire project, but also the most critical.  If the footings aren't set properly it will be very difficult to make the deck square.  If you look closely you will see a plumb-bob hanging just above the form.

Filling in around the forms.  I've had a good helper for various parts of the project!

In this picture you can see three of the forms on the left have been leveled and set, and are ready for concrete.

Daddy's little helper is very happy with our progress so far!

Next time: pouring concrete and setting the support posts.