[ An empty, mostly clean stainless steel sink basin. There’s a drain strainer at the bottom, and a tiny bit of white plumbing pipe is visible below. ]
Okay, it took a while.
… okay, it took years.
But! I finally went back to the local plumbing supply place, bought the things I needed with some assistance from the lady behind the counter …
… & then, on a day when I had the spoons to do the thing AND Morgyn had the spoons to get the dish tubs out of the sink, I actually got it done.
We have a sink. That DRAINS.
[ Below the sink, horizontal white piping leads down from each sink basin and meets in the middle, from which more pipe angles downward and to the left. Soapy water is gushing from the bottom into a clear, square bin. There is no water anywhere it isn’t supposed to be. ]
Morgyn spent probably ten minutes pouring water into each sink basin, in turn, & then we’d watch it pour into the bin, & cackle.
SO GOOD
originally posted on Patreon; support me over there to see posts a week early!
[ The side of the room occupied by my bed. Instead of a hunk of plywood screwed directly to the wall, there’s now a window. The window itself is solid white, much of the arched ceiling’s insulation is still uncovered, and my room is a mess, but it’s a mess with light on it now. ]
Something like two & a half years ago, while in the process of building the loft I was going to be living in, I made the mistake of leaning a bit of my weight against one of the windows I’d planned to put in as it lay on the floor. The glass, of course, cracked.
Fast forward to a couple weeks ago, when I FINALLY managed to take it to a glass place to get it fixed.
& then, not a week after I’d brought it back, PUT IT IN THE WINDOW FRAME.
(it doesn’t QUITE fit. I’ll need to do some stuff before it, you know, OPENS. I had to mildly threaten it with a hammer. BUT it’s in the frame & hasn’t fallen out, so for now, it’ll do.)
I now have TWO windows with flat spaces under them to hold plants!
[ Beneath the window is a low set of drawers. On top of that are a whole bunch of smallish aloe plants, planted in a variety of soda & bean cans. A bit of Mount Blanca, overexposed and yellowish, can be seen through the window. ]
I haven’t moved the big hanging aloe over yet, but I need to do that. & I’m gonna stop in at the local gas station cafe/convenience store & see if they’ll let me have a baby or two off of their big-ass spider plant. More light means more plants!
… also more energy. It took me about a week to get used to it but this is my third ‘I got SO MUCH STUFF DONE’ day in a row. I’m extremely solar powered, is what.
Plus the VIEW.
[ A view out a window: the walls around it are black, the tops of a few aloe plants are barely visible below, and part of the headboard blocks part of the window; but out the window is a sea of low, brown plant life, leading up to Mount Blanca, a many-peaked, snowcapped mountain. Above that is that deep blue Colorado sky. ]
All I gotta do when I’m sitting at my desk is turn left, & I get to see THAT.
It’s SO good.
originally posted on Patreon; support me over there to see posts a week early!
[ It is, indeed, a screen door, visibly built from pallet wood; the bottom half is solid wood, while the top half is screened. It’s been installed in the doorframe in the cargo container. ]
SO glad I got this done for Morgyn & CJ. Between this & the wall I built to go where the big doors open (about which more later), they have DELIGHTFUL amounts of airflow, & a fair amount of light, while also keeping the cats inside.
Sigdis is Just Fine with this. Oh, I’m sure she’d slip outside if she had the chance, & have a lovely time wandering, but she is also perfectly happy to not do so. Sigdis is not a complicated cat, & there are definitely days I envy that.
Marisol is the ANGRIEST. Note that she was ALSO the angriest about having to be on a leash any time the doors were open. She wants to be OUT. SIDE. Which I feel would be a reasonable ask if she did not, upon gaining access to the outside, IMMEDIATELY attempt to see how far she could get before Morgyn LOST THEIR SHIT ABOUT IT.
… & that, my friends, is why there are TWO layers of screening on this screen door.
[ A pretty close view of some screening. One layer is your usual aluminum window screen, though it’s way more wrinkly than usual. The other, further away, is quarter inch hardware cloth. ]
Quarter inch GALVANIZED STEEL hardware cloth. You need STURDY wire cutters to get through this stuff; my jewelry wire cutters won’t go through it, & more importantly, neither will cat claws.
Marisol has, of course, spent a notable amount of time hanging from the screen, with no visible effects whatsoever. Except to her temper.
Of course, in my all-fired hurry to get the thing DONE, it’s not painted. Heck, it’s not even SANDED. That’ll happen over the winter. Probably. I hope.
In the meantime, it’s got spots like this.
[ A close view of a couple of pallet boards. A single screw head is visible. So is a nice splintery gouge along the edge of one of the boards. ]
Don’t grab the door there until I get that sanded out, okay?
originally posted on Patreon; support me over there to see posts a week early!
[ Frank, a big black pickup, seen from behind and to the side; there’s a whole tall stack of styrofoam insulation taking up most of the bed and sticking several feet off the tailgate. ]
What with one thing & another (& with MANY thanks to y’all for continuing to support us, YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE) I managed to order almost everything we need for this summer’s construction plans in one shot, & a week or so later, me & Morgyn drove down to Canon City again to pick it all up.
Getting it all loaded didn’t go near so smoothly as last time, mostly because the hardware store employees in question didn’t have a lot of confidence in our ability to make everything fit. (As it happened we COULD have fit everything in & on the van; it wouldn’t have been a good idea, but it would have been POSSIBLE. HA.)
But eventually we got it all more-or-less stuck more-or-less where we wanted it, used every strap & bungee cord we had, & drove home.
… to be fair, the van looked like this, & that’s AFTER I’d unloaded a bunch of it. Remy for scale:
[ Remy, a big black puppy with a white streak on his chest and white toes, sits proudly in the back of the van, tongue hanging out. He’s guarding a stack of plywood taller than he is, with three sheets of styrofoam insulation in top of that; lumber sits on top of the plywood, and in the gap between the stack and the right side of the van, and there’s a small pile on the ground. That’s a LOT of sticks, is what. ]
One of the people who helped us out (I suspect she had grandchildren) advised us about eight times not to stop too fast. I explained to her that I was pretty sure we weren’t doing ANYTHING fast, because: no. & then we drove home REAL SLOW.
Unloading all that took time — we haven’t even touched the plywood yet, I want a couple pallets in place to stack it on before we start, but at least I got all the lumber out over a couple days. By which I mean ‘out’, no more than that.
[ A big pile of lumber in various sizes, lengths, and treatments. It’s sitting on the ground anyhow, like a pile of pick up sticks. Or like it was flung out of the van one stick at a time, with no regard to where it landed other than ‘out’, which is in fact what happened. ]
But! It’s getting sorted! Little by little! One step at a time!
[ There are three small neat piles of lumber on the ground. One holds two boards, one holds six, and the third and largest, a stack of two by fours on a long pallet, holds eleven. Look, it’s a work in progress. ]
VERY small steps.
originally posted on Patreon; support me over there to see posts a week early!
[ A stack of roof trusses — two by six boards in an arch shape, held together by plywood braces at the corners — stands in the yard next to the house. Another truss sits alone next to them. Behind the stack is a big black dog. ]
I was, I gotta admit, worried about the roof. Partly just because I was gonna be working higher than I ever have before, partly because it was gonna be tricky & new. I spent a lot of time over the spring & summer noodling over ways to do it safely.
[ The back of a black pickup truck, which has a lot of bags of insulation in it. One bag spans the entire width of the inside of the bed, something like four feet. A bumper sticker on the tailgate reads “Frankly, it’s a truck”. ]
Also known as ‘we finally had the money to get enough stuff to more-or-less get my cabin ready for the winter, so I made a huge-tastic order & we drove down to Canon City, it was a whole thing’.
(Taken from a twitter thread the day after, lightly edited.)
[ A plywood-covered wood foundation, covered in turn with an outdoor carpet in cream and green, holds up two walls, one to the left, one on the far side of the floor. Each wall bears a single window. A pair of matching doors leans against the side wall. ]
I’ve been posting about stuff I did months ago, trying to catch up while I couldn’t do any building for a while, BUT the money has finally come in for the last of what I need to finish my cabin, so here is the State of Things.
[Two folding tables are set up, end to end, along Tyrava’s long side; they hold a single board and a scattering of tools. There’s also a couple of rusty folding chairs, a dog crate with a cat crate inside, a covered litterbox with a cardboard box and a gallon of water on top, and an ez-up, still in its bag.]
Finally, FINALLY, things have lined up so that I can start to build.
I got the folding tables set up, with sort of a workshop, not great, but it’s working so far. It gets shade in the late afternoon, & Tyrava shields it from the wind most of the time … when the wind is behaving, which is intermittent at best.
Plus I got lumber. A lotta lumber. Have you LOOKED at the prices for lumber these days? Ye GODS.
(I will gently remind you of the gofundme; the description is RIDICULOUSLY out of date, but money still goes to the overall cause of ‘we build thing to live in’.)
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