Our Barn
It’s a bit chilly today. Not bad. I don’t have the heater running, but I do have a quilt wrapped around my legs to cover my bare feet.
Last weekend a crew showed up to work on the barn. The weekend’s crew was Lorr (our son) and two of his friends, Austin and Roy, and Terry’s brother Walt and my friend Mindy’s husband Wayne. My friend LouAnn came to help with feeding the workers and Mindy came as Wayne’s chauffeur. Terry stayed on the ground and ran the tractor, Walt ran the crew and Austin played gofer. We’re close . . . there’s a bit more to do before the sheathing, tar paper and metal can go on the roof, but it should be just another weekend’s work.
Once the roof’s on I’ll encourage Terry to get some walls in and move everything from his shop. I’ll have to do some fancy electrical stuff to make it happen, but getting rid of his current shop makes this a value added task. His current shop is an old rotting leaky building parked on bricks in the middle of what’s supposed to be additional parking. It’s got to go. I can build another rocket stove in the new shop to keep him warm when he needs to work out there.
Mindy, in her supervisory role
On the house rocket stove front, I lit off my test stove to show a couple more people how it works. Pretty cool! This week I purchased more things to play with. I now have a couple sheets of 6-6-10-10 wire and two more sheets of cement lath. Also, a sack of silica sand, three sacks of mason’s sand and a bag of portland cement. Once I get the riser pipe (6″x53″) I will cast the curved brick for the end of the burn chamber. I’ve been debating how I’m going to set the riser, whether I’m going to weld on tabs or a flat circular collar or . . . haven’t decided. I’m liking the collar idea but even that has some drawbacks . . . we’ll see. I’ve about given up finding a water heater core to use as the container for the riser insulation. I think I’ll swing by Ace today and pick up enough hardware cloth to do the job and stop trying to find something to suit at the recycle yard. They’re starting to roll their eyes at me which is never a good sign.