My Recent Obsession

I must be a crazy woman.  In my spare time I've been compiling information on the requirements of a DIY house-building project.  I call it the Imaginary House.  It's my guilty pleasure.

Guilty because the trailer didn't pan out, and I spent $800 to get a series of unpleasant, practical, and "you'd think I'd know better" lessons.  The trailer is going nowhere.  It started going nowhere within the first week and when we had our unexpected relocation, I decided to scrape what remained of my dignity into a thimble and abandon the thing.  I could gripe and complain, but the fact of the matter is that I really needed those lessons to know what not to do with the Imaginary House.

~Imaginary House Rule #1: Have a very precise cost analysis of all materials required, money set aside with which to purchase them, extra money for unexpected expenses, and purchase all materials ahead of time.  (You'd think I'd know better...)

~Imaginary House Rule #2: Be capable of doing everything yourself.  If you can't do it entirely by yourself, have money set aside to hire someone to do it.  (Since hiring someone is expensive, might as well learn how to do it by yourself.)  People might volunteer to help.  That's very nice.  Don't expect them to follow through.  People have busy lives.

~Imaginary House Rule #3: Understand the logistics of everything.  Have a clear plan for how every little piece of every step works and do not deviate.  People will tell you the "correct" way to do things.  Unless its a safety issue, thank them, then ignore them.  They do not necessarily have a vested interest in completing the project.  They do not necessarily have a working knowledge of what you want the project to look like.  And even if they do have a working knowledge that could greatly improve your project, refer back to Rule #2.  Nothing sucks like waiting around for several months for someone to finish the key element of one comparatively small piece of a project that only they know how to do.

~Imaginary House Rule #4: This is more like a dire warning about rule #3.  I like to think I'm not so arrogant as to ignore a professional when they tell me I'm doing something wrong.  Normally I'm a strong advocate for listening to other people and considering their advice.  The problem with this comes when they tell you you're doing something wrong then refuse to offer a workable alternative.  So, when issues arise with Rule #3, consult Rule #2.  If someone tells you doing something is vital to the completion of your project, does doing that something depend entirely on them finding the free time to do it for you?  They might think they're helping by offering to do this complicated thing for you.  But really, they're not.  Nothing sucks like being stuck on a project with nothing to do for several months because someone started to do something vital that you don't understand and didn't finish it.

So... yeah, those are the first rules of my building plan for the Imaginary House.  They sound fantastically bitchy.  I do apologize.  I had a lot of help from several well-meaning people on the trailer, and it wasn't anybody's fault (expect probably mine) that it became such an absolute disaster.  There were several points during which, if I'd had any leadership qualities at all, I should have taken charge and said, "No, we're going to do it this way."  However, I have no leadership qualities.  I'm an antisocial person.  I'm not a team player, and my plans for the trailer should have reflected that.

So, because of this, my Imaginary House plans will be based on the assumption that I don't play well with others, except possibly Fiance.  If something needs to be done, I will do it myself.

Of course, this opens up a whole new door that I would never have expected to open in the past: the sheer mental joy of learning everything about building a house from the foundation up.

Last week, I spent hours trying to figure out how to correctly design and hand craft large beam trusses for a cathedral-style ceiling.  This week, I'm beginning to look at electricity.  Half the challenge is finding out how these things work in the first place.

I should mention that I'm one of those odd folks who gets an enormous jolt in the pleasure center by learning something new and foreign.  I'm in house-building heaven, weighing the pros and cons of different roofing materials because installing roofing is something people always tell me to hire someone else to do.  How many people who've never worked as roofers install their own roofs?  And what about all the stuff that goes on underneath the roofing material?  Trusses?  Support beams?  How about some fancy-looking purlins?

Roofs used to scare me.  I didn't know how they were designed, and because I didn't know that, I assumed that I'd have to hire someone to put them up for me, thus tremendously increasing my imaginary building costs.  Before roofs it was plumbing.  How on earth does plumbing work?  And then I saw youtube videos of people who'd installed tankless water heaters in DIY off-grid housing and some of the mystery's gone.

I feel reasonably confident that I can install my own plumbing, build my own roof, and assemble my own walls.

So now I'm studying electricity, which is perhaps the biggest and scariest of the big scary things I don't know how to do.  I'm not sure I'll be able to make electricity work for me.  I might have to cave a little and hire an electrician to make sure I don't burn my house down or electrocute myself.  But I'm going to study it first.  I want to understand it.  I want to know how it works.  I want it done my way.

I'm sure that sounds spoiled and bratty.  Maybe it is, but I want to understand the Imaginary House.  I want to build it and, having built it, I want to be able to dissect it with my eyes and identify all the inner workings that make it what it is.  If something breaks down, I want to understand why and how.  I want to know which parts broke down and how those parts can be fixed or replaced.  I want to be capable of doing the fixing/replacing myself.  I don't want to feel helpless in the Imaginary House until a professional comes and magically fixes whatever broken thing I don't understand.

Of course, there is a possibility, the Imaginary House will never be built.  It is imaginary after all.  If that's the case, I still want to learn and understand how it works.  If only because it's way too fun to learn about.

CHICKENS!!!! :)

So we are now the proud owners of CHICKENS. :)  So happy.  So excited.

I bought four pullet chicks, and my mother-in-law bought two pullets and one chick of indescriminate gender.  Their names are as follows.  Mine are Wings, Spotlight, Shadow and Tiny.  Hers are Pipsqueak (Pip), Star and Paulie/Polly.

I didn't expect them to be so ADORABLE!  The tub (which we will convert to a bathtub after they're grown) is full of the sound of little cheeps.  I'm trying to look up all their requirements.

Plus, I'm rotatilling the area where our garden will be.

And I'm trying to resist picking them up and holding them and cuddling them, and holding them some more :)

Anyway, here is the first in what will inevitably be a long stream of chicken pictures:

Aren't they just the cutest little things?

Yogurt Attempt 3. Success. Labneh Attempt 1...

Hopefully, I don't kill any more gallons of milk trying to do this.  I know I will.  It happens.

I am not a master yogurt-maker by any stretch of the imagination.  Streptococcus thermophilus (as the name suggests) loves heat.  But if you get it too hot, it will die.  This last batch, instead of trying to play it safe at the low end of thermophilus's temperature range, I cranked it up and started working with the high end of the bacteria's heat tolerance.  My thermometer kept fogging up, so I kept having to rinse it and restart my measurements.  Which meant I was far hazier than I would have liked on the exact temperature of the milk and the heating bath in the cooler.  (I got a cooler this time, because I was tired of making perfectly good yogurt and letting it sit in a too-cold house overnight.)

But it survived.  I'm pretty sure if I do it all over again, I'll run the risk of killing my starter, but in a few more batches I think I'll get good and comfortable with it.  (As an added bonus, everyone in the family will have enough sour cream substitute, soup thickener, fro-yo, and smoothies to last them a lifetime.)

Who ever thought that cooking up a batch of bacteria could be so exciting?  (Or stressful?)

So, here comes recipe #2.  Labneh.  Hopefully, this won't prove to be as tricky as yogurt was for me.

I'm going to copy the recipe down in my journal in case anything ever happens to that beautiful, wonderfully informative website.  (Have you ever noticed, it's always the websites with the best info that suddenly seem to shut down when you most need to find that recipe/chunk of information?)

Anyway, after copying that.  I'm gonna pull out my newly purchased gentleman's handkerchief and make myself some yogurt cheese.  Blue cheese, here I come!

PS: So I started making the labneh, and it looked so pretty sitting in the fridge, surrounded by veggies and healthy-type things, that I totally had to show it off.  So, here you go: Labneh!  (I still don't know how to pronounce the word... oh well.)

Journal, Cheese, and Goats.

So, yesterday was my official "end of stripping" cut-off.  It ended with a whimper and not a bang.  I guess I'm glad.  I don't know what a bang would have been like.  Probably unpleasant, considering the nature of the job.

Anyway, I am no longer a stripper.  Or at least, I no longer consider myself a stripper.  Which isn't saying much. I haven't considered myself a stripper for some time now.  I haven't worked in... a while.

I saw going to post something to mark the occasion, but as it turned out, I had a to-do list as long as my arm.  And other things just seemed more important.  For example:

I was researching cheese-making.  I knew I really wanted to do it, and I figured getting cozy with yogurt-making would be a good way to break into cheese.  But this was something I assumed I wouldn't be able/ready to do until I had my own livestock.  I particularly wanted goats.  I don't know why.  I just like goats.

So, I went online and finally looked up cheese-making.  I got this lovely site right here.  And I can't wait to try out their recipes.  The thing that got me laughing though, was that they use goat milk.  From their goats.

So, then I was researching goats.  So now I'm all kinds of excited about having goats someday in the future.  I've wanted goats for forever, but now I have another reason to want goats.  I now have recipes for cheese.  That I can make myself.  With milk from goats.

I guess I get manic about weird things.  Anyway, in order to do any of these things I so very much want to do, I need to figure out how to make yogurt without destroying gallon after gallon of grocery store milk.  If I can make yogurt, I can make lebneh.  If I can make lebneh, I can try to make... yeah, just visit the link above.

In all of that confusion, I got myself a journal at the Walgreens.  A cheap thing.  The cheapest I could find.  It is now my new bestest best buddy (after my fiance).  I spend a massive amount of my spare time visiting websites for all kinds of information.  How to make relaxing bath salts.  How to make your own soap.  How to make your own cheese.

So, that's great and all, but the problem is that I usually have to re-read most of each of these lengthy articles to get the ingredients and steps of preparation of a lot of these things.  A good writer adds entertaining anecdotal whatnots to their article, and most of the articles I read are written by excellent writers and bloggers.  So, I find myself wasting lots of time fishing through my massive bookmarks collection for the right page that has the right recipe.  Having done that, I have to scroll through the entire article to find the right ingredients.  And then there's always the danger that I'll miss a step.  "You mean you needed flax seed flour for that?  But you didn't mention flax seed flour with all those other ingredients in paragraph six!"

See my problem?  So I went through and copied down all my favorite recipes and cures into this journal which I now find myself using for everything.  Wanna de-flea the cat?  Journal!  Wanna make the beet hummus you can't stop eating?  Journal!  How do you plant garlic?  Journal!

So far I've copied twenty pages of information into that thing, and I'm nowhere near to stopping yet.  How do you make cheese?  This must go into the journal.  What do goats eat?  Journal!

I love it.  Everything in there is scattered in this disorganized hodge-podge.  And at the same time, because it's all hand-written, I remember where everything is just by the feel of the pages.  (It's weird, but I'm like that with stuff I touch.  Particularly stuff I write.)

At some point, I do want to write an index on a piece of loose-leaf and shove it in there.  And I think I'm going to print out the cheese-making instructions, because those are very detailed and my hands are already cramping.

But I'm very happy today.  I'm also very energized, because I couldn't sleep last night and I made up for it with lots and lots of coffee.  So, I'm typing all this a mile a minute, and feeling perfectly wonderful with Everything while I'm doing it.  Oh, blissful euphoria of coffee.  My only drug.

So, I'm making a tincture (?) of rosemary and mint in vinegar.  I know it's supposed to be used for cleaning, but I'm thinking I might use it to wash my hair.  I've been using the vanilla/clove/vinegar spray in my hair and its worked out wonderfully.

But now I've got to run off and do more errand-y kinds of things.  If anyone's reading this, I hope you're having a good day.  I will be until the coffee filters out of my system. :)

"...and that was when I realized I was a hippie."

In the chaos of loading all of our belongings (packed carefully away in boxes) into the van that would transport them to our new home, my fiance and I were both repeatedly impressed by how much stuff we have.

We'd already decided to discard or store away the majority of it.  There's not enough room in a trailer for all our junk.  If you've ever seen a cluttered tiny house, you'll know why we're resistant to letting more than what is absolutely necessary enter our future home.

Both of us have remarked at this point on what a cleansing experience it will be to let go of all the material excesses we've been carting around all day.  We don't need this much stuff.  In fact, it's downright embarrassing that we own so much stuff.  What's the point in having boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff, up to the point that we don't even know how much stuff we actually own because it's all been buried under more boxes of other stuff?

So we'll be garage-saling and ebaying and craigslisting away a lot of our excess stuff.  I look forward to this process.  I think my fiance does, too.  At first, it seemed frightening.  Get ride of that leather jacket I've never worn?  Get rid of that electric fireplace that cost me all that money even though I've only used it twice?

And then it just seemed like a relief.

And that was when I realized I've become a hippie.

It's been over a month since I've washed my hair the traditional way.  (Which isn't to say that my hair is dirty.)  My wishlist on pinterest is dominated by essential oils.  Just today I told my fiance we should give patchouli a try.  I want to buy lemon oil to keep away the spiders and lavender oil to spray on my clothes before I go hiking (to keep the ticks and fleas away).

I want to grow my food this summer.  I want it to be organic.  I want to harvest the seeds so I can replant next year.

We want to live off-grid.  Way off-grid.  We want a solar- and wind-powered house.  I want to turn our black water into manure that I can spread in the vegetable garden.  Today, when it rained, I looked at my future in-law's house and thought, "I wonder if they'll let me set up a rain barrel?"

I don't think any of these things (or even all these things in concert) necessarily make me a hippie.  However, I don't think the majority of the conventional/mainstream, non-hippie world will be able to tell the difference.

So that's that for now.  And now I need to read about organic soap nuts.

More Clothes Washing

My fiance and I have been working more on our laundry system.  We purchased a set of buckets to wash and wring the clothes in, and when those proved to be less than desirably efficient, we bought a janitor's mop bucket virtually identical to the one I used at my first job.


(I wasn't a janitor.  I was... well, these days they're refered to as "direct support professionals" although at the time I worked there, they had a different politically correct title, which didn't matter much since the nearly toxic levels of political correctness in that company dictated a new change in title to something more politically correct every other week.  As for what I did: picture a glorified candy striper.)

So we got the mop bucket, and things have been going smoothly.  Since we're not allowed to dry clothes outside, I've rigged a wire in the living room, going from the closet doorframe to the practice pole to the window frame.  Add a little duct tape, and we now have our second load of laundry drying in the middle of the living room.  Certainly not glamorous, but it seems to work.

We also bought an oil lamp.  I've been leaning more an more off-grid in my design ideas for the gypsy wagon, and last week, my fiance suggested that we light it at night with oil lanterns.  (It's got a lot of windows, so there won't be much light shortage in the daytime.)  The oil lamp produces a surprising amount of light.

It leaves a rather distinct paraffin smell, but that doesn't bother me.  I've even temporarily suspended my health-nuttiness to consider dabbing scented oils on the inside of the hurricane glass.  I might not eat sugar anymore (health issues: sometimes being sick will make you healthy) but there's a scented oil I bought once called "sugar cookies" which does its name justice.

So, we've got the laundry situation figured out (I expect we'll need to work out future kinks, but I'm not afraid of it anymore) and the lighting situation seems to be working well.

Our friend R. says Tractor Supply has an tiny cast iron stove that would fit well into the corner, which would take care of the heat and even give me a place to keep my tea warm in the winter.  In the summer, I'm thinking we might grill or build an outdoor brick oven...?

If this happens, then we might not need to buy a new stove to go into the trailer.  We'll still need a new fridge, but we can use the old kitchen sink.  Of course, cooking in bad weather will be an issue...

Plus, I have no idea what kind of bathtub we want to buy.  And I need to make us a toilet.  And for that I'll need to get my lazy butt to work and make some money.

Off-Grid Prep: Washing Clothes

It's possible my fascination with off-grid living began with a washing machine.  The washing machine at my apartment complex to be exact.  The one that keeps eating my quarters.  It's a small thing-- a dollar here, seventy-five cents there-- but it was enough to lead me to this website: http://www.off-grid.net/2010/04/22/diy-washing-machine-and-homemade-laundry-soap/

Inspired, I vowed to one-day wash my own clothes by hand and avoid ever losing any more quarters to an unnecessary washing machine.  This week, I finally washed some clothes by hand.

A bit of background.  Apparently, what the lady on the first website made a modern-day equivalent to what was refered to as a dolly tub and dolly stick. *Shrug.*  Seemed like a good idea to me.

Unfortunately, I did a lot of this on a budget.  I still haven't been working.  At this rate, I could get a job doing anything at all and earn more money than I'm earning at present.  I've been looking into job options.  This sitting at home doing very little, with no money to do it with is getting on my nerves.  I feel like a sponge.  I feel like I'm not pulling my own weight.  I've been assured otherwise, but...

So, I bought a plunger, and filled the bathtub with dirty clothes (mine, so if this went wrong my fiance's work clothes wouldn't be ruined) and warm water.  I didn't have anything to poke holes in the plunger with, but that didn't cause any problems.  In fact, everything went very well.

I used store-bought washing detergent because I still haven't gotten together the ingredients to make my own.  I didn't use much of it-- partially because I think they try to get people to use way more detergent than they really need, partially because I didn't want super-sudsy clothes if this went wrong.

I had that "learning" sensation I get when attempting something completely foreign as I began.  I kept worrying that maybe I wasn't doing this right, even though I logically I knew I couldn't screw it up to badly.  It was clothes.  Secondhand jeans, some underthings and a few hoodie sweatshirts.  Nothing I can't live without.  It was still a very weird experience.

And fun.  At least the plunging part was.  I tried to sprinkle the soap evenly across the entire bathtub, then I started plunging everything.  I was trying to get soapy water into everything so I did a rather excessive amount of stirring and plunging.  In the future I don't think I'll have to plunger my clothes quite that much.  And at the same time, that was the fun part.  The water turned brown, which surprised me because I didn't think anything I did with them was that dirty.

Anyway, after draining out that water to the best of my ability and pouring in fresh water to rinse it with, I started wringing out my clothes.  This was the part I now realize I should have done more research on.  I'm reasonably strong, more or less.  I can climb a metal pole and suspend my body in midair for several seconds at a time with nothing but my hands ot hold me in place.  Let me tell you, though, wringing out wet clothes by hand is a chore.  It's kind of like picking up an unweildy medicine ball and trying to squeeze its insides out.

Drying the clothes after that inexpert wringing was rather difficult as well.  We aren't allowed to hang our clothes to dry at this apartment complex, so I had to run them through the dryer twice.

This means I've revised my wish list to include brand new mop bucket with its own wringer.  (The woman whose article originally inspired me on this venture wanted the same thing.)  So, that's my goal.  Which I can't afford yet because I have no money.

So, that's my first adventure washing clothes the way my great grandparents did.  It wasn't an absolute success, but I think next time I try it'll go a lot smoother.