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So we’ve got this crazy idea of building our own garage. We were looking at kits, but they’re kind of steep… and building a proper wooden garage/barn the size we want it would be crazy expensive.

The pre-fabbed metal buildings are a little better, but we really think we can do it a lot cheaper just buying the materials ourselves. We have most of the gear necessary to make a metal frame barn, just by sinking the poles into the ground, welding frames to it and then tech-screwing corrugated sheetmetal roofing on top. Toss in a few hundred bucks in doors and windows and we should be golden.

We’ll have to see if the budget ever gets approved for it though, but it’d be nice to be able to change the oil on the cars in winter without freezing our nuts off in the process.

Since Duncan’s starting to fall into a routine, I’ve been managing to catch up on some of the crap I’d been meaning to do for the last two weeks. I finally had to service Duck’s home-brew aquarium filter – which isn’t bad… ~6 weeks between servicing in a sandy tank with a nine-inch turtle constantly kick crap around. It’s a colossal pain in the arse to pour all the gravel out, rinse all the muck out of it and then stuff it all back in, but given that it’s only every month or so I think I can deal with that. It keeps his tank nice and clean, and the tank no longer smells bad, so that’s the most important thing.

I got the lawn mowed once, but it needs doing again. It’s been raining every couple of days here lately, so there’s been no time for it to dry out. It’s been growing so bad that I decided it was now or never – I took the recycler off so the lawn mower would have an easier time, especially because there’s a crack in the base I need to fix somehow. I’m not sure if I can weld the pot-metal that the base is made out of or not, I might just look for a dead 21″ lawn mower with a briggs and stratton motor so I know it’ll fit and just swap the parts out. Regardless though, the lawn is cut short but still looks awful.

I still have to put the stereo back in the oldsmobile, which should make a pretty okay Hungry Hacker article because I’m putting a 98 cd player in a 93 oldsmobile. No progress on that yet though.

We cleaned up the fireplace/mantle again, even though it never gets used… so I’m not sure how the hell it gets so dirty. It’s an “open fireplace” at the moment, which is why we never use it – you burn so much wood and it doesn’t warm up worth a damn. We’re either going to put a stove in there, or maybe one of those fake electric fireplace insert just for “ambience”.

Finally, I broke out the Visual Basic again and wrote a little application for Sabriena to help her work, because the old “helper” app she was using isn’t updated for the new pay rates (so it makes her think she’s earned more than she has). It was amazing how much fun VB is because in a few clicks you can bang out a functioning app – but I still feel ashamed that it’s probably one of the programming languages I’m best at.

We were in Lowes’, picking up a replacement cartridge for our water filter, when we happened to walk by the section selling tubing. When we moved in, we had to push our fridge through the window because it was too big to fit through any of the doors. Unfortunately, this tore the tubing that feeds the ice maker, so we never got around to hooking it up.

So I saw that the tubing for it (1/4″ O.D.) was only about 9c per foot, and I thought that reconditioning the ice maker on a 20+ year old fridge would make a pretty decent article for Hungry Hacker. We picked up the line, and the rest of the stuff to hook it up to the water.

I came home, hooked it all up… and… it won’t make ice, and the water won’t stop dribbling. I tore the solenoid out and messed with it a bit while it was apart – it functions (the coils aren’t open) but the rubber bits are all mangled. I’m theorizing the mangled bits of rubber are probably stopping the water valve from closing, and the Ice valve appears to be seized shut. I started looking for part numbers, but most of them are illegible. I found one “kmls2208” but a cursory Google search didn’t turn up anything.

I did manage to find some of the entire solenoid assemblies that “look like they’ll fit” (and probably can be made to, with a little redneck ingenuity), so I’ll probably just buy the complete solenoid on ebay – looks like it’ll run me around $25. That’s a little more than I’d like to spend, so I may still try and free up the rubber parts, or try to find just that particular part rather than the entire assembly, but so far no such luck.

About four years ago I rebuilt the auger motor so we could dump bought ice into the ice bucket and have it dispense it… looking at Ice maker parts I’m glad I did that rather than just buy a replacement, because they’re about $100!

I’ll probably post more, and an entire Hungry Hacker article, complete with pics, when it’s all working. Unless I can’t get it working, in which case I’ll delete this post and pretend I never tried – I hate admitting failure.

I should begin this rant by stressing how completely and utterly unfit we were for quite some time back there… I ate way too much fast food and drank more soda in a weekend than anyone should probably drink in a month.

Little by little we’ve been changing our eating habits for the better, so somewhere quite some time back we started buying water and drinking that instead of soda. Why’d we buy water? Because our municipal water tastes terrible – it can be used to induce vomiting if you’re poisoned or anorexic.

However, there’s a problem with bottled water. It’s expensive. There’s also the secondary problem of Indiana has no real PET recycling programs so they’re pretty wasteful – but screw that, it’s expensive.. that’s the real problem!

So about a month ago we decided to buy a water purifier so we could drink tap water instead of buying it like suckers. We stopped in at our local home improvement store, and looked for the plumbing section. After a few brief moments of being distracted by fancy black toilets, copper kitchen sinks, expensive water softeners and gaudy faucets we finally found the purifiers.

It’s actually not expensive at all for an under-sink filter – about $45 for the whole setup, and about $6 a pop for replacement filters. We’d have to go through filters at a rate of 3 a week to cost more than bottled water – pretty unlikely.

The problem? It still tastes awful in my opinion. It’s not quite as bad, I can’t taste it when it’s cold and it’s drinkable at room temperature (as in I can keep it down, but it’s not an enjoyable experience)… Sabs says she can’t taste it and it tastes good – I dislike it though, especially when it’s warm.

On hot days it doesn’t come out of the faucet quite cold enough to taste good, so I’m going to buy the hardware to hook up the ice maker/water dispenser in our fridge to it so we can have it chilled and all that good stuff. The icemaker should work so maybe we can save money from buying ice in the summer too!

I got a little bit done on the “Great Room” in the last week or so. It’s nowhere near complete, heck, the sheetrock is nowhere near complete (probably got a good $200 left to go on that alone). But it’s getting there.

I removed all the pieces of plaster/cement that were hanging precariously, there really isn’t anything at the moment that could come crashing down on young heads at any given moment. That’s a good thing.

So we got part of the ceiling sheetrocked, the east-side fan hooked up. I ran the electrical wiring for the west-side fan and put witches hats on the ends of the wires because they’re live now. I tore out the old round arch that was put in sometime around the 60s I’m guessing – early enough to still be plaster and cement, but late enough to not be done properly. It’s back to the 7 foot square shaped opening that the house originally came with – hopefully we can dig up some of the original moulding that went around it too.

The wall behind the stove, I discovered when I removed the bullshit “rustic panelling” from behind it, is actually cement and it’s in pretty good shape. I am a little worried that the sheetrock behind this will discolor from the heat (because the panelling did too), so I’m researching how I can smooth up the cement and maybe pigment it to closely match whatever color we’re going to paint the walls. If I can do that, it won’t discolor, it won’t be a fire hazard (not that I’m worried about something bursting into flames – more that it might just look like shit after a few winters), and the cement/brick might even store a bit of heat when the fire goes out at night.

Overall, again, the hold up is money. I have the time and the drive to do it, just no funds at the moment… hopefully we can do a little each month.

So there’s a bush outside our dining room window, just on the edge of the parts of the garden bed I’ve done. I want to remove it so I can continue with the surface of the garden, but my wife noticed a Cardinal protesting rather loudly when anyone went near this bush.

We then noticed a nest in the top of it, so I pulled one of the larger unsplit logs over and stood on it to peek in the nest without disturbing it on the off chance it had eggs in it or something. Instead of eggs, I found chicks… they look newly born too. I snapped a couple pictures quietly with the camera and then left them alone – I guess I’ll tear the bush out after they fly the nest.

I’ve been planning on building a deck on the back of our house for about a year or so now, and things just keep coming up so we can’t afford it. Basically, the back part of our house just past the back door is always muddy. It’s un-even, and I think there’s a well under there. We’ll never get grass to grow there, so it looks terrible.

So we decided to cover it up with a deck, so we’d have a nice pretty area to hang out in the summer months and maybe we can keep the snow off it during the winter months. We have also looked at gazebos, one of which would look great on the corner of the deck as well, but that’s just dreaming at this point.

I’ve done a bit of yard work the last couple weeks, but there’s oh so much more to do. We’re not the messiest house on the street, but we’re not far off. We could honestly do with tearing out practically all the ratty-ass trees and replacing them, but that takes money and tools I don’t have.

As much as I try not to, I can’t help but be envious of people as you travel around. First and foremost, I’m jealous of folks who’s homes are t-shirt warm at all times during the winter. We have a ~2500 sqft wood stove, several space heaters and our house is still freezing on those really cold mornings – sure most of the people with consistently warm houses have tiny houses or appartments with central HVAC, but still.

The main thing I’ve been feeling recently is barn/garage envy. We’ve had several major things go wrong with our vehicles these last few months and I have scant but a gravel driveway to do any work in… not so much as a beach umbrella to keep the weather off me.

People out here can have houses that are falling apart, then they’ll have a huge barn 5x the size of their house that’s filled with all kinds of tools. The guy I bought the rims for my Suburban off even had two full-size four post car lifts in his barn!

Unfortunately, like my father, I only get to purchase tools when a pressing need arises for them. Compounding that issue was the fact we spent much of the last decade living in an appartment and taking public transport, which means that my selection of tools is somewhat limited, mostly to things relevant to the electronics and computer networking fields.

I’m slowly amassing a collection of handy gadgetry, but it’s slow going and it still doesn’t mean I have any place to put them.