Hi everyone, It's been busy and cold here on Bonesnapper Ridge. Lots of stuff has happened in the past few months, and I apologize for not updating more frequently, but Ill try to make it happen. I am going to break stuff out into separate posts, and then I can do updates on those.
In this post, I want to talk about all other *other* stuff that's been going on here.
SNOW
As you know, Bonesnapper Ridge is in California, and one thing CA is not really known for (especially in my part of CA) is snow. I am at about 2200' in elevation and I got some of that snow, about 16" at the deepest. That is 100% unheard of where I am at. Typically down in the valley, we might get a few inches a few times a year, and it doesn't last more than a day. This year, I had snow on the ground for a month. I stayed up here the whole time with just a couple of emergency trips to town to get food, fuel for the generator, and heating. It was a pretty sketchy drive down the mountain dirt roads and back in my Jeep, but I made it. The last two miles to my property is on private roads that are not maintained by the county, and there are only two people above me, so the road was not plowed at all. Just the occasional tracks by someone needing to go to town.
My house has a fairly low slope pitch roof, and the awning over the deck is nearly flat. This is usually OK because we typically don't get 16" of snow. On the back side of the house, the snow would slide off every couple of days, but the front couldn't go anywhere because it would slide down to the awning over the porch and stop. One day the awning decided it had enough and collapsed in one spot. I spent the next half day on a ladder with a garden hoe raking as much snow off as I could.
The temperatures were in a place I was not prepared for either. The only bathroom (at the time) was in a small 10'x10' building external to the house with no power or other sources of heat. On the first night of really cold temperatures, all my water lines froze (some broke, and I had to fix them), and the toilet itself. Since there is no insulation or heat in the bathroom, the toilet was frozen solid! It wouldn't have mattered if the water lines did not freeze, the bowl was a big ice cube.
The day it started snowing, I put in all new PEX water lines in the house. Ran to the kitchen, bathroom, and laundry. I was able to get cold water hooked up and fully insulated so that did not freeze. I still don't have hot water in the house. The only hot water is in the external bathroom, and the heater is broken. It leaks like crazy from something freezing and cracking in there. I do have a new-to-me hot water heater that I need to install, but it will need its own little building outside to live in.
When I bought this place, the whole house was gutted. They took everything out but left everything under the house alone. Meaning that I had grey water and sewer all connected. However, the sewer was not connected to the septic tank.
Since I had water in the house that was still running, and an ice block of a toilet outside that was not going to thaw for weeks, I decided it was a priority to get a toilet going inside the house. I discovered that the house sewer lines ran all the way out to the septic tank but were not connected. So I spent the time (in a foot of snow) to dig all that up and splice the house into the septic system. Excited by the prospect of having a toilet again, I ventured a couple of towns away (where they have a home depot) and bought a toilet, got it back, and that's when I discovered the "rough-in" of a toilet. Almost all modern toilets are built for a 12" rough-in, meaning that the center of the sewer pipe is 12" away from the wall. This old place built by slackers had a 10" rough-in. I went right back to where I bought it hoping I could exchange it for a 10" rough-in. Turns out NOBODY in the county sells them. I found a specialty place, and they wanted 3x as much as a normal cheap toilet. I finally found one a couple of counties away, bought it over the phone, and then a snowstorm hit. I was stuck here for a couple of weeks before I could get out and go pick it up. That was a rough couple of weeks. The outside toilet was frozen solid the whole time, and ill leave that up to your imagination how I dealt with that...
Anyway, I was able to get the new toilet, got it home, installed it and it worked! What an amazing feeling that was. I realized how much I took a toilet for granted most of my life. I have always been an outdoors kind of person, and camp a lot, but you get to go home after that. Home is where the toilet is.
That lasted about 2 weeks.
SEWER TROUBLES
About two weeks after I got the new toilet working, it stopped. It seemed like just a plunge job, but when it started coming back up through the bathtub (ugh), I knew the problem was further down. I tried snaking the line with the 20' I had via cleanout, but no luck. I ended up having to wait out the snow again until I could get to town. I tried to rent a 100' powered cable auger, but all three in town for rent were broken. I called down to the closest "city" and they wanted $165/day for the rental. I ended up buying a 100' flat bar snake locally and that still didn't work. I think there are two 90-degree bends that are really close to each other, and it just would not go past it. Now my options were to rent an expensive cable auger and not be sure that I could fix it, or for a little more, have a real plumber come up with theirs and their experience. I went with that route. He came up and could not fix it. He was able to get a camera in the system and we finally figured out what the problem was. The main sewer drain pipe collapsed underground. Whatever slackers built this place used corrugated 3" drain pipe (the stuff that's for routing water from downspouts away from the house) and buried it! I could crush that stuff with my hands.
There was no option, I had to replace all of it. I had an opportunity to have an excavator up here, so I waited until then to fix it. When the excavator got here and we had some time, I decided to leave the old drain pipe in the ground and dig next to it. All was going well, until the conduit-seeking excavator did what they do best, and tore out my water main and solar feed. We even looked at what path those would have taken to get from point A to B, and it should not have been where we were digging. But of course, it was... The slackers that built this place. Wow. Water and power are right on top of each other, snaking all over the place. So, ran to town, got the stuff I needed to fix THAT, and then I was able to finish putting in new 3" ABS drain pipe. And now it works great. Better than it probably ever has been.
TREES
I have a friend who owns a heavy equipment construction company. He is also a CDF-trained forester, and work for him was slow at the time. He was willing to come up here and work for what I considered a better deal than I would *ever* get for that type of work. He brought all of his tree-falling equipment, an excavator, a backhoe, and a track loader with several attachments.
What I wanted to accomplish while he was here, was to get rid of a really old trailer that was right where I wanted to build my "solar shed", where I will house all of the solar equipment, fall some big trees that were threatening the house, and some more trees that would eventually threaten the shop once its built.
We started by getting rid of the trailer by smashing it with the excavator and putting it in a dump trailer. From there we cut down a few standing dead trees that were near that area, and that went so fast, we just... kept going. More trees came out, more view opened up. He cut in a new flat space for a 20' shipping container. That was a very exciting week!
We ended up looking at the forest behind my house which was pretty thick and would be a fire hazard. We went back there and took out several dozen trees and cut in a new fire break road. I got all the required permits and we had a huge burn pile to get rid of all of the branches and brush generated by falling all of those trees. Huge and safe burn pile. We had the excavator to feed it, and the brush just kept coming. I ended up tending that fire for several days, in fact, it's still hot today. Just down to embers, but it's still there!
SOLAR SHED
I need a building to put my solar gear in. That's the inverters, batteries, and charge controllers for the solar panels. As well as all of the wiring and monitoring for the system. Since the equipment was a large investment for me, I wanted the shed to be somewhat fire-resistant. I initially thought I would build it out of cinder block. I did some estimating and discovered that anyway I build the shed with conventional materials was going to be expensive. Concrete foundation seemed like the logical choice for the floor, which is expensive and I considered stick framing with metal siding, fire-resistant siding, etc. All options were about the same cost, and most were less than buying a 20' shipping container and dropping it there. So that's what I did. I found one that was pretty inexpensive, bought it, and hauled it up here.
Those things get pretty warm in the summer, and cold in the winter. I decided to build a room inside of the container where I would put R13 insulation all the way around so the equipment is protected from heat and cold. I am going to have plywood walls so I can easily mount stuff to it, and on the wall that has the high voltage equipment, I will put concrete Hardie board. I just finished installing 2" rigid insulation in the ceiling right before coming in to write this blog.
And, well, that pretty much brings us up to the minute!
I am going to work on writing a dedicated blog post for the Solar Install right after this one. That project is coming up fast and will be in parallel with everything else. I can't wait to have a bowl of cereal!
More pictures of this are to come with the Solar Project.
