So, we began the joyous task of putting up the plasterboard in the garage. It’s… both not as bad and as bad as I thought. The actual getting of it up onto the ceiling isn’t too terrible – largely because it’s 8′ up, not 13′ up, and it’s flat not sloped.
Both of these things make it easier. It’s also a smaller space. Howeeeever. The trickier bit is that the garage is full of ‘stuff’. Rebecca has deigned to move; she’s fired up successfully four times now, and so on Monday when we started on the project she pootled out of the garage, I turned her around so that this time the exhaust will be pointing out of the garage when we start, and sat her outside for the day.
Plan is to do that today.
Then I’ll start on some of the fiddly bits.
We went for a less good finish, but more rapid coverage, with our board tessellation. Ideally you shouldn’t have boards going in different directions, but we do, because that works better for speed. But we did also glue them and screw them so we haven’t abandoned all our quality principles.
So today is mainly going to be cutting little bitty end-bits and some long, narrow runs. Popping those up and hopefully we should be mostly done. Then we can start on the joyous fun of insulating the walls and putting the drywall up there.
In other news, we’re slightly concerned that the combo of heavy rain and high winds may have given our chickens a tiny bit of frostbite on their combs. Well, two of them. Mymble seems unaffected, which would make sense, she’s the one that sits furthest from the breeze being head of the pack.
We’ve tweaked the coop airflow to a more winterised setting – blocking off several of the vents. I’ll stick my head in there tomorrow morning – immediately when I let the chickens out – to see whether we need to increase the venting a little. I really don’t want them to be insufficently ventilated, but also don’t want them to get frostbite :(
It’s funny because it’s not actually been that cold – we’ve only had a few days of frost this winter, so far. Which is quite worrying for pests in the garden, and for the trees who probably haven’t gone properly dormant.
What we have had, instead, is a ton of rain. Days and days of solid rain. Which led to the discovery that the replaced sump pump is, as I feared, not triggering at a low enough point. It doesn’t actually have any kind of adjustment mechanism – oddly – so we had the fun task of digging under the pump to drop it a bit (it turned out that actually the pump probably used to sit a couple of inches lower because down below the silt and crap there was a small concrete paving slab.
Having done that I also used a bit of cut-off pex pipe to make the pump trigger about 1cm earlier. I’m hoping that combined, those tweaks will keep it drier under there. It doesn’t look like it was actually getting up high enough to hit the wooden piers that support the house, thankfully.
Come the summer when I’m not trying to dig out silty soil from a puddle while lying in a puddle I may try and find the enthusiasm to tackle this again and maybe get it another 2 or 3 cm lower. And at the same time clear out some of the crud. But to do that I’ll have to extend the pipe that I put in… it’s already at the limit of its flex. Ah well.
