Building a Homestead in 100 Days - Day 76

Come on, get in. We don't need to load it that much, if at all. Dangerously low on hay. Probably just 10 days. Finally got a hold of my hay guy and he's got a date for me Monday. So perhaps Sunday seed day will spend getting ready. Honey, kid calls me and my first question is, what's wrong? What's wrong?

Is the lever supposed to be up on the wood boiler?

Yeah, it should be down. It shouldn't be beeping like that. Where's that chicken? Look, it's up in the hay rack. There you go. Nice.

Someone from our class—

you got some? Yeah, day 76 of 100. Big day today for these pigs. We're not going to get them out today, although we're going to get them out very soon. We've got to get our Everflow, our mobile Everflow waterer situation down before we get these guys out in the field because it's winter and we don't want to be dealing with frozen water out in the field. I think maybe the boys are continuing to clear Guys, we're coming down to the wire. We've still got some things to do with clearing access, clearing the land, and establishing the water. But we're narrowing in on 100 days of building a homestead. 2 acres, this was not usable to being usable.

Pour out the cows and put some deep bedding in.

Yeah, but breakfast is going to be about ready. We should probably go up. I think the boys will do the deep bedding and the cows later. That chicken would rather be a sheep or a cow, I think. I don't think it even thinks it is because look, why doesn't she go with her buddies? Next problem. Well, two problems. This is blinking red and green, so it just needs some— it means it's half dead. But we can't make the sun, honey. We have to switch the batteries out and get that one charging. Well, switch it out with the, with the one that's working and turn it towards the sun, and this blinking light will be facing this way. Instead of that way, which is our bedroom window at night. That's one of the most exciting things your mom and I like about living in the country. It's dark at night. Guess what, Jonah? Eric texted me last night. Eric, our spring guy, saw this and said, hey, you got to cut that pipe down. Like I said, I said, that's funny, Jonah said that. Sometimes he's smarter than I. I just need to know when that is. It's still working because— but this inlet is immersed And it would be easier if that pipe were below it and this was having a little waterfall. Yeah, I was hesitant to cut that because you can't uncut it. It's not like it's that hard to get another— yeah, piece, 3/4 inch. Where are you going?

To give people hay.

Okay, then come up for breakfast. By that time it'll be ready. Hey, supposed to come Monday. Okay, so Sunday we're cleaning up the pole barn. This is my great love today. We've got my super beefed up thingamajibberger contraption insert into the water line turn-off valve ready to go. Well, some of them. We've got, I don't know, 7. They're not all complete. Like this one doesn't have this piece. I could look at every one or I could go to the field and in the field I could see, I think, more clearly in my head what exact parts we need to order. I'm a try it in the field kind of guy and then figure out what we need to do, as opposed to figure out what we need to do then try it in the field. Yeah, that's definitely done. Hey, I wish you wouldn't do that to the golden play button. Can somebody get it? It's just senseless.

Is that real gold?

It's supposed to be maybe very thin layer, but— That is the million subs subscriber button reward trophy. Thank you guys so much, each and every one of you, for subscribing. Uh-oh. Well, plans might be all out the window if it's gonna rain. Tomorrow, rest day. I'm not shooting. You said good. That means you guys can do the chores if you want. I'll have to capture any of it. Tomorrow's our Saturday. We take a rest. There's not that much exciting going on. If something exciting does happen, we'll tack it on to the next vlog during this 100-day challenge, so don't be surprised if there's no vlog tomorrow. Thank you for understanding that. It's twofold. We rest and we need that, and you see nothing exciting happens, so it's not an interesting movie. Hey, are we going? No, we're playing. Come on, let's go.

Can you tilt grain?

Sure. And I like it when the kids boss me around because that means they're taking initiative and responsibility. 10 pounds still, or what? Does this look about right? That reminded me, our hide lady said, hey, you better put some more salt on that. She saw the video. We ain't gonna use no more of that Redmond's, that's expensive. That's table salt. We're not gonna eat this, so we don't have to be as peculiar about our salt. That's what she said to get down at Tractor Supply. All right, I think we got it salted. Starting to mist. I think we can work in that, given that it's not so cold. What have you done? We've got Hope in a harness. Is she gonna pull you? Yeah, yeah, he said. Look! Want to get on there, Henry? He's stomping around like a boss baby. Start with lightweight. Hey, let's see if she'll carry a bucket. You don't want to do it? All right, we got to get back to work. We got to beat this drizzle. We're gonna need to get on our project. Before this drizzle turns into rain. Hey, did you see what they did to Hope? Yeah, I'm back, honey. You can't really leave, honey. She woofs down the alfalfa. She don't even come up for breath, she just woofs it down just as fast as she can get it. Oh, she did come up for breath! Oh my gosh! But see how Flossie, she just comes up and gets it down? Not Honey. She's actually going a little slower right now because she's probably already eaten 6 pounds of alfalfa. Daddy in! We're gonna go set these all out. This is a complete shutoff in the line and an exit adapting to a water hose connection. There you are! I thought you were gone. You've been here the whole time. This is only missing one thing and it's going to be complete. This gets a quick connect so we can easily connect our hose. Let's get a bucket or a bin for these things.

Big enough?

No, let's use maybe a bigger one. It needs to hold all these things. Here, let's take some male-to-male connectors and our toolkit. Okay, y'all can start clearing. I'm gonna take Henry. Henry, you come with us. You'll be with us, okay? We'll all be over there together. You're actually having a good time. Now it's warmed up a little bit. We took him outside for a moment on that really cold day. Bundling them up. And his look when he came back inside was a betrayal, not of us, but like the one— the place I love so much. It was so painful. Okay, everybody needs to find a spot. Henry will sit in front of me. Oh, are you serious? We did not bring the bag. All right, I'll be right back then. It'll take me 5 minutes. Oh shoot, where's our hose? Oh yeah, that's right, we need to order 300 feet to get this far up. Maybe we're okay, we'll go back down the hill. Well, we still need our bags to attach these. I forgot that we lacked 300 feet of line, so we need to back down 300 feet to where our line is. We need our bag of hardware to connect this stuff. We'll go get the hardware and we'll come back up to the line. We have this creek, goes all the way— we're going to as far up as we can in our property, collects water there, and that water is just ever flowing. We'll come down this 1-inch line down into our new pastures where we're going to put the pigs to help us establish pastures, where we're gonna put the ever flow water. Henry, let's go! You're having a good time in the woods. This is a neat spot because we have a trail coming up here, and I've noticed we have another trail right through there. With our Mini X and track loader, we can put a culvert in here on the creek and clear that road. The goal is to just have it just tap these logging roads so we can have access throughout the entire property and just, I don't know, make, make use of it. Hike it, ride the dirt bikes on it, Sally. You know, it's too steep up here and tight for animals, but still, it'd just be nice to come out and enjoy nature, wouldn't it? Okay, everybody on. We're at top of the line, all that we have. You guys can stay here and play, okay? It'll be much faster if I go by myself. Oh shoot, you got to be kidding me. I'm going to have to ask the boys where they put it. Where's the torch?

The wire room, that shelf.

You put it on a shelf in the wire room? All right, let's next time put it back. Got it. Hey, you guys, bring that torch. Who wants to run the torch? Okay, Lily, get me a male to male. I'm a big fan of these clip-ons. All right, I think we don't even need a ball valve up there. We're not gonna have a trough at the top of the mountain, are we? We'll probably put our trough more down.

Nice.

You can try the next one. Okay, now the next one We'll put in a— one of our connections. We need to have a name for it. Connection thingamajig. There we go. Our next connection's down the hill. Do we drive the four-wheeler down now to the next flat spot way down there? Actually, we can make this connection. We can actually connect this hose first. Oh boy, I'm suddenly feeling chilled. Hope I'm not getting sick. Whatever Rebecca has is bad. All right, Rebecca's got a cough, major headache made from the major congestion. There we go. What do you say we walk down and come back to the four-wheeler. Sure. All right, Birdie, let's see what we have. This is fast. Give me the other hose. Lily getting our other line, bringing it up. Okay, all you do is pull that off. I can hold you now. I just— for a second. Okay, let's keep going down the mountain. That's the only one where we have everything we need. We have enough on this one. They're a little further away from us. We can turn this off. Right here, and then the water will be forced to go in here. That can be then where we connect the small hose for, say, the pigs are over here right now. Next stop, it's up the hill. I can't do it. I, I don't want to do it with 4 kids— 3 kids, a camera, tools. It's easier to walk. Stopping every 100 feet. Let's hope this one comes off. You're putting all your strength into it, that's for sure.

I think the coal bag Want to finish it?

Sure. Why? You sure?

I'm not good at it.

We're almost done. Hey, Henry, how are you doing? This one does not have the 1-inch adapter. You can only do one more. Pull it tight. We'll go get You guys done? Yeah, you are. How much did you clear? 2 trees, one each? He nodded his head.

About 25.

25, okay, good job. We're going up further there. We're not quite at 2 acres yet, and we got a little more. More pasture means more meat for Mr. Rhodes and his chidlers. Yeah, it means a horse for Lily.

You can't eat my horse.

Oh, I can't? Suppose I get hungry for a horse. Want to mix it up a little bit?

Store.

Tired of eating just pork and lamb and beef. Here's what I'll do. We've lost our yellow tape, right? So I'll order some more and we'll, we'll mark the rest of it, and that'll be good because we got less than 30 days, guys. So we're narrowing down in on this. It'll be good for the viewers to be able to see too how much we got left. But we did good progress on this water line today. It turns out we made it to the creek. The thingamajiggers aren't complete. We have to order a few things for them, but not nearly as much as I thought. I don't know why I get overwhelmed with running water line. It's not that difficult. It's just, uh, what'd that take us? Lily, an hour with chitlers, and we ran over 600 feet of water line. I should say we made the connections. This next little project, very exciting, has to do with the home remodel. I'll give you a tour right now of what will be out here. This is the south side. We're going to turn this barn, this house barn, into a passive solar house as much as we possibly can. This doesn't need to be a covered porch. If we were designing this anew, you wouldn't put a covered porch on the south side. It doesn't let much light into the house, it doesn't capture the sun. So this is going to become a sunroom and open deck here for grilling and being in the sun, sun, and here a total sunroom. We'll have an entrance here like we always have. Let's go around this way. See our dock? Our current dock will become— and that's— this is our thoughts now, things change of course. This will be our main entrance, and this will be covered and walled and screened because this is a nice place in the summer evening when the sunset is starting to go over this way. We've got shade here and it's cooler here. You wouldn't want to take a meal out on the porch. That's going to become a bathroom. 2 bedrooms. We just went through the kitchen. The kitchen then will expand and be here all the way to here. The kitchen and the living room on the south side. That's it too. You don't want to put a bedroom on the south side. Bedroom you want to put on the north side. So 2, 3 bedrooms over there. Modifying our master bedroom a bit. You all right, Rebecca? You decent? You surviving? Donna's gonna move to the back end of the master bedroom. We have room, we have unfinished space beyond all this that we can tap into. Oh, and I'm excited about this. We'll have a little deck here for ourselves, a little privacy, check on the animals, get some sun. We got some cool stuff we're gonna do downstairs with a garden kitchen and a milk parlor. Not that we're gonna milk there, but process our milk. We'll catch up with you in a second, babe. This is going to become a library. It'll become a library, studio, office. The kids' room would be on the proper side. Guys, if you're designing a house, you want to face your house towards the south if you're in this northern hemisphere and take advantage of the sun, take advantage of the natural light, the warmth, and put the bedrooms on the north side because they will naturally be cooler. You only spend the night in them, and you spend your waking hours in rooms where you want natural light. Your vitamin D drops per your request Any new additions besides that for your healing? You've got a heat pad. What is this you have? The cooties? And nature's greatest natural healer, that's distraction. What's the royal family up to now? It's just Diana and Charles. Hey, I hope to God I don't get this. You guys don't want to see me cough into the camera for a week, do you? All right. Enjoy that. One thing we're doing with this 100-day challenge is you want to clear in the winter when it's cool, when the weather's cool, you don't have that much chores. Like, chores are so easy right now and the leaves are clear, so super good time to do a clearing project. Why 100 days? Well, I mean, that's a good number. It ends when we go on a vacation, and boy will we need it after of that 100 days. Probably see us doing more of that in future vlogs, this measuring and whatnot. I'll get to that in a second. Speaking of that remodel, so we go on vacation, then we get back— well, the general contractor will be helping us out, isn't available till March-ish. So I hope that's still the case. Actually, let's make sure that's still the case when we get back from vacation. We need to work on clearing this house out. Where are we gonna live? Well, getting ready the log cabin for us to live in. Boy, that's going to be interesting. I plan on working closely with Seth and doing this remodel myself. I mean, Seth's got contacts with subcontractors, so we, we will be utilizing subcontractors, but hope to do a lot of the work ourselves. Not just me, the kids Rebecca. That's what will make it special, and that's what will make it our own, is if we work on it. I think we should make a difference between love and affection. Affection is, I don't know, something you can appreciate, you, you enjoy, it's there, you have affection for it. But I don't think you get love for something until you lay down your life for it, you know what I mean? For example, you might get affection for a new piece of land. It's beautiful, you see the potential, that's great. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. You will not love it until you start bleeding, sweating, and dropping tears on that land. This woodshed, not necessarily for a woodshed. Think it through. Permaculture design, you don't— I mean, the idea is neat to have wood near to your house. You got to realize, at least in North Carolina, we're burning wood 4 months out of 12. So, so that for 8 months, this is taking up valuable space. This is going to be our new barn. Right now our garage is our barn, but Rebecca would like to park the car in there again, and I don't see why not. That makes a lot of sense. Our machines will go in here, feed will go in here, and it's still central to what's going on, maybe even more so. We would want to have a landing platform for something around the wood boiler. I'm thinking we're going to start stacking wood in crates because we're getting a track loader. You could do this with a tractor or whatever. We will haul these crates. From wood being stored, I don't know, we'll probably build a shed on our, on our 2-acre expansion that we've done and have a, have a massive woodshed. And you could use a little trailer like this, pull it behind a mower, and just leave a place over here for it. And that you maybe there's a pull-through here, and then you just unload it kind of like what we do right now. We just do Henry cars, which is not a big deal, but I'm just hauling wood for stored wood in the, the barn here, the downstairs stalls, but I think that could be better utilized for something else. So it's going to be exciting. We're finishing this 100 days, we're then going on vacation. We'll take a 2-week break from YouTube, from everything, and then guys, we're looking at a passive solar permaculture home remodel. That's going to be exciting. Hang tight, I'm going to announce a little freebie for you guys here at the end since we are going to take a day off. Probably going to take a day off a week from vlogging unless super something super interesting is going to happen until the end of the 100 days. And then we'll resume our— well, we'll take a break for vacation, then resume our 5-day-a-week posting schedule. No show tomorrow. If something exciting happens, I'll tack it on to the next day. So what are you gonna watch until then? I have this— I believe it's 10-part, 10-part Homestead Crash Course. Gardenings, permaculture, design chickens, cows. Guys, we all lack knowledge, myself included. We're all learning. I've been learning through experience on the field for 15 years, and a lot of that is unpacked in this crash course and will help many of you, whether you're just starting out, just need a refreshment course. Go in there, it's free. You just sign up for my email list. Link is down in the description. Enjoy.