We Survived the October Freeze!

With the weather we have had this past week it has been really hard not to put the camper on the truck and start driving south. We have talked about it a couple times and it is really tempting. The fact that we are seeing pictures of our friends in warm weather locations is not helping. That, plus Red and Pam keep sending me pictures of big bucks down in Texas. I was ready to drive down there even without the camper!

We got as low as -2F one night and the highs were in the teens a couple days.  In the past we have froze up in when the temps hit the teens. But now since we were in the garage I did not know how that would change things. I did not want to take a chance so we winterized the rig last Sunday. Then just to see how we would have faired I did a little experiment. I put a glass of water inside the belly where the "winterize" valve comes through the plastic housing. This is the point where we have froze up first in the past. I also put a glass of water outside the rig. Even though we have a heated belly this particular area is sectioned off from the main belly.

This is the area we have froze up in the past

Each morning I would check both glasses. The water outside the rig froze up the first night and stayed that way all week. The water glass inside the belly never froze even when the temps hit their lowest. Better safe than sorry! We were able to de-winterize on Thursday but it was a long 4 days! Now we know that next time the temps get that low we don't need to winterize.

Like I said, we talked about heading south but a couple things are holding us here. First, there is still so much we want to do before closing up the house for the winter. Mainly closing up the house. Which means getting the soffit and fascia on. With the cold weather and the fact that the skidsteer is/was on the fritz stopped us dead in our tracks. We also want to finish the insulation, get the heat in and Kevin and Cheryl are coming out for Thanksgiving. Our original plan was to stay here until after Christmas but we seriously doubt we will make that. If we get everything done, we will more than likely leave sometime in early December.

What was wrong with the skidsteer? Good question. I spent several hours attempting to fix it myself (with the help of Dave when he and Leslie were here). I finally took it into the shop. Ends up some mice had made a mess of the wiring but some $1,400 later it was back up and running.

Since it was too cold to work outside so I opted to help my neighbor out by chinking the walls of a house he is building. Since he is a licensed plumber we are trading some labor and he is going to help me out when we start plumbing our bathrooms and kitchen.

The entire house he is doing needs to be chinked. In the old days they used to use mud and horse hair. These days they have "Chink caulk" but it is still VERY time consuming. It is good to learn how to do this as we may have an accent wall in our house with something like this.

Barb in the meantime has been very busy insulating! She has all the lower stuff insulated and is now working off the scaffolding on the higher stuff.

Barb working off the scaffolding

Nothing like working on a 1" pipe 16' in the air!

Panoramic from the loft

We also got the truss vents in!

We were supposed to have had our boiler heat system installed this week but with the colder weather the installer had a lot of emergency calls and was not able to get out. Hopefully next week.

I did get out deer hunting a couple of afternoons. A couple of bigger bucks are showing up on a camera I have on some nearby public land but so far they have proved to be elusive.

Nice 8pt

Even nicer 10pt

This one we should make into our Christmas card!

View from my deer blind

We also found out that our granddaughter Lily’s soccer team went undefeated for the season! Must have been the excellent coaching by our daughter-in-law Somer.

Lily is just to the left of Somer

We continue to live without TV since July now. I have survived but do miss my football. We still have some recorded shows on our DVR that we recorded earlier this year. We are down to (18) Dr. Pol's (7) Dr. Jeff's and (48) House Hunters. We started with something like 129 House Hunters. When we sit down to dinner Barb will say "What are we going to watch tonight?". I will respond, "How about House Hunters?" "Oh, Okay" she says....day after day after day...… When we get done with these I am not sure either of us will ever watch House Hunters again!

We also had the realization that we have officially progressed to "Old Couple" status. When we went to the doctor on Friday Barb got an appointment at 1:00 and mine was at 1:20. When the nurse came to get Barb at 1:00 she said "Why don't you both come". So there we sat in the exam room together like an old married couple. Well wait.... first they had to weigh us and Barb never, I mean never in 32 years has let me know how much she weighs. So out of courtesy I stepped away when the nurse weighed her which I know she appreciated. But later when the doctor was doing her exam he says "I see you lost 17 lbs and are now at xxx. She looked at me mortified! I chuckled to myself, the doctor had no idea what he just did. We are both healthy and ready for another year of travel!

Our exciting news for the week? Well, it is something we have been working on for over a month and finally got worked out to the point where I think we can talk about it. Our neighbor to the west (the Jordan’s are to the east) are selling 30 acres adjacent to our property. We were interested in it but not the full 30 acres so we made them an offer on 18 acres. They agreed to split the 30 acres and sell us the 18! We have the paperwork all filled out, made a down payment and are just waiting for the next county planning meeting for the approval of the split.  This will more than double the amount of forested area we have. The 18 acres is outlined in red below and our house location is the red circle.

With the weather warming up this next week (upper 40's) we hope to finish the insulation, soffits and fascia. With luck our heat will be installed and this time next week we could be fully insulated and heated!