3R Home and Barn Project

[3RRL]

Jonathan,
I'll bet Tom (tommu) put you up to this.
He has been bugging me to add a webcam for six months now! That system looks great but you have to call for a price quote. I'll bet it's expensive.
I guess you guys will just have to live with my pictures for now.

 

[WBWI]

Jonathan,
I'll bet Tom (tommu) put you up to this.
He has been bugging me to add a webcam for six months now! That system looks great but you have to call for a price quote. I'll bet it's expensive.
I guess you guys will just have to live with my pictures for now.

LOL - no one put me up to it, specifically. I know I would not have been happy if I could not have seen the progress on my house daily.

You're right about the price. I did find an article that said hardware was $3500 but it cost $450/month for the monitoring fees.
I didn't notice a date on the article.

BTW - your home is really coming together and looks great. Great choice on the stain color too!

 

[tommu56]

Rob we are having withdrawal post some pictuers asasp

tom

 

[sandman2234]

The one part I like about this thread is I can drag my wife in here and show her the pictures to uuuuhhh and Ahhhh over. She really likes it, but I found it first, so she gets to only look at them when I am finished.
David from jax

It is almost Monday, so hopefully more pictures are on their way!!!

 

[3RRL]

Yes, finally more pictures on the way. I retrieved my frozen camera and got these photos of the barn starting to go up.
Hopefully they come out good and not frozen.

 

[3RRL]

These are a couple close-ups showing some of the metal beams.
Also a view with the solar shed in the foreground.



The rest of the metal siding and insulation was delivered, but it was still down by the culdesac. The downpours we had last week made our dirt road a slimy mess. They will trailer those pieces up to the homesite this week.

 

[3RRL]

I scraped about 100 yards of mud slime off the road. On some places I got down to DG (decomposed granite). However, in order to gain traction in the mud, I carried a bucket full of dirt/mud while doing all this ... not good for the front wheel drive. I had been warned against using 4 wheel drive while using a super heavy load in the bucket and I should have listened. There were some loads pushing the mud/dirt that I couldn't budge my Koyker 195 loader, so I know it was way over 3,000lbs.

Well, I blew out a couple teeth on the right front bevel and ring gear. I locked up the right wheel for a second and then rolled over it. I had to get it back to camp so I drove it (causing more damage). I would stop to back up and then go forward again until I got it home. Now I have to order parts and perform surgery. I'll fix whatever is broken. Well, it was to be expected with how I treat that Kama. I'm surprised those front gears lasted as long as they did with how I've abused the poor thing over the last 2-1/2 years!
Here's what that looks like. Also some pics of the road and gutters I cut before the rain hit. All done with my boxblade.

 

[3RRL]

Before all the excitement, I had to dig a water line trench that would connect the 5,000 gallon water tank up to the well. This was in the rain but I figured it would be better to do it now since the Earth would be a little softer. Good thing too, because if I had done the road first this would never have gotten done.
I had to switch buckets for the trenching first. I knew I would hit that hard DG and a narrower bucket would help in cutting through it.



And as I thought, I soon hit the hard granite. It was dry as a bone too! You can clearly see where the granite starts below the dirt in these pictures.

 

[3RRL]

Here are a couple short videos of the painstaking process showing how hard it was at this end of this trench. I'm sure glad the entire 30' trench was not like this part. I didn't hit the DG until I was at least 18" deep on the other parts. So the top layers were much easier to dig with the Nardi Back Hoe than this last section was. It is a pretty good backhoe but I sure wish I had a real TLB for jobs like this.

This one shows the start of the end trench. Notice how my articulated mechanical thumb is kept out of the way. However, it is not disconnected. Just have to control the curl function so it does not interfere. I did use it to hold the dirt in the bucket when I cleaned out the trench as in the other photos.



This is a close up of the work. I had to scrape of about 1/2" at a time to get through it. It took me almost 3 hours to dig this darn trench! Another interesting thing is you can hear the bucket scraping pretty good. I couldn't hear a thing from the backhoe seat, so I never realized that it was making that sound.

 

[3RRL]

Man, my Internet connection is slow today. Is yours like that? I'm supposed to have that super fast roadrunner blinding speed. It's more like one with broken legs in casts! What's up with that?

Now onto the log home progress.
They pretty much got the rest of the logs stained and the bottom section too. There are still areas that need to be done but they wanted to get at least this part done before the weather hits. They should be able to work through the Winter now that they are dry inside.
These are a couple photos of how the boxed in the overhanging eaves and also showing the stain on the exterior.