Kitchen Progress Update

The kitchen is very gradually coming into existence, one baby step at a time.  A friend worked on the trim this week, a job that I'm terrible at. He got the window trim finished, then proceeded to make the "earthquake trim" for the shelves. So what do I mean by earthquake trim? It's a piece of trim on the edge of a shelf that sticks up above the level of the shelf, designed to keep things from falling off during an earthquake. Since most of the earthquakes here so far are in the 3-5 range, the quakes causes objects to vibrate and dance about. A half inch lip keeps them from dancing off a shelf. I also plan to use a rubbery shelf mat to help hold things in place.

Earthquake lip in place. I set the container there so that you can see that the lip
is about 1/2 inch deep, just enough to prevent things from sliding off but not
deep enough to interfere with using the shelves easily. 

Two corner shelves were added in the pantry this week. And the first shelf in the main kitchen got made. This one is beside the new range and will eventually hold pot lids. I plan to store gallon jugs of drinking water under the shelf, a place where they will be handy but out of the way.

Two corner shelves in the pantry area. It's a start. 

Now I need to sit down and draw the plans for the rest of the shelves and "cabinets". Plus make a shopping list of the materials I need to buy. The kitchen is slowly but surely coming along.

This is a corner shelf beside the range. If you look closely you can make out the
half inch lip that will prevent things from jiggling off during an earthquake.
I plan to store water jugs (drinkable water) and a fire extinguisher under the shelf
and pot lids and the extra potholders on the shelf itself.
If you noticed, I'm already using the range! 

By the way, the propane shut off valve for the range is not behind it, like most people do. I installed it in under this shelf, back against the wall. Out of sight, out of the way, but far easier to reach than having to pull the range out. Just one of those little things I wanted to do to make life easier. 

House Floor Plan

Here's the floor plan of our funky little house. It's totally nothing like we've ever lived in before. Surely not you're conventional 3 bedroom home! Ok, first of all it's only one bedroom. But we found that's a great asset when you're living in Hawaii. All your relatives and friends, even ones that you didn't know you had, start wanting to visit. So unless you like running a free B&B for your brother's friend's cousin's nephew's neighbor, a one bedroom house comes in rather handy.

When we bought the unfinished place,the bedroom was a separate building with two roofed lanais (porches) -- the red lined ones. The black line one we added. A walkway connected it to the bathroom/living room building. We enclosed the walkway and lanai, making a wide hallway. Gee, it's so much more pleasant going to the bathroom at 3 a.m. without being soaked with wind blown rain. Hubby, being your typical guy, considered it an advantage to be able to walk out the bedroom door and pee over the porch railing into the flower bed. Enclosing the lanai ended that shortcut. I preferred the idea of keeping dry. And it made the place one building instead of two.

The bathroom is the future plan. Right now it's a simple toilet, sink, shower with the rest of the space being storage.

The living room use to have a frig, range, and sink along the left wall. We took those out when we finished the room, moving them to the lanai, them opening up the wall for a door to the new kitchen. We added stairs coming off the lanai since it was a nuisense having to walk through the house everytime you wanted to exit or enter the lanai. The front door use to be right off the livingroom, leading to the wrap around lanai. We moved the door out, enclosed the lanai on the left to make a kitchen, the lanai at the bottom to make a pantry to the left of the front door and a small room (office? Sewing or craft room? Guest bedroom...heaven forbid!) to the right. 

Enclosing the lanais greatly increased the living space of the house. And being that everything is still under the original roof, it didn't change the official square footage for tax purposes. Thus it was simple to upgrade the permit without having to jump through hoops again.

We've been thinking of semi-closing in the lanai off the living room, basically screening it in. That would be a task once everything else is done with the house.

I'd like to enclose the bedroom new lanai (black lines), making it a hugh walk in closet-storage space. Of  course we'd have to cut in doors from the bedroom. But for now were using that lanai as our construction work area for the various saws, sanders, planer, and router.

Someday I'll have this house finished. It's getting there. 

The New Kitchen - In Progress

Besides creating a family hometeading farm, we are also building our home. 1/4 of my time is devoted in some fashion to the creation of our house and home. I really haven't talked much about the house, so I'm going to add that to the topics of discussion.

The thing that we've been without since we moved here is a real kitchen. And even though I don't have much in the way of domestic instincts, I do appreciate the idea of a kitchen. I mean the sort of kitchen that makes most women happy. These past years the kitchen has either been a sink, refrig, and range in the living room, or else ditto out on the porch.

Now having a kitchen out on the porch isn't as bad as it sounds. Sure, yellow jackets can be a nuisense and you have to take precautions against rats, but hey, it's really convenient to chuck that onion peel over the railing into the flower bed. Carrot peelings? Flick. Apple cores? Fling. Drop the bag of flour? No problem, just get out the leaf blower. Spill water on the floor? Ha, it will dry by morning. Plus cooking cabbage or fish doesn't smell up the house. Thus an outdoor kitchen has some nifty advantages.

Hubby assembling the new range. He also converted it to propane use while he had it apart.

In the original house floor plan, there was no room for a separate the kitchen. The previous owner had set up a "kitchen" along one side of the living area, a large room used for everything except bathroom and bedroom. Partitioning that room into a living room and kitchen would have created two tiny rooms not acceptable for either function, so we decided to create a separate kitchen room. A solution that was acceptable to both of us was to enclose part of the wrap around porch. The original vision was to enclose just enough for the kitchen, but our ideas ran away with us, and we ended up enclosing the porch on two sides of the house. Oh I am so happy we did! Now I'll end up with not only the kitchen, but also a large pantry and a separate little room ......a craft/sewing room? ....an office? ...a guest bedroom? Haven't decided yet.

Looking down the kitchen from the livingroom access doorway. The Stecas are
on the left out of view behind the wall. 

I wish I had taken photos while the work was in process, but I had no idea that I would be sharing this information. So I'll do the best I can. The outdoor porches originally were roofed over, having solid plywood floors, and a porch railings. So enclosing them wasn't too difficult a task. Luckily the
flooring was level and solidly built. The walls went up easy, then we installed high quality sliding windows. Boy am I glad we went for the bonded, good windows! They were hubby's choice and I was hesitant in spending so much money. First, they are the nicest windows I've ever had, but more importantly, they are holding up extremely well in the vog. We lucked out on this one. (Thank you, hubby!) Wanting as much airflow as possible, we installed windows the full length of the kitchen. 

Next we needed to consider how to cover the walls. In that mold and mildew are major problems, we opted for cedar. Absolutely no drywall or manufactured wood! We used cedar tongue and groove, installing the smooth side toward the room. Lightly sanded, we then gave it a coat of polyurethane. We were pleased with the results. 

What to do for a ceiling? It was already low, though within code, but we didn't want to simply nail a ceiling to the roof rafters. We thought it would make the room look like it was ready for midgets, hobbits, dwarfs, and the like. So we opted to sheath the 2x6 rafters with pine to give the effect of beams, then put the cedar between the rafters. 

When you leave the pantry, this is your view. The new range and the two
Steca units in their new home. 

Onto the floor. Both hubby and I are slobs, just face it. So a durable, easy to wash floor was a must. Tile seemed a good solution. And some pattern that wouldn't scream, "I'm dirty! Look at these footprints!" I picked out a mottled neutral pattern, planning to use a highlight, accent color in the kitchen accessories. That way I would not be locked into cherry red, sunshine yellow, autumn orange, blushing blueberry, or whatever.  The room is narrow, so I opted for small tiles to help give the illusion of the room being bigger. A friend who installed the tile suggested putting them on an angle. I'm glad he made the suggestion. I think it turned out pretty good. While I'm pretty good at laying tile myself, laying it on the angle was a bit daunting. Thus I let David do it. 

The pantry. Walk thru and to the right and you're in the kitchen. 

One thing that I really, really, really (get the idea yet?) love is that I can walk around the corner and be in a large pantry area. You can enter it from the house's front door, for easy putting away the groceries, or from the kitchen, for easy use. As you can see, we've started building in the storage shelves. In the photo you'll notice that even before they are finished, we've found their horizontal surfaces to be fairly handy.   

Back to the Country - Not the Perfect Life

My last post generated a whole lot of emails! Blasting me for being antisocial, for trying  to keep paradise for myself, for trying to scare people away from living on a farm. From my position, I'm just announcing why I decline all the requests for farm tours from people coming to Big Island on vacation. Besides the fact that the County of Hawaii requires special permits for farm tours that can cost tens of thousands of dollars, my insurance company will not insure farm tours. Anyway, there was enough said repeatedly in the emails that is prompting me to make a few comments of my own about the "perfect life on a farm".

This pertains to me, but it very well be pertinent to many. Leaving behind the hectic, high stress, high population areas and going to the less populated rural areas doesn't mean that I ran to paradise, the good life, the perfectly happy life, a safe life. I chat with many people who appear to believe that if only they can manage to move to a small farm, they will achieve instant happiness. They congratulate me on my move as though I've left all problems, failures, depressions, and other negatives far behind. In my experience, life is never without problems. My hope is that they will be fairly minor and readily resolvable. But I've discovered that I tend to carry my habits with me everywhere I move, thus if life depresses me in location A, it will repeat itself at location B unless I make the effort to change. So just because I now live on a small farm doesn't make my life idyllic. Every day isn't perfect, things go wrong, I'm not happy 100% of the time, nor is life here one big vacation.  

Farm living on any economic level is difficult and dangerous. I read about other farmers' problems in the trade journals, and it doesn't seem to make a difference if it is an 3 acre farm or a 20,000 acre ranch. Farm life is not heaven and it's not automatically "the good life". 

Farming is work. It is long hours. It is disappointment and disasters. A 5 day a week, 9 to 5 job is a cinch compared to farming. On a small homestead style farm, another factor is added into the equation - you're the only employee and you seldom can afford to hire others. So if a job needs to be done, it's all up to you. And there's no one else it blame it on. No manager to vent your frustration on. So suck it up. 

I've seen a number of people move here to small acreage assuming that life would be instantly wonderful. Many have failed for various reasons. All these became disillusioned, blaming their failure on everything but themelves. Some managed to injure themselves, yet still place the blame on others. 

Yet I've seen others move to country life and be content. They willingly admit that they left the crazy, problematic lifecycle behind and ran toward a simpler life. Perhaps they didn't expect work-free bliss? Perhaps they were willing to accept responsibility? Did they lower their expectations? I'd answer yes to all 3. In order to maintain a happy life, I still need to lower my expectations on a regular basis. I take this to mean that my life isn't perfect and that I create my own happiness by changing. 

My blog is not intended to be an instructional book for wantabee homesteaders. I'm not here to tell people about a perfectly happy life of living on a farm. I don't want to give readers the impression that running  to the countryside will solve all your problems. Please note, I am not an expert. I like to experiment and learn but make plenty of mistakes along the way. And I often prove myself wrong when I see the results of my own test runs. 

 I get asked a lot, "How did you do that?" Thus I find that doing a blog is the easiest way to answer. 

Visitors Not Welcome! -- Danger on the Farm

Want to come visit my homestead? Not a chance!!! .....unless I already know you fairly well or you're a country-type person. You are free to look from the road, but that's it. Why am I so antisocial? Too many bad experiences in the past. Non-farm people are just an accident looking for a place to happen, they misinterpret what is going on around them, they tend to be obnoxious and ready to sue at the drop of a hat over stupid stuff. Gee, sounds like I don't like people. Hey, didn't I move to Hawaii to get away from those kind of people afterall? I don't see the sense of now inviting them onto my farm. 

Farms are dangerous places. They seem to be even more dangerous for city folk who haven't a clue about how things work on a farm.

I find that many non-farm people see my place as a free petting zoo. They are so out of touch with nature that they don't see the danger of trying to approach a ram, getting between a ewe and her lamb, of ducking under a horse's belly to get to the other side, or trying to pet a rooster. It's not smart to try to kiss a chicken on the nose, nor offer a finger to a bottle fed lamb without expecting it to grab it. They are either totally ignorant of the dangers or expect other people to ensure their safety. I don't wish to babysit those people, nor get sued by them when they get themselves injured.

Non-farm people don't listen or comprehend what is going on around them. For some reason they don't understand that the aisleways in the garden are there for walking. I've had plenty of visitors tromp on the veggie plants. I've seen them rip their clothing on barbed wire fencing. Even after being warned I've seen them walk into ditches, trip over rock piles, get zapped by the electric fence. I've seen people dip their hands into the barrels of manure tea and be appalled to find out what they just swished their fingers in. They approach animals that they've been told to stay away from. They just don't get the fact that things are dangerous on farms. I've had to stop visitors from trying to eat jicama beans, mistaking them for edible snap beans, and from eating the berries of  potato plants thinking they were some sort of cherry tomato.

Visitors have gotten mad when a chicken pecked them while feeding them corn out of their hands. Angry at me because their children started throwing horse turds at each other. Horrified that their toddler picked up and tried to eat sheep turds (mother said she thought they were berries. Gee, you let your child pick berries off the ground at home and eat them?) Mad at me when the rabbit scratched them when they tried to pick it up by its ears while they were petting it. I couldn't yell "stop" fast enough. Mothers have gotten upset because their kids step in manure, or put their fingers in their mouths after petting the horse. 

Then I've had others who are not just ignorant of the dangers of farm life and nature, but who are fearful of imagined dangers. One mother followed her family around with a bottle of hand sanitizer, making them wipe their hands after touching every animal and even after every vegetable! I had one women question the safety of the vegetables once I told her about using compost for fertilizer. She was certain that parasitic worms were inside the tomatoes, beans, etc. Another questioned the health value of my veggies because I never mentioned applying vitamins to the soil. Yet another, who was lucky enough to see a chicken lay an egg, was horrified to see where they come from and swore that my eggs would cause lethal diseases if not soaked in bleach before eating. Said he would never eat an organic egg in the future. 

Even after you successfully get people off the farm in one piece, you're not home free by any means. I've had people phone me the next day claiming they got food poisoning from eating the fresh peas off my vines. Now understand that these were English shelling peas, so the people had to take them out of the pods where the peas were totally isolated from any soil, manure, or compost contamination.  I've had another claim that they were having migraine headaches now because of touching their butt to the electric fence. They wanted me to pay for the doctor visits, tests, and medications. A mother claimed that her child was permanently traumatized by the guinea hens and wanted me to pay for therapy. One visitor tried to claim that my border collie bit him in the hand and wanted me to pay his emergency room costs. Luckily the photo I took for them at the farm gate when they were leaving showed his hand to be perfectly healthy. 

The American society that tourists come from is totally out of touch with rural living. Let them learn about farming on someone else's place. I don't welcome the headaches and lawsuits. 

Grow boxes - Making Soil

It's time to empty out some of my grow boxes and start them over again. Below is a picture of one box that I've opened and removed a couple buckets of soil out of it already. First of all, you can see that the surface of the soil has gone down a bit more than a foot from the top edge. Initially I overfilled the box by about 3 inches. So over the course of 6 months, the soil has settled quite a bit via decomposition of the organic material (grass clippings, weeds, compost, horse manure, and chicken litter).  I had expected that but I didn't know exactly how far it would go down. 

Next, I was impressed by the well developed root system the sweet potatoes made deep down into the box. The roots travelled all the way to the bottom although the tubers were in the upper 12 inches. 

I've opened this grow box and am taking some of the soil out to use in filling another grow box.
 You can see the deep root system that the plants made. 

When I loaded this box in the beginning, I placed the coarsest material on the bottom. The only pieces still intact were the bamboo chunks and 1 inch thick tree branches. Everything else had disintegrated or else was soft enough to crumble by hand as I unloaded the box.

Most of the organic material has decomposed, turning
into a medium brown soil. 

Most of the material I had originally put into this box is no longer identifiable. It is all crumbly and medium brown in color. As a bonus, I found a few dozen worms living in it. 

I emptied the box, returning to coarse stuff to the bottom. Then I refilled it with lasagna style, with thin alternating layers of  organic material (grass clippings, chicken pen litter, horse manure, weeds, waste mangos) and dirt which I took out of this box. I used 1/3 of the dirt for refilling the box. The rest of the dirt went to starting two new grow boxes. 

Dumpster Diving

Cardboard down at the trash station. Good dumpster diving
opportunity. 

Now, I'm not advocating dumpster diving for others, but I admit that I do it myself. I find some great stuff at the trash transfer station that I can use, fix, or repurpose. I find it a shame that so much stuff put into those dumpsters goes to the landfill. The county is always moaning about the landfill being overfull, it costing too much money to expand or keep it open, of trash being a real super problem. But then, they won't let the public take any of it either. Sure, sure, sure, it a liability thing. But I'd be willing to sign a contract saying that I assume all responsibility for my trash picking activities. But alas, it's a no-go. Thus I become an outlaw and dumpster dive.

Just needed an easy repair. I've been using it for over a
year now. Still has plenty of life left. 

Dumpster diving saves a lot of homestead money, plus it provides a lot of resources for repurposing. Some of the stuff I pick up:
...newspapers to be used for mulch
...plastic bottles and containers to be made into fruit fly traps, fly traps,  bird chasers, pots for sprouting seeds and growing plans
...egg cartons for use in the greenhouse
...feed sacks for toting stuff like grass clippings, mulch, coconut husks, macnuts, etc
...feed sacks and old tarps for lining my grow boxes
...gallon jugs for carrying water and making drip waterers (ollas)
...cardboard to be weed blockers in the aisleways of the garden
...old coolers to be made into planters
...old or cracked buckets and totes to be made into planters
...pallets - all sorts of uses such as making grow boxes, shelving, wind blocks, firewood
...old pots and pans for chicken feeders
...old hoses for electric fencing insulators
...discarded drip irrigation lines to be reused
...hogwire fencing to be used to make trellises. If in good condition, to be used as fencing.
...pipes to be used for trellises, and asking all sorts of things
...barbed wire to be reused to protect garden perimeter from feral animals
...old clothing for rags, making garden ties, making pet beds, etc.
...partial cans of paint for painting my homemade planters
And the list could go on.

Reusing stuff from the dump gives a homestead the opportunity to have lots of physical use-items, if you wish to call them that, that it might not normally be able to afford to buy. I look round my own homestead farm and see so much that came from reusing and repurposing:
...in the garden - plant containers, planting pots, grow boxes, spot waterers, funnels, water storage containers, trellises, bird chasers, fruit fly traps, mulch, material for garden signage, 
...on the farm - fly traps, livestock feeders, hen laying boxes, sheep shelters, tool and hardware organizing, paint, wire, sheet metal, t posts
...for the home - firewood, rags, pet beds (made from discarded clothes), pet feeding dishes, storage uses

I've picked up some gems at the dump that were ready to use or only needed minor fixing. A wheelbarrow, 55 gallon drums, rope, extension cord, circular saw, shovel, rake, mirror, double sink, floor tiles, a lamp, card table, assorted chairs, pots and pans, dishes and silverware, puzzles and toys, clothing. 

Been there.... and got the t-shirt !

What's sad in my opinion is the amount of stuff that goes to the landfill. With dumpster diving not allowed in my area, diverting stuff is difficult. Thus I see plenty, plenty, plenty of serviceable things heading for the landfill that people could be using instead. I've seen perfectly serviceable doors, windows, screens, household goods, tools ending up in the trash beyond my reach. Eeerrrggg. So I have zero sympathy for the county government who moans about running out of landfill space.