Early Retirement Extreme Forums

That is some great progress in just a week! Looking forward to the next update.

Lookin' good!

Incredible how quickly it's all coming together. Good job!

Some afternoon musings as I slowly recover from my first week in the woods.

I want to throw out there that folks who think these are glorified sheds may not understand the amount of work that (should) go(es) into preventing water damage on a typical tiny house.

Hitting my knee with a 2x4 and then on a ladder rung in the same place two days in a row wasn't a good idea.

This process has been expensive, and will continue to be expensive for the next couple years, I expect. But I think it'll meet my needs much better than the RV, and more importantly...I get to build my own frickin' house.

Amazing work. I get it about recovering from working in the woods!

No roof on my tractor, just a roll over bar. My tractor won't be anywhere near falling trees, it will stay on my skid trails and winch the fallen trees to it. Even from skid trails, if I need to, I can use the forestry winch (not purchased yet) with rigging to help trees down. But by then I'll be finished with all this precommercial thinning I've been doing and the commercial log trees should have room to fall. And weight to do it.

Good luck on your house!

Checked here and YouTube for updates. Hope you didn't fall into the woodchipper.

Week 2!

I did not fall into the wood chipper. We actually just wrapped Week 3, but I'm a little behind on my video uploading and editing.

https://youtu.be/9n3PQ1rC5VY

And Week 3!

https://youtu.be/FkyDLJ6nCRw

I'll start Week 4 on Monday.

Jeey, you're alive and out there! I'm going to check your videos right now to see how much you've progressed.

EDIT: seen it. Nice! Well done!

Wired a distribution box yesterday.

Sleeping in partially renovated garage in house I own on busy street corner. Not happy about soundproofing.

Stressed about state of world.

At least house not stuck in mud pit.

Week 4! My video production skills are improving somewhat more slowly than my skills at cutting pieces of wood in different ways and screwing them together.

https://youtu.be/lBqtsBeT1do

Yes, trying to hold the camera and show people stuff has been tricky.

There are pros and cons to my new build location. Previously, in the forest mud pit, my risk of viral exposure was much lower. Ben, who helped me build the exterior, and I were living in the woods basically full time, with little exposure to others on each week of the build (except for masked Home Depot trips and the occasional lumber delivery). It was much quieter in terms of traffic noise, and in some ways a very unique experience to be cooking out in the forest on a construction site for weeks. But there was some very weird political stuff going on at that property -- stuff between full-time residents and newer residents (my girlfriend) and the benevolent dictator who owns the property. And also, frankly, I was not a big fan of the guy I hired to help me with the exterior build process (and he might feel mutually). Our positions boil down thusly: Me -- This is my house, teach me to build my house, I don't care if I fuck up some stuff, I want to learn how to build my house. Him -- You hired me to build a house. You're my apprentice. Go cut this piece of wood at the same length 900 times. No, you cannot do that, you'll fuck it up. Let me do it.

I found him condescending and patronizing, most especially on the day where he announced that his attitude was, "For my own good." He probably found me entitled and bratty. I'm at a place of, "You did a great job on my house. I learned a lot from you. I never want to see you again." Also, he completely disappeared when we finally needed to move it out of the mud pit, which was a bullshit move that put a lot of unnecessary stress on the property owner and on the rest of us involved in moving the thing. Since it was his decision to put the damn house down there and he prepped the work site, he really should have been around to help get it out.

In this new location, I'm exposed to a shared kitchen/bathroom with four other adults, and I'm sharing a garage space with my fellow home owner, who is sleeping on the other side of that shelving (and somehow has managed to bring four different women home in the last six days, power to him). So viral exposure is essentially a free-for-all, and I have no control over that. Traffic noise is also terrible, because the house is on the corner of a busy street and the garage door is not insulated. But I've bought an air purifier/white noise generator, and I've been falling asleep with headphones in, so I've largely solved the noise problem, except I can't sleep late at all because traffic noise wakes me up.

Additionally, the guy helping me with my interior plumbing and electric (and a smorgasbord of other things) is a handyman who has worked for me and for my ex-husband on a variety of projects over the last four years. I'm responsible for referring him probably upwards of 50k in business, on top of the several thousand he's earned from me directly -- and when people call him and say they heard about him from me, he records that information when he adds them as a new contact. In fact, he just wrapped a several thousand dollar project for a former neighbor of mine who used to let me grow vegetables in her backyard. He's hardcore LDS and thinks I live in sin, but he doesn't proselytize at me and I try not to swear too much, so it works out. We have some conversations that end abruptly with, "M, you may not want to ask too many questions about that." Like when I brought a friend over to talk about what it would take to install hard points in the rafters. And when we were talking about electrical power needs and I was listing out every appliance I wanted to have in there, my hitachi became a "massager."

All that said, our relationship is a very good one. He's grateful for the work he's gotten from me and from people I've sent to him over the years, I appreciate his skill, experience, and ethics, and his attitude towards teaching new skills is much more in-line with what I'm looking for from this project/any educational experience. He's been heavily involved with Scouting over the years and it shows. He does/shows me the thing, coaches me through the thing, and then steps back while I do the thing. So instead of hearing, "No, you can't do that, you'll fuck it up" multiple times a day, I hear, "Sure, absolutely, let me show you." I am very teachable -- I am good at learning, and I want to learn, and I'm willing to step back and allow a demonstration and then take coaching well as I perform a skill. So except in cases of extreme risk, or things that require several years worth of training to do properly, I would generally prefer to get hands-on and I appreciate that he empowers me to do so.

In sum, while I'm not happy about my COVID risk here, I'm much happier about who I'm working with, and as I own the house and am compatible and comfortable with my friend and co-owner, the politics of group life have diminished down to a basically flat line. Indeed, one of the roommates likes to cook and was looking for an outlet for shared group meals. She didn't have an outlet before I arrived, because the denizens of the house are mostly private, hard-working, introverted people. But I gave her $30 and she's been cooking for me, which has freed up a lot of my time for other things, like the obscene amount of time I am spending wandering through hardware stores.

I wrote a thing:

https://becomingsee.com/biosquare/week- ... s-on-boxes

Week 5:

https://becomingsee.com/biosquare/week- ... s-and-bobs

Turns out, when you connect a negative wire to the positive side of a battery, you can blow shit up.

Usually you just burn up the wire. Not that I would know!

https://becomingsee.com/biosquare/week6 ... rior-plans

@EnigmaT120, that would also have been unfortunate. Wire seems ok, though. More testing needed before we close up the walls.

Ah. Short circuits. Not just about people.

I wish we could meet up again. Not for wiring details.

But for a person who hasn't killed himself yet with a chainsaw, I'm pretty good.

You know, we caaaaaan meet up again.

I gave a tour to a random stranger who stopped in the middle of the road last week who had questions. We both wore masks, I opened the windows and the door of the house.

This thing is going to go for years. I'm going to take precautions, but I'm not going to stop seeing people indefinitely.

Just caught up with the videos, very intriguing project. Hanging things or people from the ceiling made me laugh.

Reep, ya me too. Of course my main precaution is my own ableism but I do have masks. I have also shared hugs with 4 people who are not from my immediate household.