Okay, It's Time to Get Some Stuff Finished.

For so long it feels like I've just been doing garden related stuff and I've got a couple of projects that I started a few months ago which still need finishing and I think it's really time to get back on with those. The first thing I'm going to do is put up this shower curtain which sounds like it would be a nice quick simple job but it's not going to be. I'll show you why. So the best shower curtain rail that I could find for our space was this little corner shaped one which needs to go across here between these two walls but each side of the corner is only 90 centimetres and that far wall is more than 90 centimetres away from where it needs to be if you know what I mean. So I need to build, I think I'm going to build a little tiny little brick wall here just to bring the wall out a bit. You'll see what I mean. I didn't explain that very well. I've never really understood these Spanish bricks with like the holes in them. I just don't get what you're meant to do at the end of a wall you know when you've got these holes and you need it to be flat. Are you supposed to just like poke the cement in and try and cover it up which is what I'm doing or is there some other trick that I don't know about? I just hope it doesn't look as bad on camera as it looks on real life. Oh this is such a mess. I want to go back to building with mud and straw that would be much nicer. So the cement needs to dry obviously so I'll come back to that job tomorrow. Just stopping for a bit of lunch. I'm having a sourdough pancake which I have pretty much every day. It's so easy I don't even buy bread anymore I just make myself a pancake if I want something like bread. And a little salad from the garden. It feels really good to get on with one of the bigger jobs which I started and haven't finished. I've got a lot of those sorts of jobs like hanging over me. Things that are perfectly fine and comfortable as they are but in my head are just not finished. And I really want to start some other bigger projects soon as well like the permanent goat enclosure and their permanent shelter milking station. That's going to be a thing while I've still got like three or four open-ended quite big things on the go. I've actually been using like a to-do list application which I used to use in previous jobs when I was developing software. It's an application called Trello and it's just a to-do list really. But the magic comes in how you use it I think. So the way that we always used to use it at work was with a system called Kanban. It's basically a series of columns and your tasks are all organized into columns. You've got a column for to-do, you've got a column for next, the things that you're doing right now and the things that you've done. It's really good to be able to see the things that you've done on your board as well. It gives you a little bit of a morale boost. And yeah you move things across the board from left to right from to-do all the way to done is where they want to end up and you watch them as they progress. Trello lets you add tags and labels and notes and checklists and things like that to your tickets which is really helpful. It lets you see at a glance anything you might want to see like I've been organizing my tasks into big, medium and small. So small is like something that I could probably do in a day, medium is maybe up to a week and big is like I don't know too long to be able to really say. And then I add a checklist to each card. Yeah doing this has made me realize that I've got a lot of big things in the doing column. That's not good, that's not where I want to be. I think really I should only have one big thing in the doing column and that should be where I focus most of my attention. So I'm trying to get some of that stuff out of that column. That's why I'm back working on the bathroom really. It wasn't till I wrote everything down and realized what I'm working on, how many different things I'm working on that I realized that yeah I've probably got too many big things on the go at once. And it doesn't matter if they don't all feel like a priority right now, like the bathroom is perfectly comfortable as it is. I think it's just that mental load of knowing that you've got something pending that you haven't finished yet and that you need to come back to. I think just clearing that from my list and a few other things is going to be really helpful and give me the headspace that I need to start thinking about the next big project when it comes to it. So while I've got this basher, which is not mine, I'm borrowing it although I'm definitely going to get my own, I wanted to just get a few more posts in the ground around this chicken run. I want to put another layer of chicken wire around to raise the height of the run a bit because I very quickly discovered when I put the chicken here that through a combination of flapping and hopping he could actually get to the top of the chicken wire and escape. I haven't clipped his wings yet so I don't know if with one wonky wing he wouldn't be able to do that but anyway it just seemed like a good idea to just make the run a bit taller anyway. Help keep the cats out and yeah just make it a little bit safer. Do you remember the sunflower seeds that I planted around the edge of this enclosure? Look how well they're doing. Right the posts are all in. I can't remember if I showed you already but I did finish painting this chicken coop with the protector liquid. As you can see it's all nice and protected. I also finished bolting in the roof. I needed to get some longer bolts. These bolts that I had didn't fit through some of the wood so I've got this roof all sturdy and in place now. Another recent investment is this feed bin. I know it's nothing much it's just a basic bin with chicken feed in it but this is one of the things that was on my list, get the feed bin and get the feed sorted to be able to call the chicken run job complete. So there it is there's another thing checked off the list and what I'm going to do now is for these doors where we're going to be getting the eggs. Someone pointed out that kind of pushing these doors they do open a bit which could be a danger for things getting in. I mean they don't open that much because of the hinges that sort of prevent them from going that way but yeah this can easily be sorted by just putting a couple of little bits of wood around the back so that this just can't be pushed in so I'm going to do that. Here's Tofu under here. What are you doing under there? I think it's nice and cool under here. Sometimes I'm looking all over for him and he's always under here. What are you doing? I'm just trying to figure out if I've got enough pallet wood already broken up to do the nest boxes. I'm going to do three nest boxes of 30 by 30 by 30 more or less. So I'm looking for about a meter yeah a meter long split into three sections. Apparently you need one nest box for each, well different places say different things, but for each three to six hens you need one box. So I'm going to have three boxes so I think that could give us at a maximum nine or ten hens potentially. We only wanted six anyway so I think this is more than enough space for laying. One thing I've been doing with all these rusty nails that come out of pallets as well as reusing as many as I can, some people suggested in the last video that my poorly looking orange tree was possibly iron deficient so I've been putting some of these rusty nails in water and the water is taking on a rusty brown colour and I'm going to let it sit for a little bit longer and then I'm going to pour it onto the base of the tree and see if that helps it a little bit. If it works hopefully this tree will go a darker shade of green. The leaves are looking a little bit pale and lime coloured at the moment so I'll let you know how that goes. So that's all I'm doing for today. I've just had a shower and I'm going to go out to yoga later. I just wanted to show you the kittens. I haven't taken much footage of the kittens. Coffee Bean chose quite a dark corner of the house. The house is dark anyway and she chose a dark corner which is normal. They like to be out of the light but yeah because the kittens aren't really leaving the nest at the moment it's kind of hard to take footage of them and I don't want to shine a bright light in there to illuminate them because their eyes are so sensitive when they're this young. But yeah I just wanted to show you how well they're doing. Their eyes are looking so much better after about a week of chlamydia treatment. Yes and they're starting to get a little bit more active. They haven't left the nest yet but I don't think it's going to be long. Some I love this one's little white long hairs that are kind of coming over the top of the undercoat. I don't know if they'll stay around or what colours this one's going to have. I don't know I don't know if it's going to change or what but I just think they're really cute. As you can see I am not working in the bathroom. I've just got back from a morning with my workshare group. We dug a swale. It was very hot. I'm very tired. I've just had a lovely lunch and I'm gonna lie here for a bit. I don't know if I'll do anything else today to be honest. There we go. Thank the lord for blaster making my bad cement job yesterday not look too bad. I guess that's what it's for after all. I think the cement was so bad yesterday because the cement had got wet and it was all lumpy and I thought I would just use that bag up here because this isn't a very important part of the house. Anyway as you can find out I just need to wait for this to dry and then I'll paint it. Okay the shower curtain is up. Just in time for me to have a shower before I go and water the garden and go and pick Mauro up from the station. So that's the little wall painted. I think it looks a lot better now. It blends in with the rest of the wall and I think while I'm at it I'm going to paint the cement part of the floor with this stuff. A little while ago I was moaning on one of the videos about the cement floor that we've got in the main house which just releases loads of dust and is a nightmare to clean and several of you suggested that you can actually buy like a sealant kind of paint that you just paint over the cement floor and it keeps the dust in. I had never heard of that. I thought I was going to have to tile those floors which would be a big job and I had been putting it off but no you can buy this stuff. So I'm going to give it a go in the bathroom see how it works. It wasn't too expensive so if this does a good job in the bathroom then maybe that'll be the best solution for quickly covering up the horrible dusty cement floors in the house as well. So I'm going to give that a go. Okay it's really runny. Okay let's see how much this is supposed to cover. So there were just a couple of garden related things that I needed to get done this afternoon. I've still got a couple of hours left in the day though before I need to go out and pick Mauro up from work and there are a few things left with the water which I need to do related to the bathroom. I think they should be quick. I'm going to see if I can get them done now. This evening Mauro and I actually have a really exciting and slightly terrifying thing planned so I will show you that later on but yeah let's see if I can get these little things with the water done. So the first thing I want to do is change the intake for our pump from this pipe which sucks the water out of the top of this IBC and it goes down here down this pipe and into into the shed where the pump is. I want instead to connect the compression piping to this tap on the bottom of the IBC so that the pump doesn't have to suck and the pressure from the water level in this IBC hopefully just contributes to the pump needing to use less power. I don't know if that's exactly how it works but I just figured this would be a better system. The next thing I want to do is the pump pumps the cold water along this compression piping that goes along here which leads to the instant hot water heater. What I want to do is put a tee in this white pipe before the heater and take a cold water pipe up along here and into the bathroom because we need cold water in the bathroom as well as hot. To start the rebuilding of life, the roads that lay open are many when the old one's gone under the knife and I can feel the sun on my skin again there's no excuses were too for a penny but they've all gone out the window of this car on my face oh I made some technology well I think that's it for today in fact I think that's pretty much it for this video I've had a shower I've tested everything out it's all working fine which is great I didn't break everything it feels so good to have almost almost finished the bathroom we've just got to tile the floor in the shower area and then I can say that I'm done with everything that I wanted to do on the bathroom that would be so good and it also feels really good to finish the chicken coop and the chicken run as well it's almost time to get the rest of our chickens so I'm glad that we've got everything ready for them and yeah it just feels really good to push through some of this stuff it's always tempting to just spend the day in the garden there's always so much that can be done there but it's actually been nice to get back to more inside jobs and construction-y type things after spending so long just getting the summer garden ready anyway I'm gonna go and get Mauro from his co-working space can you believe that the town down the road has a co-working space we couldn't believe it but it's great Mauro goes there a couple of times a week when he's working from here so I'm gonna go and get him and when we come back we'll do a fun and slightly terrifying thing I hope you've enjoyed this video there'll be more plants in the next one and I'll see you later are you ready for this we're going to walk the goats I might have to tackle a goat Mauro is going to be cameraman slash goat chaser let's go do this so we're just going to go and walk the goats this is something we've been looking forward to ever since we got them well before we got them actually we've had them two weeks now we just wanted them to stay in their enclosure for a little while and get used to being here and being with us and we said after two weeks we'll take them on their first little walk just 10 minutes we'll take them to the other field where there's plenty of stuff for them to graze and browse and then we'll take them back in again hopefully they don't escape hopefully they don't eat everything in the garden hopefully they go back in their enclosure with no problem they're at the gate because this is when I normally give them their evening treat so they know something good is happening so the plan is take the mother on the lead the daughter always follows the mother at least that's the that's the plan oh she's got her foot tangled you'll have to untangle her foot