Progress on our Cottage Renovation ~ Building a Homestead in Spain

Okay, I think it's time for these radishes to go. They're occupying precious space and although the flowers are lovely, most of the flowers have already turned into the little seed pods, and this is what I want. These little seed pods are edible, they're delicious, they're slightly peppery, and I'm gonna pickle them. They're so good. Come on, off you get. You know what? It's funny, it's been like two months now since I've been off work, and I've just been here focusing on the house and the garden, and you'd think I would have all the time in the world, but it kind of feels like I have even less time than I did before. I don't know how this happened. I think because I know I've got more time, I'm starting more projects, and I'm getting more things in motion, and then I have more stuff to fill my time, obviously, and then it feels like I have less time. I mean, yes, that's how it works, but yeah, I think that's what's been happening. Like, I've started quite a lot of stuff lately, stuff which all feels like a priority, and lots of stuff I haven't even mentioned in any of the videos because I'm still just trying to figure out how to tell a coherent story about it and about what's going on. So yeah, I need to figure that out. I need to figure out what I'm really working on at the moment. One thing that has actually been helping is going back and looking at this list that we made at the beginning of the year for our goals for 2022 on the farmstead, and just reminding myself of what we set out to achieve at the beginning of the year. I think we chose stuff well. At the time it felt really ambitious, but then at the time we didn't know that one of us would be leaving our jobs so soon. So yeah, it's actually turned out to be a good reference point to keep coming back to and reminding myself that, yeah, what's on the list is what's important. Anything else is a bonus. You know, the list just says get chickens. I don't need to worry about a whole flock of quail and geese and ducks and goats and sheep and llamas and pigs and anything else you could imagine. All I need is a couple of chickens to hit that target and that's what we were aiming for. So that's great. So we're making a push on the chicken coop, the roofing, the fencing and everything related to the chickens. We've also been making a push on some upgrades to our solar. That was another thing that was on the list to get a couple of extra panels installed and improve and tweak slightly our installation. So that's also something we've been, yeah, doing over the last few weeks. So because we're going to be turning the power off to do some of the solar stuff, obviously, we've got the egg incubator, which needs power all the time. So I just need to plug it into the portable battery, the power station. Here they are. 11 eggs. Mores are just going to finish, hopefully, in the next half an hour or so, painting the inside and outside of the chicken coop with this protector stuff to protect the wood from the elements and from insects. We've actually got through a lot of this stuff. This is like the second tin and I'm still on the inside. It's like we spent nothing on the pallets, but the actual treatment stuff we've probably spent like 50 euros on. The drill bits are here. So our first job of the day is to take these panels off the roof, remount this metal frame and then put the panels back on the metal frame and add two more panels. Well, I say that's the first job of the day. That's possibly the only job we're going to get around to today because it's quite a lot of work. What are you doing? You're going to go and find those rats? Yes, go and find those rats. Yep. That's right. They live in there. Yeah, English, English and English. Solar panels, they're fine, but they would be better if they were at an angle because the sun would hit them in a more perpendicular angle. This water boiling downstairs is really distracting me. But yeah, that's what we're gonna do with those structures. Just put them 45 degrees so that we get... Is it 45 degrees the angle? No, it's more like 60. 60? What is it? It's 45. This is the worst shot I've ever taken. So just in case that wasn't a hundred percent clear before, we're taking these panels off the roof, mounting them on a new frame so they're at a 45 degree angle, which is the best angle for this latitude to get the most efficiency out of them in the summer and in the winter, and also adding two additional panels to the array to give us six panels with a total of 2250 watts. I cannot believe I've just finished the third extra tin of this that I bought. This pallet wood is just super absorbent and it's just like sucking it in and a tin is not going very far at all. My friends just told me actually that a technique that you can use is you can paint or soak the pallet wood in diesel or a mix of diesel and car oil first and the wood will absorb all of that liquid. Then it won't be so porous when you come to use the actual protector liquid on it and you'll use a lot less of the expensive stuff. I don't know if I would have done this for this project because this is obviously a chicken coop. I don't know how good that would be for the animals, but I thought it's a really cool tip. I would definitely bear that in mind next time because this is like 10 or 11 euros a tin. So I've got the roof in place pretty much. I borrowed a clamp from the guys doing the solar stuff. It's actually very useful. I'm definitely gonna buy one of these or several. To attach the roof I've got these what do you call these? Bolts which have a little rubbery washer thing to protect from the rain, to keep the rain out. So you can imagine the plastic sheeting and the wood is gonna go just here where my thumb is. Just need to drill the holes. These are five millimeter bolts. As luck would have it, I don't have anything useful in this bag. This bag was a complete waste of time and money and space because there's never what I need. Here we go. This is what I was needing. OK, I've got five of the nine bolts I was going to do in. I don't think the roof is going anywhere. I need to get some longer bolts for a couple of places because I didn't manage to line up the flat, the lower part of the wave with a beam in a couple of places. So therefore I need a longer bolt to go through the top bit of the wave and the beam. If you know what I mean. But the roof is on, it's not going anywhere. It's in the right place. And I think I'm done for the day. I am actually really happy with it. It's the first time I've put a roof on anything and I'm really happy with how it turned out. Doesn't it look good? Don't tell me it's at the wrong angle or there's something wrong with it. I don't want to hear it. It's the best roof in the world. I love it. The panels are going back on at a lovely new angle. What do you think of my roof? It's awesome. Yeah, you like it? It's very wonky. Thanks. That's what I thought. That's awesome. Congratulations. Thanks. Sorry? Your first roof. My first roof. I know. That's exactly what I thought. My first roof. I can do a roof. So here they are. The panels are up. They're a lot more prominent now on top of the house. You can actually see them from this field, which you couldn't before. I quite like being able to see them. Just makes the house feel a bit more lived in, I think. Of course, one of the things that's making everything feel so busy at the moment is that it's spring here in Spain and the garden is a huge part of this whole endeavour. In fact, for me, it's really the main thing. It's why we're here. And yeah, there's been a lot going on in the garden. I thought I was done with these beds in this field for this year. Forever, actually. I was planning to just leave them to the elements, let them get taken over by weeds again, and then at some point rethink the entire plan for this field. Probably reorient the beds that way, have irrigation going that way because that will be much easier and just rethink the whole plan. But I need the space. So these three very badly positioned, very badly thought out beds, which we did in like the first couple of months after buying this land, they're going to get used again. There's a little bit more life in them still. Found some tiny potatoes. They can go in the stew. I've also been working on the drip irrigation, which we really could do with soon. I will update you about that in another video. I had to figure out a lot of stuff early on when I wasn't really sure what I was doing, so it hasn't made for very interesting watching. But I think I'm more or less on the right track now. So you'll hear more about that soon. So as well as getting our solar panels repositioned, there they are up there. We've also been doing some work on our internal and external wiring. So a little while ago, we built this shed and we moved our batteries and our charge controller into here. You can see the black cable coming down from the panels is leading down to this shed and everything related to our solar is in here. We've got the batteries and the charge controller and then coming out again from the charge controller through a fuse box is from the inverter is this white cable, which previously just went through a hole that we drilled in the wall. Well, now we've improved that situation a bit and we've got a box here. I think. Oh, OK. I don't know what's going on there. OK. Oh, we've got a box. I don't know what this is, but one thing it definitely does is it leads to a grounding rod. So we've got a rod drilled about a meter into the ground here. This is something that you're just supposed to have an earthing rod. So that's good, I guess. And we've also got a little bit of covering here on this cable that goes inside. And we're also starting to do is get in place some neater cabling protector cover thing that goes along the back of the house and goes into the house at various points along the back wall. So everything's starting to look a little bit neater along the back here. I mean, apart from that tree growing out of the middle of things and the black cable that just goes that way, which everyone's very upset about, I don't really mind, but that's just the length that we had. So it has to go crossways and our new pipe goes along the back wall and we're going to have an entry point here, which is going into the kitchen. The hole is drilled behind this box. I don't know what this box does. Is it a fuse box? I'm not sure. And the pipe goes along. This is just a protector just to protect the cables that are going to be going along through it eventually. And this goes into the bathroom. While the big drill was here, we've also drilled a couple of other useful holes in various places. This is going to be for some water going into the kitchen. A second hole going into the bathroom so I can get cold water into the bathroom. That was something I was missing. We've also got this now, which is our fuse box. Actually, he hasn't really explained this to me yet, but I'm sure he will. And then I'll understand what's going on here. At the minute, the cable that comes out of here just goes into a plug in the wall. And this is still just going to our extension cables because we haven't done the whole wiring job yet, but this is ready for when we do it. All that drilling made a lot of dust everywhere. So now I need to go and sweep up floors and tables and surfaces and things. I love the building technique we have here of if it fits, shove it in. Doesn't have to be a brick. Doesn't even have to be a conventional building material. If it'll fill your gut, put it in your wall. The day is getting hot now. Well, I think we're actually in a heatwave. This isn't really summer yet. If it's not one thing, it's another. First, it was a drought all winter. Four, five months without meaningful rainfall. Then torrential rain. Rain that hadn't been seen in a century. Now, obviously, it's a heatwave. I'm doing a planting here of beans and corn. It's a bit like a three sisters thing, but just two sisters. I'm trying to fit a lot into this small space, so I thought it was probably a bit too ambitious to put a squash in here as well. Also, this area is not super sunny all through the day. There's tree cover and there's a bit of shade and squash like a good eight hours in the sun to really ripen. So, yeah, two sisters. Ideally, I think I would have maybe started the corn earlier and had them growing a bit taller so they could be the stake for the beans, which is how it's supposed to work. But I didn't plan that properly. And the beans and the squash are now the same size. So until the corn really gets going, I guess I'll just put some some stakes in for the beans and hopefully at some point they'll catch up with each other and it'll work out. So, yeah, I think that's it for this video. Thank you as always for watching. I hope that's given you a bit of an idea of where some of our main energy and attention has been lately. There's a lot of other stuff going on as well. There's animal things, there's garden things that I haven't shown you. I will show you all of that in a few weeks when I know a bit more about what's going on and we're not in the middle of so many things. Yeah, I'll see you in the next video and have a good week.