Choosing Voluntary Simplicity » Doing It Ourselves

Somewhat More Intimidating Than the Usual Do-It-Yourself Project

Shirley — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:25:05 +0000

We have heat! It took nearly a month of telephone calls, research, lots and lots of perseverance, and a full day of exacting work, but our previously "dead" furnace is now running like new. We were hoping to repair... not replace... the furnace, and this turned out to be a problem because the part we needed didn't seem to exist. There used to be two dealers within a sixty-mile radius selling and servicing this kind of furnace. The dealer we bought the furnace from went out of business a few years ago. The other dealer is closing his business in a few months because of the recession and he had absolutely no interest in trying to help us find parts or information.

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My Winter Herb Garden

Shirley — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 13:38:21 +0000

All I can see from my kitchen windows is snow, snow, and more snow. The winters are very long here, and spring is still several months away... this is a time when I absolutely yearn to see something growing and GREEN, so I really enjoy the herbs that make up my little kitchen garden.

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The Final Cut and Summer Memories

Shirley — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:40:11 +0000

This was such a beautiful sight... to have ninety logs "done" and to see only one log still left to be cut. And there's the little "brook" that formed under this log during one of our last torrential rains... and the thick layer of sawdust that is so wet and packed down, we're having to rake it up in stages as it dries.

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Our Load of Logs — A Progress Report

Shirley — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:52:30 +0000

It is raining again this morning. And it rained for a while last night and yesterday and the night before that and the day before that. It feels like it has rained almost every day since our load of logs was delivered to us... and it actually has... last night the local weatherman said we have not had two consecutive days without some rain for the past seven weeks.

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A Truckload of Logs — Our Winter Firewood Supply

Shirley — Thu, 28 May 2009 19:22:49 +0000

For the past four years our winter wood supply has come from the woods across the road from our house... but finally we have cleared out those storm-damaged trees and this year we needed a new firewood source. The price for hardwood keeps going up... currently hardwood that is stove length, split, and delivered is selling for $300 or more per cord. The standard for "stove length" and "split" in this area seems to be huge chunks that are often more than sixteen inches long, even when we have asked for a smaller size, which means that when we have purchased firewood in the past, we have had to do a lot of re-splitting and re-cutting to end up with firewood that would work in our cook stove. Since we would have to do all that splitting and cutting anyway, it seemed that the best solution for us this year would be a load of logs.

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Inexpensive “Cold Frames” — Our Solution to Our Short Growing Season

Shirley — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:08:10 +0000

We really have to work around our short growing season here. If we wait to set out seedlings until all danger of frost is past... and this can be as late as the first two weeks of June... we end up with too late a start on the garden because we can also get frosts on the other end of the growing season as early as late August. Covering plants to protect them gets old very quickly, we have found, especially when you have a lot of plants to protect, like we do. Traditional cold frames never seemed like a practical idea for us either. We needed something that offered frost protection on a large scale, could be left in place without having to be adjusted, and most important of all, something that was really inexpensive. Our solution... "cold frames" made with one-by-one supports instead of solid wood and heavy duty woven blue drop cloths instead of glass!