I have a sink!!!

An hones-to-goodness kitchen sink!

Ok, so it's not a sink in the traditional sense of things. Quentin and I had both been focusing a lot on the word "sink" and scouring the aisles at Home Depot for one we liked that was affordable and would fit into our kitchen well. No dice at all unless we wanted to spend nearly $100 just for the sink!

Then he watched a tiny house video tour on YouBoob and called me up to his computer to show me part of it. That enterprising fellow had taken a stainless steel mixing bowl from Wally World and added plumbing to it and made a sink of the thing! Why not, said we, do similar here? It would only give us one sink and I really wanted two if possible, but a single sink would allow us to dump liquids without going outside in bad or cold weather, including the shower totes when we are done with them, and my dirty dishwater as I could still use my dishpans for the washing up. Honestly, I prefer the dishpans ... don't ask me why, because I really couldn't tell you!

So, we went to Wal-Mart a couple of weeks ago on our usual Thursday night after work grocery run, and got the sink (an 8-quart stainless steel bowl), and most of the plumbing supplies. He got the drain the next day in town at the hardware store, as the only ones Wally World had were the bathroom pop up type and that's not what we wanted. He already had the pipe glue and silicone at the house. So ...

Him playing with his early birthday present/Sweetest Day gift of a saws-all. He's wanted one for a while, but until now, we didn't get him one. He thought he might need it for the sink project but he was able to use his jigsaw instead.

One eight-quart stainless steel mixing bowl - $12

One plumbing repair kit - $20. The drain cost about $5.

Cutting the hole in the bottom of the bowl. He drilled a small hole first so he could get the tin snips started and then got busy chopping out the hole. How did he know it would be the right size? He took the gasket and drew around the inside of it with a marker on the bottom of the bowl so he'd know where to cut.

And the hole is made! One stainless steel mixing bowl sink in the making!

Screwing the drain in.

Putting silicone all around it to keep it from leaking. Mind, since the bottom of the bowl isn't slanted a bit like a regular sink, the drain sits above the bottom of the bowl a tiny bit, which leaves a little standing water in the sink when it's used. Who cares, it dries up pretty quick.

Fitting more of the drain together to be able to add the pipework.

More silicone sealant. He never does this kind of thing halfway.

One finished sink bowl!

Now he's cutting the hole in the door that became my kitchen cupboard for the sink to sit in.

And it fits perfectly!

More silicone on the counter where the sink meets the wood, and the plumbing is assembled. As it's greywater, it just runs straight out to the ground, but we put in the p-trap for keeping cold air from rising up the pipe into the house. It also makes it kind of hard for things like mice to try to get into the house through the drain when there's water sitting in the p-trap.

So now I have a sink! Next project is our woodstove! I love our kero heater, but as we cannot leave it running all the time while we are at work (it would run out of kero before we got done and home), well ... it is getting a bit chilly at night now that it's late fall, and so the day this post goes up, he went shopping and brought home the stove board for the woodstove to sit on when we get it. It looks like gray flagstones, and is pretty.

For me, it's now off to work on the shop some more. I have a need to get a LOT of Christmas stuff in the shop in the next month and sell as much as I can. Too many bills still to get caught up from the debacle of the last year!

Fall onset

Fall is closing in here on the homestead, and the land is starting to go to sleep for the winter. Hasn't stopped my black and yellow garden spiders on the porch (named Thelma and Louise) from spinning webs and putting up egg cases and just generally doing their spider thing of keeping the flies and other pests down on the porch. Who needs those nasty fly strips when you have the girls?

As for the shop, it is ready for all the way through to Thanksgiving, and I am prepping for Christmas.

Etsy has done a huge favor to sellers by expanding categories from 15 to 20 we can use, so that means when I get far enough to need to be putting in the various types of decor (home, holiday, garden, and party), I'll have enough categories plus a couple left over.

I'm beat though. It's been a rough few weeks and I want a short nap before I have to pull together for the Just Over Broke that currently does most of the bill paying around here. Too many 9 1/2 hour shifts and six days last week just are killing the heck out of me.

But that is why I keep working on the shop. One day, it will be enough income to replace the Just Over Broke and I can quit. One step at a time, one sale a time, it gets me closer and closer to getting out of there. Go, me!

Shower update and a few other things

Well, it's been a bit insane again ... when is it NOT here? I sometimes think that when I can finally quit the plant, life is going to be boring, and then I laugh. BORING? With ten cats, and eventually adding other livestock, all the plants and trees and things for food and extra produce sales, the shop, and all the housework? BORING? You've got to be kidding me.

So, what's been going on lately?

I keep having minor depressive episodes and crying jags, because this last year has been such a struggle and it's not over quite yet. It's coming up fast on a year since I nearly lost Quentin to that awful pneumonia bout, and I can't help but think how much further along we would be if not for that. Seems like the last year, things have kind of just stagnated.

But then I look at the shop, which is essentially two of them. Thanks to Etsy allowing things in Pattern earlier this year that you can't sell on Etsy itself, I can add all kinds of things over time to the Pattern side. Currently, it's my jewelry and Mom's stuff. The Etsy shop itself is being limited to beads, charms, and Mom's stuff, with the likelihood later on down the road of adding party supplies/decor. At this point, I'm all about whatever sells to make a profit. That means in Pattern, adding other things for ladies gifts, including bath bombs, soaps, holiday decor (I can get my wholesale hands on a TON of Christmas ornaments, and since I loooove Christmas ....), spa gift sets, and possibly even things like cosmetic sets and fragrances, so a gal or her man can get inexpensive but lovely gifts for her(self).

The main products will still be jewelry, much of it handmade by me. I get a kick out of taking beads and charms and making something pretty from them. So that's that.

The plant has changed the attendance policy from 14 points (absences) and fired to six, and a one-year rolloff instead of 28-days-perfect-attendance worked off. You can bet people are quitting right and left as they find other jobs in other small manufactories around here. The company made a huge mistake with that. There is now talk of making it six days a week mandatory, and while it's just a rumor, the LAST rumor was the attendance policy change, and those of us there know what happened with THAT. Christ on a crouton.

So I'm working hard on the shops (officially one, as it's all managed with Etsy's seller admin, but technically two since I have so much stuff divided up), and hope and pray for better times ahead. Meanwhile, we are taking all the overtime and paying off or paying down everything we owe, fixing things in the cabin to be completed, and etc.

Shower update ...

We had to take the shower head on a hose off and put a regular small shower head on the end of the pipe. The long hose pulled too much water too fast and so it was a bust. The smaller, regular shower head doesn't get a full flow like it would under regular running water pressure, but the spigot allows us to control the flow and we get good pressure with a solid dribble that does the job. The water also stays hot longer and it's awesome to get a hot shower instead of a tepid one every weekend, and not have to hold a hose or make it a Navy shower to get the water to last for us both. He just turns off the spigot when he's done and then I turn it on for mine. Yeah, he goes first all the time ... he uses less water than I do and that way, I can just enjoy the heck out of it and run out what's left, which is usually at least half. We both get really clean and happy now, too! The shower bucket is AWESOME.

If you are going to be off-grid without running water for a while, a shower bucket is going to have to go on your must-have list at the top for a bit of "normal" convenience! It's WORTH the work, and it's inexpensive - it cost us about $50 all told for the parts, and took about an hour or so to put together. You will need a power drill and a spade bit for the hole in the side of the bucket for the pipe, but that's about it for power tools. The drill also comes in handy for the pilot hole for the heavy-duty hook to hang the double pulley on. A bit of metal pipe of some kind works wonders to crank that puppy into the hole, too. Simple physics involving a lever (the pipe) gets that hook seated in the hole really fast.

With that, it's 240AM here, and I have to finish up the last of the dishes and make some supper. Talk to you all soon!

Catching up and new shower

It's been a rather long year, almost.

This time last year, we had no idea things would be the way they are. So what happened, that I didn't want to talk about a few months back? What's kept me from blogging this year?

I'll make a long story as short as I can.

Last year, on the week before Halloween, Quentin got sick. Originally, he was diagnosed with severe gastroenteritis (stomach flu is what most folks call it). It wasn't. A week later, he was barely eating anything, had lost seven pounds, and looked like a walking cadaver. He's skinny enough anyhow that he doesn't have much body fat, so losing that weight made his eyes sink into his head.

At his week after checkup, his BP was only 80/60. The doctor that day, on Halloween, the day after his birthday, said we needed to shove him across the street to the ER. He didn't want to go. The doctor looked at him and said something I will never forget, "Dude, you're septic."

Three little words that told me my husband was dying in front of my eyes. So off we went to the ER, and his records had been shot over there already. Two bags of IV fluid and three different antibiotics through the IV were going inside of five minutes. TWO nurses. That alone told me this was bad.

He was in such awful shape, they brought the portable x-ray to his ER bay, because they didn't think he could stand up for a chest x-ray. Sometime later, the ER doctor was talking possibly shipping him to Branson for an infectious disease specialist there to handle things. He decided against it, but put hubby in the hospital for an overnight. The idea was to see if they could get things under some control that could be handled at home. If it didn't work, there would be surgery. Thankfully, it worked.

Diagnosis: right lower lung pneumonia, and  abscesses in both lower lungs. All were about 1 inch across. He was on sick leave for six weeks, with two antibiotics totaling 1300mg a DAY for the whole time. Then he got back to work, and got accused of something he didn't do from well before he got sick, and got fired.

In July, he was able to hire back to the plant. In the meantime, we nearly lost the house and land, and are still struggling to get back to our feet on everything. The doctor bills are going to collections, and we really don't care. I'm sending people snarky letters and trying to put them off until at least mid-January, when we'll be more sturdy on our feet, financially. Things are slowly but surely ticking along to get where we wanted to be a year ago. We saved the land and cabin, but it's been rough, and as I said, we are still struggling. We survived last winter with just the kero heater in the cabin and it not fully insulated, while he was home sick the whole time.

Thanks to how the plant fired him, he couldn't find steady work, which didn't help with the whole situation, and led to nearly losing it all as well. So you can understand why I haven't wanted to write. It was all just too painful, especially when you add in that the stress caused my BP to go sky-high, I ended up with three trips to the ER from work (two in an ambulance as it was so high I was on the verge of stroking out or having a heart attack), and me on two BP meds now. Just so much fun.

Maybe by spring, we will finally be caught up on everything, and paying off all the bills, and a small loan a friend gave us early this year to help us get through it all. I was so grateful to get the land guy and cabin people somewhat off our backs with that. It was still a huge struggle and continues to be, but we are slowly making it.

Altogether, there's about $9300 in hospital bills to be figured out how to pay them. It's going to be a long haul.

But we are also making a point of slowly but surely putting a little each week to fixing things up how we want. No more "We'll get to it eventually." Last year scared us both, and we are making a point of putting a bit out each week to piece by inch our way to getting things done. One piece of paneling, one tree, one piece of stovepipe, or one whatever a week, it's getting done.

So the project last weekend (we didn't schedule any for this weekend, we were just too pooped from the work week) was a shower bucket for us instead of constantly using shower bags, which wear out in a few months. I got the idea a while back from another homesteading blog I read where they did similar. So I'm going to spend the rest of this post telling you about our shower bucket!

 This is the supplies we got, in the bucket. We got a bit more CPVC pipe than required, in case of mistakes. It's pulleys, thread sealer tape, pipe, attachments, and pipe glue.

The stuff all laid out. We changed the one pulley for a double pulley later on.

Drilling the hole in the side of the bucket to screw the end of the pipe into for the drain.

Putting pieces into the hole.

The end of the pipe screwed into the side of the bucket.

Outside of the drain.

Checking for leaks on the porch.

On the top left, you can see the drain from the Aquatainer we brought out to fill the bucket. It made that so much easier. We used a couple of gallons to make sure there would be no leaks under pressure.

The rope and pulley on the handle, and the full pipe is done. The little bit of blue at the end of the pipe you can see is a spigot so we can control the flow.

Adding the hot water!!

Watching for leaks. Nope, not a drop. Unlike the shower bag.

The double pulley and 2x4 he put in to hold it. There's a big hook there for the pulley, so we can just take it all down when done and keep the cats from playing with the pulley. The pipe is part of the frame from the Ozark Trails shower cabana we use for the "bathroom."

Adding some cold water, the hot water was HOT! The hose is from the pipe to the handheld shower head. We had to take that off in the long run as it wouldn't let us control the flow properly. It was sure nice when we got it right though, even if it was a stream and not a sprinkle, since I could just stand under it and not have to hold a hose!

The finished setup of the pipe with the 45 degree elbow to point the water flow onto us. Works awesome!

When we tried it with the hose, we had to put the showerhead in the bucket for hoisting, because it pulled down too much. Here, the bucket is starting to go up in the air. The pulleys made it easy.

The finished shower bucket on the shower shelf that had previously been used for the shower bag. Push the shower cabana back in place in front of it, and the pipe goes right through the back window into the cabana and the water flows onto us. It was AWESOME. (Did I mention that already? Heehee.)

Next project after finishing tires on the truck as they are trying to have babies, is to start on the wood stove!