So while my wonderful daughters were making brownies, I headed to the basements to continue with some organizing and cleaning.
In the process, I found some very cool things!
The first thing I found was among a pile of glass jars I sorted through.
Continue readingI wanted to get some progress in the basements today, but before I continued with cleaning up the old part basement, I wanted to clear things out of the new part basement. I’d been putting garbage bags near the bottom of the stairs, and things were getting pretty cluttered.
It wasn’t just the garbage I’ve been cleaning up from the old basement, though.
Shortly after we moved in, one of the things we’d done was set up wire frame bag holders to hold bags for recycling.
This was back when we still thought recycling was worth doing out here. I’m not so sure anymore.
At the landfill, the only general household recycling they want sorted out is the glass. Everything else is supposed to go into the general bins, which then get shipped to the city for sorting. At first, we would take our paper products to the burn barrel, but with the fire bans in the past two summers, that stopped. Even starting up again in the winter didn’t work out, due to weather. So that all goes to the dump now, instead.
One thing that took some getting used to after the move, is that this province does not have bottle depots. You know all those things you pay an enviro fee on when you buy them at the grocery store? We used to be able to take them in and get that fee back. Here, we just pay the fee and it goes… somewhere.
However, I knew that aluminum could be taken in and sold by weight. It’s one of those things organizations do for charity drives; they collect people’s aluminum, then sell it by weight to raise money. Pop tabs are collected separately, as they are pure aluminum and get a higher price per pound. Pop tab collections are sometimes done to raise money for wheelchairs.
So we’ve been collecting our aluminum for close to 2 1/2 years now.
For a while, we had a wire bag holder for aluminum, another for paper and plastic, and a small bin for glass.
At some point, we needed to make space for company, so it all went into the basement, but never made it back up again.
Since then, we continued to bag the aluminum separately into smaller bags, all of which got tossed into the basement as smaller bags were filled. (Except the tabs from pop cans and food tins. We keep a small jar for those and when it’s full, I run a magnet through them to catch any that aren’t pure aluminum, then transfer them to a 1 gallon jar. We have yet to fill that jar.)
Then we got a can crusher, which allowed us to fit more into the little bags before they got tossed into the basement.
As you can imagine, things were starting to get ridiculous down there.
Today, I fixed that.
Most of this involved combining the contents of little bags into larger ones, but I found 3 recycling bags full of stuff from before getting the can crusher.
I just spent a whole lot of quality time with the crusher.
This is what I got out of the basement.
Six bags of crushed cans. Not everything could be crushed; some of the cans were too big even for our extra tall can crusher, and things like cat food tins don’t get crushed at all. Even taking that into account, each one of those bags is the equivalent of 3 bags of uncrushed cans.
So this is the equivalent of 18 bags of cans, crushed to fit into 6.
I honestly don’t know if this is enough to be worth taking to a scarp yard. They go by the pound, and aluminum is really light.
At least they’re out of the basement.
They are now taking up space in the garage, instead. :-D
I also got out a large bag of regular recycling, plus another 4 garbage bags from the old basement clean up.
Things are looking a whole lot better down there, just by getting this stuff out!
At some point, we will even be able to start using the new part basement as a workshop again!
I’m really looking forward to that. Even if stairs are my nemesis. :-D
The Re-Farmer
Among the many things we are interested in doing in the future is making cheese.
We already make yogurt cheese (see here and here) whenever we make yogurt, which can be used right away, but we’re interested in making cheeses that need to be aged.
Which requires a place to age them. Like a cheese cave.
Well, we do sort of have a “cave” in the basement. The old root cellar.
In the research I’ve been doing (watch out for a future “Recommended” post for a home cheese making resource!), the aging cheeses need temperatures and humidity to stay within a certain range.
I don’t know that our root cellar has that range. For starters, I think it might actually be too cold, but that can be helped with appropriate insulation. I think our greater challenge will be the humidity.
Since this is not something we’ll be able to do for quite some time, that means we have time to gather data.
Which begins today.
I went to pick up a cheap thermometer at the dollar store and found a hydrometer right next to it, which was great, because I didn’t even think of such a device existing. At least not in household form. These are not mounted just inside the door of the root cellar. This is probably the warmest part of the room, but the best location for hanging them. Ah, well.
As you can see, the temperature gauge had already dropped quite a bit.* The humidity is about the same as it was upstairs, so I don’t know if that was the actual reading, or if it still needed time to adjust for the new location.
There were already huge nails hammered into the floor joists of the entry above (I’m finding nails like this all over the basements, garage, sheds, barn – anywhere there is wood, there are nails hammered in for hanging things), so I used one that was accessible, but still out of the way enough to not bash my head, for the clip board. I printed out some chart sheets to record date, time, temperature and humidity. The plan is to come down here once a week, at different times of the day, and record the gauge readings.
This would be why it’s so cold in here. This vent duct goes directly outside. The only thing at the end is a screen to keep the critters out. While I was down there, I felt an actual wind coming through this duct.
Over the next year, we will get the weekly readings and slowly empty the room out and give it a good cleaning. I figure, in a year we’ll be able to chart the data and use that to determine how much would need to be done to make it functional as a cheese cave, or if we have to go with something else. Like a modified refrigerator.
If the room turns out to not be appropriate as a cheese cave, I already know it works well as a root cellar. :-) So either way, it will be used in the future!
The Re-Farmer
*edit: for some reason, my brain just assumed that, like every other thermometer I’ve seen, the 0C was at the top, so when I looked at it, I saw 2C instead of 12C!! Which is a bit of a relief, because while the temperature did continue to drop, it was not as severe as I originally thought.
I had quite a surprise last night!
As I got up from my computer to do the cat stuff a bit earlier than usual – the only reason I happened to see this while there was still enough light – I caught movement out the north facing window.
Three deer had been startled and were bolting away from the feeding station, which is around the corner of the house from where I was looking, running through the old garden area and maple grove.
Did I say three? Oh! There’s number four…
Continue readingI was able to get a bit more progress in the old part basement yesterday, and it’s the sort of progress that actually feels like things are finally moving forward!
Stuff got put back for a change!
Okay, so it’s really all temporary, but still…
The first thing I wanted to work on was getting the now dry shelves back against the wall. My plan was to put both on one side of the centre pillar, instead of one on each side, like it was before.
It didn’t quite work out that way.
Continue readingToday, I was finally able to continue working on cleaning up the old part basement.
For those who are new to visiting this blog (Welcome! Thanks for popping by!), click here to read about what happened, and you can see the clean up progress here, here, here and here. (All links will open new tabs, so you won’t lose your place! :-) )
I’ve really been kinda dreading what I need to work on next, which is to start putting back some of the things I had to move out during cleanup, and try and figure out what to keep, what to store elsewhere, and what needs to be disposed of. Hopefully, I won’t be finding any more hidden “poison for tree” containers hidden somewhere!
The first thing I did today was move the blower fan to a different area, so I could do a bit more clean up in the last section I had worked on.
The photo on the left is how it looked when I last worked in this section. There was still a lot of dust and dirt in the area, but trying to sweep it did more to kick the dust into the air than get rid of it.
In the process, I discovered a light fixture hidden between two furnace ducts! I had to have seen it before, but simply forgot it existed. It’s very well hidden! (As an aside, I had my phone on one of the ducts near where I was working, held in place by the magnetic case, playing music. I later found out the girls could hear my music on the second floor, through the vents!)
There are so many odd little lights around this old basement. This half of the basement alone has one of two lights that turn on with the switch at the top of the stairs, one that has its own switch at the side closer to the new part basement, and one above the septic pump that has no switch. It is screwed in and out to turn it on and off. Now I find the light with the pull chain between the ducts, so that’s 4 lights on this side of the stairs. On the other side of the stairs is the other light that’s turned on by the switch at the top of the stairs, a light with a pull chain above the sump and well pumps, and another with its own light switch closer to the furnaces.
That’s a total of 7 lights in one little basement!
Anyhow. Where was I? Oh, yes. Cleaning.
I was even able to wash this section of wall a bit. The other walls were too crumbly, and the best I could do was sweep them gently, but this wall is solid. Since this wall is part of the original basement, but became an internal wall after the new part was added, it tells me that the crumbing of the exterior basement walls is probably due to all sorts of moisture from the soil around it.
Waterproof sealants probably didn’t exist when this basement was built.
As for the clean up today, this time I didn’t even try to use the mop bucket, and just set up in the laundry sink. That water got so black! Even after changing the water several time and rinsing the floor several times, it was still really filthy.
We’re not going to be able to use this mop anywhere else in the house anymore. :-D No amount of washing and rinsing of the mop will get it clean enough!
Once the floor was washed and rinsed as best I could, I set up the blower, then turned my attention to the two shelves we will be able to reuse.
I started by washing and scrubbing the shorter one.
I gave it a good scrubbing – after first removing the nails that were used to attach it to the pillar it was next to, originally – then flipped it upside down to do the bottoms of the shelves. You can see the water damage on the “legs” of the shelf, even though it was raised off the floor by bricks.
When this shelf was scrubbed and rinsed (and I took advantage of all that soapy water to mop that section of floor again), I dragged out the taller shelf.
It needed some nails removed before I could start cleaning it, too.
This one has less water damage on its bottom, but was a lot dirtier. The section of wall it was next to is crumbling a lot more than where the shorter shelf was set up. At least this shelf is a lot sturdier, which made it easier to scrub.
Once they were done, I set them up where the blower is aimed, on bricks to keep the air circulating.
Though we will be using these shelves, because we need to, it will be temporary. When we are able to, we’ll pick up some plastic utility shelves to use instead. No wood. No metal. Not for this area!
Once we figure out what goes where of the stuff that got moved out of the shelves, we plan to use them to store bottles. We’ve got a stack of bottles from hard apple cider that we’ve been accumulating over the past two years that will be used as bottle bricks when we do our cordwood practise building. There are also lots of other bottles and jars all over the place, and as we clean those up, we will set aside the one we want to use at bottle bricks as well, so we’ll have other colours as well as ones with no colour at all. The outdoor bathroom we’re planning to make as our first practice building is not going to have any windows in it. Bottle bricks will be used, instead, so all light while maintaining privacy. Whichever wall ends up facing south the most, will have the most bottle bricks with no colour in them for maximum sunlight.
Storing these in the old basement will also mean we’ll have access to water, and the old laundry sink that has turned out to be so very handy. The bottles and jars will need to be cleaned and sterilized before they can be made into bricks.
Little by little, it’s getting organized!
All of this took only about an hour, and it feels like I should have done more, but everything needs to dry before I can continue. Hopefully, I’ll get a bit more progress in tomorrow.
Now, before I forget again, I’m going to go back into the basement and get the dehumidifier that’s down there running.
The Re-Farmer
As usual, I had furry company while I did my rounds this morning. Including Two-Face.
She found a patch of ground some critter had been digging in, against a tree root, leaving a softer pile of dirt. She hunkered down on the warmer patch it created and wouldn’t move! :-D
Continue readingWe did things a bit differently this month, with our bulk shopping.
Usually, we do one big trip at the end of the month, with the bulk of the shopping done at Costco. As we’ve gotten to know different stores that we now go to regularly, that monthly shopping day has expanded to include going to at least 3 different major stores to stock up. Sometimes more.
The van gets very full and heavy. Especially with the weight of cat litter and giant bags of kibble that we have to pack everything else around.
So at the end of February, we decided to split the trip into two. The first trip focused more on stocking up for us humans, and a second trip would be to top up anything we needed, but mostly pick up the bulky bags of kibble and boxes of litter.
Today was our top up day.
Our timing to try this could have been better…
Continue readingI was able to get a bit of time to continue cleaning in the old part basement this afternoon.
Progress wasn’t quite what I was hoping to get done, though.
Continue readingYesterday was our day to do our monthly shop, which always makes for a long day. We actually decided not to do a full shop, though, and will go back later in the month. Specifically, we didn’t get all the cat kibble and litter we usually do. It gets really hard to pack the van with groceries with so many bags and boxes taking up space!
I’m really enjoying the longer daylight hours, too. It was still daylight when we came home!
We were greeted with gorgeous views in the morning, too.
Continue reading
