House Building Materials

[Edwin]

Thanks for the compliments on the photos, Chas. You are always so good to share photos of your travels where you have been, and things of interest. Yes, the materials are heavy, huh, Chas, and the work is close to the ground which makes a combination for back fatigue! "Big Sky" does sound familiar; it sounds like a film made in Montana, although I don't know that to be true. We do have open spaces here in the horizon, on the horizon, with only wheat fields, hay stack rocks, and cattle pasture. We can see towns off in the distance 25 miles and more away. It is a lot of fun to view the horizon, anytime, and especially at night! I might add that Crisi has been really good to share with us in photos her life also, and what she does and enjoys. Thank you, Crisi!

[Edwin]

Chas, I remember why the term "Big Sky" was familiar to me. As you say it may be the title of a film and I am unfamiliar with that. But "Big Sky" is the name of a college athletic conference or group of colleges that play, football, basketball, baseball, etc. I am a little vague of what it entails, but it is the name of a group of college athletic teams who all belong to the "Big Sky Conference," and I think it includes some of Washington State, Idaho State, and Montana State, and I can't remember about Oregon State.

[Edwin]

I have handled so many concrete blocks in the last year, that I am kind of getting burned out with them. I have found so many uses for concrete blocks that it seems I can't quit buying and hauling them home. I hired a truck to bring up 6 pallet of concrete blocks, 75 to a pallet, then a pallet of concrete premix, against my better judgment, as I always got the sand and gravel and did it myself, but that's the way my son in law wanted to do it, and he was very good to help me, so that's what I did. I also had a pallet of mortor brought up on that truck to mortor the blocks together. The cost of hiring the truck was cheaper than even the gasoline for me to have hauled them myself. After we got started on the cellar, my son in law suggested I build some kind of a structure over the pump and pressure tank to keep them safe from freezing. I turned and looked at the blocks, and it dawned on me that I could put up a protective structure over that water equipment, so in just a couple of hours I had the water syster inside concrete block walls, no mortor, just stacked together exactly like they would have been if I was going to mortor them in. That worked great until we had a really hard freeze, and we lost our water due to freeze up, but no equipment was damaged, so my structure was a suggest. When it froze that hard I tore it down, took out the pressure tank and pump, until we could put it in the cellar hole.

I kept trying to think of what I could do in the place of the very cheap metal roofing used for skirting to do a better job. My son in law wanted me to insulate all of it, but I didn't want to do that, so that I could get under our house anywhere any time I need or wanted to. Then the idea struck me that I could stack a 5 block high wall all the way around our house instead of that metal skirting. All kinds of ideas went through my head about what I could do for a wind break between the wall and the blocks. I finally came up with the idea of using contractor garbage liners, and that is what I did. It was very successful because for the first time in 5 winters, nothing froze up underneath the house! Then I got the idea of putting them under the fence to keep the metal wire off the ground, so it wouldn't deteriorate, and also give the fence a little mroe heighth. That worked great. I also built a two room chicken house using concrete blocks, and my next project with them is to build an eight by eight, and also eight feet tall structure to put the garbage in. That will be my last project with the concrete blocks, that I know of for now anyway! I was thinking about Smiley and all those blocks that he gave away from removing those partitions, and someone that our youngest daughter knew gave me 43 concrete blocks, and I should not have hauled that many in my van, but I did, and I guess I got by with it, as I was very careful, and drove very slowly! Even though I need a few more blocks I decided to take a break from hauling them until our very hot weather is past. It is not important to have that building put up until winter sets in, so I am okay with that, and enjoying not hauling more blocks up the hill for now anyway!