The Grid Is For Squares

Hey out there. It’s been another weird and dark week, but at least nothing too catastrophic has happened since we recorded this episode a week ago. Although here in LA basically everyone has coronavirus, and there have been threats of armed insurrections in all 50 states, so we’re hunkering down, staying indoors, and taking long trips up to our 10-acre property.

In our previous episode, we talked about the in-floor heating system we built in our greenhouse. (Vince also wishes to issue a correction: he stated we were using 1/2-inch vinyl tubing, but it’s actually 1/4-inch. He would recommend 3/8 or 1/2-inch though, if you want to try building an in-floor heating system yourself.) But we accomplished a lot more than just in-floor heating while we were up there over New Year’s. I only went up for 4 days, but Vince stayed up there for 10 days. He says that by the end of the trip, he stopped feeling the grease in his hair and even stopped minding the cold mornings. He went feral!

So what all did Vince and his mom get up to while they were on the property for 10 full days? Well for one thing, they finished digging the post holes and setting the pier blocks for our future yurt. I started the holes when I was up there (and I know I’ve said it before, but holy crap digging is hard work!) and then Vince finished the holes after I left. A yurt requires a round platform, but lumber doesn’t naturally want to be round, so we’re going with a hexagonal structure: 1 support post in the center and 6 support posts around the outside. So now we’ve got our 7 post holes with gravel and concrete pier blocks (meticulously leveled, of course) in place. There’s also an extra-deep section dug out at the front for an under-yurt pantry. Next step is building the platform!

I emailed the yurt company we’re going with, Living Intent, to get a proper quote for the yurt we want. Their base price for a 16-foot yurt is $6000 but we want to add French doors and full insulation, which brings the price to about $9000. We technically have that much saved, but it won’t leave us a cushion for emergencies (like if anything goes wrong with our cars) or to buy the platform lumber... it feels like we’re so close yet still so far. But all we can do is keep moving forward.

Vince also took a new approach to humanure during this trip! Our compost toilet was one of the first things we built on the property, but you gotta do something with the waste each time the 5-gallon bucket fills up. We’ve been digging holes and burying it in corners of the property where we know we’ll never plant food crops, but we’ve only had the property for one year and those zones are already starting to fill up with shit-holes. So Vince did a bunch of reading on the subject (largely going off the peer-reviewed Humanure Handbook) and this month he implemented our new humanure solution. He built a 5’x3’x3’ Composting Station with several compartments layered with grass/hay; the material is a permeable plastic (leftovers that Vince snagged from work), but the hay keeps any sewage from seeping out the sides.

If you let the humanure compost for 1-2 years, you can supposedly use it on your garden… even on food crops! We don’t plan to do that—there are so many native plants and trees that we want, we’ll have plenty of non-food uses for it—but this guy who Wrote The Book apparently feeds his family with crops he’s grown in (properly composted) humanure. Crazy. In any case, I really appreciate Vince doing all this work and research on humanure so I don’t have to think about it or touch it myself.

On a related note, we officially have food planted on the property now! There are some brussels sprouts and beets coming up, and Vince plans to plant even more the next time he’s up north. It’s comforting to know that we finally have some edible plants growing on our property. We can’t survive there yet off the grid, but we’re on our way.

Vince is actually up on the property right now, so I’m looking forward to hearing all about what he and his mom accomplished this time around. We’ll record another episode when he gets home and let you know!

Today’s exciting news is that we finally finished our in-floor heating project… and it worked! We knew from the get-go that electric heating wouldn’t be an option; the average space heater runs on 1500 watts, which means that our giant Yeti 3000 battery could only run one for 2 hours. Another solution was needed.

The simple version of our in-floor heating system is: a 12-volt circulating pump (which plugs into our Yeti battery) is immersed in a one-gallon steel reservoir, which pumps hot water from the reservoir through 2 tubing runs that wind through the floor. After pumping the hot water through the floor, the cold water returns to a steel coil which immersed in hot coals, which fills the reservoir with hot water again and the hot water begins its journey once more.

Tune in to today’s episode to learn more about how we built our DIY off-the-grid in-floor heating system, pros and cons, suggestions and recommendations, and more!

Welcome to the last episode of 2020! We’ve had our ten-acre property for a little more than a year now (we spent our first night there on Thanksgiving 2019), but as we come to the end of December, we thought we should take a moment to reflect back on what we’ve built, what we’ve learned, and what we recommend.

For starters, I always feel a lot of imposter syndrome when I say either “homesteading” or “off-the-grid”… we don’t live there, we haven’t planted any food, we don’t have a drinkable water supply, and we rely on the resources and the grid of our home in LA. But an off-the-grid homestead is our goal, and it has only been one year. We’ll keep trying to bend our arc towards sustainability.

But let’s get to our One Year Retrospective!

What We Have:

• A locked chain for the front gate

• A greenhouse with bamboo floors and furniture

• A compost toilet

• A skoolie, with a fridge and solar power, which isn’t ours but we can use

• A water catchment basin that has already caught many gallons of rainwater

• Several holes (in-process foundations and dugouts)

• An outdoor sink

• Some firescaping and landscaping

There’s definitely a part of me that wishes we had accomplished more in our first year, but when I list everything out like that, it’s not bad! Especially considering that it was all done by hand with 2-3 people, mostly over one weekend per month. And a lot of these projects are Proof Of Concepts too; hopefully now that we’ve experimented on smaller projects, we can scale up to bigger stuff.

What Surprised Us:

• Well, we weren’t expecting a global pandemic to dominate our first year of owning property! It definitely confirmed for us that a homestead is a good idea.

• The compost toilet is easier than I thought… it pretty much feels like using a normal toilet, and it wasn’t difficult to build either.

• The temperature variants, on the other hand, are much harder than I was expecting. We looked up weather records before purchasing, but it’s one thing to look at a number and another thing to sleep through a cold night. We also didn’t expect the temp to get up to 145F in the greenhouse during the summer… hopefully once we get some plants in there, it’ll regulate the temperature a little better.

• The “wild factor” was a known unknown. We’d camped in wild places before, but we’d never built and left things in the wilderness. Rodents, for example, have chewed up the engine of the work van we bought, which means that now it’s just junk on our property. Bummer.

Products We Recommend:

• The Grandio Ascent Greenhouse

• Milwaukee Electric Power Tools. Vince already owned a Milwaukee drill, circular saw and jigsaw, but we’ve now purchased a Wet/Dry Vac, a String Trimmer, and a Chainsaw. We can’t say enough good things about electric power tools.

• The Goal Zero Yeti Battery

• PVC (AKA Grownup Tinkertoys) is a mixed bag. It was a great material for early construction projects, especially since we have a small car, but we found that it doesn’t hold up to snow loads or rogue gusts of wind very well. We still recommend it as an early building material, but be sure to shore up your joints and be prepared to rebuild a few times.

What We Learned:

• You can either throw money, time, or people at a problem. We’re pretty short on all three of those things! We try to game the “time” system a bit by building as much as we can back home in LA, but now that Vince has quit his job, he hopes to have more time up north in the new year.

• We’re so glad we didn’t spring for a more expensive property. As it is, we’re only barely able to pay our monthly “mortgage” and complete modest-sized projects on the property. If we’d bought a bigger or more expensive parcel of land, we might even be struggling to pay our rent here in LA.

• It’s important to be patient and realistic with yourself. Remember that you’re doing your best! Focus on the things that excite you, because nothing this big is easy and it’s vital to keep that flame of enthusiasm alive.

• And be patient with everyone else in your homesteading pod too. We really tried to get on the same page before we purchased land, but disagreements become much more tangible once you’re actually on the ground. Be empathetic with yourself and everyone else. We also stay organized together by sharing maps, itineraries, pictures, budgets, and diagrams on Google Drive.

Thanks for joining us on this first year of our off-the-grid homesteading adventure! Here’s a toast to a fantastic Year Two. 🥂

Have a safe and happy New Year!

Welcome to The Grid Is For Squares! Today, we’re jumping back to our week on the property in early November. We only covered half of it in the last episode because there was a lot to discuss!

But before we get to that, we talk a little about Thanksgiving. It was especially problematic this year—what with the whole gathering during a global pandemic thing—but like most stories that involve indigenous people and white people, Thanksgiving is pretty problematic in general. So we talk about the real story behind Thanksgiving and how so little of what we tell ourselves about our own history is true. Part of growing up, as an individual and as a society, is not turning away from difficult truths. You can learn more about the real story of Thanksgiving here.

So, let’s get back to our Harvest Festival week on the property in November. The biggest project we tackled was building an outdoor sink!

One of the things I’ve been missing on the property is washing my hands in a real sink. But I’ve also just wanted to keep learning more carpentry and challenging myself to make increasingly complex projects, so a sink seemed like a good next step. You can read more about how we built it below.

This brings us to a less fun (but still important) discussion… when Vince and I work together on projects, we often end up bickering, which sucks! We generally communicate well in our relationship, but when it comes to projects, all that good communication seems to go out the window. Vince is very meticulous, which I totally respect, but I’m always more excited about improvising and making discoveries. Obviously there’s a lot I don’t know (like I would never rush in headlong with power tools), but I also want the freedom to make mistakes and learn as I go. So he gets frustrated when he sees me “doing it wrong” and I get frustrated when he “tells me what to do” and we end up bickering. But collaborating on construction projects is new for us, and let’s not forget that this is an incredibly stressful year for everyone, so we need to be patient with ourselves and each other. At the end of the day, we’re all on the same team.

But building a sink (and arguing about building a sink) was far from the only thing we did on our property that week. Now that the rainy season has started, we can have campfires again, so we cut and stacked a lot of firewood. Vince’s mom also worked on our rock staircase, a very cool feature made from chunks of local granite. We all did some digging in the yurt site, digging holes for support posts and using the extra soil to build a road from the driveway to the site. And we’re getting close to finishing the greenhouse build… we almost have enough homemade bricks to line the exterior walls and hold the sand and hardware cloth in place.

There’s still so much to do, but incremental progress is still progress. Patience isn’t my strongest suit but I’m trying. And when I think about the difference between Thanksgiving 2019 and Harvest Festival 2020, I realize that we really have accomplished a lot. There are no shortcuts, we just have to keep at it.

WHAT WE BUILT

• Sink table: Plywood, 2x4s for the legs, 1x4s for the facing

• 2 silver bowls from the thrift store for the sink bowl and soap holder

• Plumber’s putty to fit the sink bowl in place and a pop-up drain

• PVC pipe and a 5-gallon bucket to catch the water

Well it’s been a hot minute, but we finally have a new episode of The Grid Is For Squares to share with you all! We missed you.

It’s been a whole month since we last posted an episode… a lot has happened, but the most important news in our local world is that the rain has begun! We went up to the property on the Saturday after the election and a big rainstorm followed us north the entire drive. In other places that might be seen as a bad omen, but for Californians there is nothing more blessed than the first rain of the season. It even hailed! Hail yeah.

Which means the fires are out! Mostly. The Creek Fire, the huge wildfire near our property, is now at 95% containment. It turned out to be the biggest single wildfire in California history at 380,000 acres or 600 square miles. Now that it’s out, our air quality has improved so so much; it went from 200 AQI to 20. We can breathe the air again! It’s such a relief.

And, if you remember from our previous episode, we went up to the property in October to dig a rain catchment basin. Which means we have now officially started catching rain! We received 0.24 inches of rain while we were up there and caught 25 gallons of water. We should be catching more, based on the math—closer to 75 gallons for the amount of rain we got—but it’s still 25 gallons of water that we wouldn’t have otherwise. The system works! We built a rain catchment and then we caught rain!

It wasn’t a simple task to bottle up the water from the catchment, though; we had to find a way to filter out the leaves and detritus before bottling it up. But Vince ended up using his beloved Milwaukee Wet/Dry Vac with some mesh over the nozzle and it worked like a charm. We definitely recommend that approach if you’re facing a similar task. And we got another 0.4 inches of rain after we left, so we look forward to another 50 gallons of water in the catchment when we get up there next.

It precipitated all through the first night and the next day, including that dramatic episode of hail. Vince and his mom worked on some building projects inside the greenhouse to stay dry while I just read my Kindle in the bed. The rain was such a relief that we didn’t mind being stuck indoors. It was very cold, however, and after the second night of shivering and discomfort I woke up with a bit of… existential panic.

It was as cold as the very first time we slept on our property, Thanksgiving 2019, but back then it was novel. It was an adventure. Now… it’s just uncomfortable. Now it’s just my life. But Vince and his mom didn’t seem to be bothered by the cold at all, which made me start spiraling about not being “tough enough” or “strong enough” to handle it. If they can do it, why can’t I just force myself to be comfortable too? And if this isn’t what I’m into, why am I doing it? What even is my life?

It was a bad morning. (Mondays, am I right?) But I pulled my shit together and ultimately decided to get a motel room for 2 nights so I could sleep more comfortably while still coming to the property during the days; not only did I have a lot of work to do, but I needed to take that time to remember why I do love this property and what I do get out of it. At the end of the day, I don’t regret buying property. It’s not easy, but the best things in life rarely are.

We got a lot done over the course of the next several days, but we’ll talk about all that during the next episode. Have a good (and safe) Thanksgiving, friends!

It’s hard to believe that this is our last episode before the election. It’s been an impending doom ship sailing closer with each passing week and now it’s almost here. We’re going up to the property for a while after Election Day (either to celebrate, to mourn, or to hide?), so we might delay our next episode, but don’t worry about us. Everyone just be safe out there and VOTE VOTE VOTE!

On today’s episode, we chat about our latest trip up to the property, which was all about digging!

We’ve been thinking about renting an excavator for a while because of the volume of dirt we need to move, but we decided that we aren’t quite ready for that before the rainy season begins. So instead we decided to just go buck wild with shovels… and we got so much done!! A little mole family we were.

The dirt in California is a lot harder to dig than that sweet soft Midwest soil. Out here, you need a pickaxe, a round shovel, a flat shovel, a sledgehammer, and about 10 times as much time and effort. But with teamwork and determination, we accomplished a lot in 2 days.

The most important project was our rain catchment basin. We dug a crescent-shaped basin and built a berm around the main drainage culvert in the middle of our property, moving about 2 cubic yards (54 cubic feet) of dirt and rocks. We also dug a trench beneath the berm and buried a 4-inch drain pipe so we can drain the entire basin later if we need to.

Then, when the hot sun started shining directly on the catchment area, we moved our operation to the yurt site and did a bunch more digging there. To our surprise and delight, we discovered that the dirt where we want to build our yurt is softer than anywhere else on the property. So instead of just digging holes for our platform posts, we decided to start grading the whole site. The site is on a hill—probably a 1 in 10 incline—so if we don’t want a ton of steps at the front of the platform, we’ll need to dig out the back. Vince thinks we moved about 1 cubic yard (27 cubic feet) of dirt and rocks at the yurt.

On the final day, we laid a 20’ x 25’ plastic sheet over the whole catchment basin. It’ll need a little more finessing in the future, but even if we only catch the rain that falls on the plastic for now, we’ll be able to store 300 gallons for every inch of rain. To be clear, we don’t plan to drink this water, but we’re hoping our new catchment basin will catch hundreds or even thousands of gallons of non-potable water for plants. It’s important to diversify your water supply.

The air quality was pretty bad when we were there (AQI as high as 190) which is, you know, not ideal for manual labor. But we hunkered down in the skoolie during the worst air times (mid-day) and ran an air purifier on the solar power we have now. We can only hope that they put out the Creek Fire soon and the air quality will be better the next time we’re there.

Finally, in the spirit of spooooooky season, we spotted a couple of California Tarantulas on our property! They’re a little creepy (to me anyway) but they’re truly docile and harmless. Vince even let one walk on his arm. Tarantulas usually live in burrows underground, but in October the males emerge to find a mate. It marks the end of summer and the start of the rainy season (in nearby Coarsegold, they even celebrate with a Tarantula Festival every year). Hopefully this means that rain is on its way.

So the next time we talk to y’all, we should have just spent another week digging and building on the property. Stay safe out there! And vote!!

Or maybe it should be AQIred, since we also spend a lot of time talking about AQI in this episode. In any case, the exciting news of the day is that the skoolie is now officially on our property!

The world is getting to a point where we can’t even mention every bleak and upsetting thing that’s happened since we last recorded, or we’d spend the whole episode talking about it. And a little closer to home, here in the world of California, everything is still on fire.

The slightly cooler weather and the firefighters’ progress on our local wildfires hasn’t seemed to improve the air quality very much; these days, in addition to checking the temperature before opening a window or going outside, we also have to check the AQI. So that’s a new thing for 2020: compulsively checking the AQI, or Air Quality Index. It’s a composite measure of a few pollutants, but the PM2.5 (Particulate Matter under 2.5 microns) is the main concern. Anything under 10 microns can get into your lungs and your bloodstream, so it’s very dangerous and insidious. Not something you want to breathe in.

There are a few different places to check it online, between official government test stations and personal networks of devices. The official government stations are more accurate, but the beauty of the personal devices is that there are more of them. As with most things in the modern world, it’s best to get your information from an aggregate of sources.

The average AQI in Los Angeles for the past few decades is 20-50, and these days it’s been 80-200. And in Mariposa, it’s been as high as 400. Which makes it very hard to plan trips up to the property. Here in LA, we can close the windows and run an air purifier. But up in Mariposa, there’s nowhere to go. You can wear an N95 mask, but when you’re living outdoors and sleeping in a greenhouse, there’s not much you can do.

But let’s not bury the lede here in all this talk of wildfires and AQI… the skoolie bus is now on our land! Vince went out to Joshua Tree (sans Amy and Dickens— the air quality was just too bad for us to join) and helped our friends finish packing up. Then they drove a bus, two cars, a dog, and four people up to Mariposa. They were hoping to leave early enough to avoid any bus-driving in the dark, but ‘twas not to be. But luckily the whole party arrived safely around 10PM with no issues from hanging branches or hairpin turns.

Vince got a chance to test-drive the skoolie into town, so now he feels comfortable piloting a big ole bus. And maybe the most exciting asset on the bus is 2 sets of solar panels and a Yeti 3000 battery bank… we now officially have power on the property! Which means we have refrigeration and (relevant to AQI) can run an air purifier! It’s very exciting.

We’ll be going up again next weekend because honey there is work to be done and hopefully the AQI will be relatively okay. But if not, at least we have an insulated bus and power to run an air purifier now. We’ll cross our fingers that the air is breathable and let you know how it goes in the next episode!

P.S. This will make sense once you listen to the episode, but a group of turkey vultures is apparently called a “committee” or a “wake.” So actually we weren’t that far off with our silly guesses!

Hey friends. We’ve been struggling a little lately… between the pandemic, the election, and wildfire smoke making the air toxic in both LA and Mariposa, things have been feeling pretty bleak. It’s not easy trying to live our daily lives and create our homestead with all of that happening in the background, but like everyone else, we muddle through.

So today we’re talking about something that makes us happy: yurts! We’ve wanted to put a yurt on our property for a while now, and although we’re still in the Research And Planning phase, I wanted to take this opportunity to give everyone a little more info. Yurts are increasingly popular these days, but Karen on AirBnB did not invent yurts. So… who did? And how do they work?

Let’s start at the beginning. Yurts are old. Like, thousands of years old. Also called gers, they’re the traditional dwelling for nomadic groups in Mongolia and Central Asia. “Yurt” is actually the Turkish word for home while “ger” is the Mongolian word for home… the yurt is so fundamental to these cultures that it literally means home. These days, there’s a huge yurt district in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar; many Mongolians have been forced to move to the city because their traditional nomadic herding is no longer feasible (thanks, capitalism and climate change!), but the yurt is so important to their culture that they took it with them.

One of the most important features of a yurt is that it’s portable. Which is, you know, pretty important for nomads. They’re perfect for the climate in the steppe of Central Asia, which has strong winds and extreme temperatures, because a round shape is safer in the wind and more efficient to heat/cool.

But yurts/gers aren’t the only traditional round house or round tent out there. Here in America, you’re probably familiar with the tipi, another super-portable round tent ideal for nomads in the open plains.

And in the Yosemite area of California, where our property is, the Ahwaneechee people lived in round houses called muucha or umacha, which are like bark-covered tipis. They also had bigger round houses for group gatherings that they half-dug into the earth. So it feels very right that the 2 types of structures we want to build on our property are dug-outs and yurts!

Our ethos with this property has always been to build in harmony with nature. Like green grass lawns, square houses just don’t make a lot of sense. The grid is for cubes! As a bonus, round spaces are more efficient to build, have better acoustics, and just generally feel more grounded and organic.

Yurts first came to America when a hippie math professor read a National Geographic magazine article about Mongolia in the 1960s. Check out Bill Coperthwaite’s book A Handmade Life if you’re interested. Then in 1978, the company Pacific Yurts started manufacturing yurts on a large scale. Now there are dozens of companies out there that make and sell yurt kits. Modern yurts use more updated materials than traditional yurts, but the design is basically the same as it was a thousand years ago.

At first we wanted to design and build our own yurt from scratch, but we realized it would be such an enormous task that it would completely dominate our property efforts for years. So we decided to go with a small company a few hours from our property, Living Intent. We’re looking at a 16-foot yurt, which will run us about $7000… that isn’t a lot of money compared to a house, but it’s still a big sum. Our goal is to have a yurt on our property by April 2021, so we’re currently saving money and over the winter we’ll start building the wooden yurt platform.

So lots of digging and carpentry and money-saving is in our near future! I’m excited to keep taking steps towards making this yurt dream a reality and I’m grateful to the cultures that have developed this incredible living space that is so perfect for our property. We have a lot to learn about robust sustainable living from those who have come before us.

When we started this podcast, we thought it would be a chill low-key show about homesteading. But 2020 has been so insane, we find ourselves having to address “breaking news” more and more.

So today’s episode is about the current disaster that everyone’s talking about… the West Coast is on fire. It’s affecting us here in Los Angeles, with dangerous air quality from the Bobcat Fire, and the huge Creek Fire is filling our property with wildfire smoke up in Mariposa too.

We can’t be anywhere indoors because of the pandemic and we can’t be anywhere outdoors because of all the smoke. At least we’re all wearing masks already? Boy oh boy, the future feels bleak. But it is what it is… all we can do is stay on our toes and do the best we can with every day. The future is about adaptability.

But let’s talk about our latest property visit for a moment. Over Labor Day weekend, we went up to Mariposa with our skoolie friend! We installed a chain gate and did some surveying in preparation for the arrival of the bus, and we also poured some more concrete bricks and did more work on the greenhouse. But we also just wanted to show off our property to someone… not just the hard work we’ve done so far, but the natural beauty of the land itself. It was very exciting.

On the second day of our visit, though, everything changed when Vince spotted smoke on the horizon. We tried to stay calm, loaded our valuables and flammables into the car, and drove into town to check it out; although we learned that the Creek Fire was about 50 miles away, we decided to cut our visit short and dedicate the rest of our time to firescaping.

But the more I think about it, the more at peace I become with wildfires… part of the reason we have so many fires now is because we have so much “fire debt” built up since we decided that Fire Is Bad over 100 years ago. So in a sense, California is just trying to find its way to healthy forests again. Wildfires are a natural part of life in the West and we need to rethink our entire philosophy on how we coexist with fire.

Last week, Governor Newsom held a press conference where he admitted that we need to be smarter about forest management and declared that “the climate change debate is over.” And there’s an exciting update on something we mentioned in our last Fire episode… Newsom signed a bill to help allow inmate firefighters become professional firefighters after getting out of prison! Time will tell if the bill will actually help, but it’s a step in the right direction. At this point, we’ll take whatever small bits of good news we can find.

WHAT WE BUILT:

• A gate with a 25-foot chain secured to metal posts on each side with a lock.

• We raised the greenhouse’s floor level with some more bags of sand and installed vent covers. We ended up needing 2.5 tons of sand in total! That’s a big sandbox.

• We also did a lot of firescaping: around the greenhouse, we broke down branches and removed forest litter, then raked the ground almost down to bare earth. (As a bonus, as long as our property isn’t destroyed by wildfire, the ground in that area is now ready for planting seeds.) Vince also took down a huge dead tree with his good ole Milwaukee chainsaw.

You can find more pictures and details on Instagram.

Hey friends, welcome to The Grid Is For Squares. It feels like about a million years since our last episode, but (checks notes) nope, still just 2 weeks.

We’re posting this episode exactly 1 year from the very first time we set foot on our property! Not when we bought it, but the first time we checked the place out. It was 100 degrees that day, which turns out is… very normal for this time of year. ☀️

Today’s big story is that we recently went up to the property to finish (well, “finish”) the greenhouse! We left on a Thursday after Vince got home from work and arrived in the dark, then we woke up ass-early on the prop and got to work. First we moved all of the furniture out of the greenhouse, then we installed our 4 aluminum boxes to provide ventilation.

After that, Vince started making trips to Ace Hardware to pick up bags of sand while Amy laid 2 spirals of vinyl tubing for the future in-floor heating and cooling system. Amy may not be a plumber yet, but she’s certainly earning her landscaper badge! After all the tubing was laid, we covered it in a few more inches of sand. And finally, we laid down 3 bamboo mats with precise holes cut out for the drain and the ventilation boxes.

It was very hot. And very dirty. And since we were moving all that sand and creating a lot of dust, we wore our cloth Covid masks for most of the day.

But the greenhouse now has a real floor! No more nighttime crawly critters! It would almost be a proper indoor space… you know, if only it wasn’t 130 degrees.

We still need to finish the bricks for the outside and caulk all the joints before the rain begins, and Ace Hardware didn’t stock our last 15 bags of sand in time, so we’ll need to Finish-Finish later. I’m starting to sense that no project on the property will ever truly be completed, but I guess that’s how it goes.

We also cleared some brush, did some more flagging and site marking for the yurt, and Vince spotted a 5-foot rattlesnake! First rattlesnake we’ve seen on the property, but not surprising. Living in harmony with nature is part of the point of this place, so we left Snake Friend alone.

WHAT WE BUILT:

The finished greenhouse floor contains the following layers:

• Sand. A LOT of sand.

• Vinyl tubing for in-floor heating/cooling. (Not Pex, the in-floor heating standard, but food-grade vinyl tubing. This is just an experiment and we’ll use Pex when we eventually get to our actual house.) We used landscape staples to hold the spiral down until we covered it in sand to lock it in place.

• More sand.

• 3 5x8 bamboo mats similar to this, with precision holes cut with a skill saw and hole saw for drainage and ventilation.

As always, for more photos, you can follow us on Instagram.