The Mad Scientist

Back in the dog days of a Houston summer Dale was truly mad to be working on the inside of our container home.  It was so worth it because our weekend getaway is so peaceful and fun.  We are still working 99% of the time but that 1% of peace and relaxation sure is fun!

Bellawood Container House Floor

We're finally getting some style to our container house with this gorgeous Bellawood flooring we scored off CL.  I bought 1200 plus square feet of mixed colors for $300.  My favorite is the Koa wood.  It's the pieces with the dark stripes effect on contrasting golden wood.  This is as far as we got because we only brought out 3 boxes of the wood.  It is so easy to install, that it only took a fraction of the time we had anticipated. At 30 inches installed, it's a little over one third of the width of the single container cabin.  The overall width is approximately 88 inches after we installed the wood frame, insulation material and plywood walls.  More pictures:

 

The other big changes since last post is that Walter is walking!  Pictures here with Wawa is the new cupboard I found (yes, on CL).

American Pickers

I am beginning to understand how people who live in BFE start accumulating a wealth of junk!  You hang on to things because you might need them, and the cost of fuel to get more stuff is expensive.  In addition, it's just plain hard to dispose of stuff with no trash service.  Furthermore, we still have no truck with which to haul s#!+ if to another locale.

It's nice to know that our roof can hold hundreds of thousands of pounds!

Riding Mower Up & Running

We mowed a path all the way around the pond along with many more accomplishments:
Turned on well, separate blogpost to follow.
Placed 250 gallon tote on roof of container over the bathroom.
Cleared brush around the homestead.
Almost sank the mower in the pond.
Fixed the leaks in the doors and windows.
It rained hard!
And more.....

Security System

While purusing our nearest walmart i threw this deeply discounted package of solar lights in the buggy to be used as our first line of defense against would-be thieves. I did not get around to unpacking them until about 6 pm.  Until then they had been lying on the hot desertesque earth since our 9 am arrival to the ranch.   And, yes, since it is obvious that I won't be harvesting any crops here anytime in the near future I am now referring to our small slice of paradise as "the ranch" and not "the farm".

Back to the security system shall we?  As one can see by this picture, the compacted heat inside the unpacked box of 8 solar lights caused some meltage on the lovely clear plastic housings.  I was still able to snap them together but just barely.  As long as they produce lights along a drive i figured they would serve their intended purpose.  If Chelsea would have been there last weekend she would have laughed her as off!  Then again, if she was there these badboys would have been unpacked and assembled in the car on the way to the ranch.  Thus, eliminating the entire situation in the first place.

I thought about returning them but they all produce light and I think they are funky fresh.  Now they look like hi-dollar handblown glass instead of plastic so cheap it melts in the midday heat.  To be fair, I think the solar panels were collecting energy from the sun's heat through the cardboard box and these were all crammed together-like.

They make me smile.  I'm keeping them!

Container on the Ground

It was a tight squeeze getting the container through the gate. Dale had to cut the wooden structure surrounding the gate along with removing the gate itself. He even had to cut down a few small trees so the truck, trailer, with container could turn into the property. Watch the video below:

Long Day

Dale and Brad have been working so hard on the container house.  It's already delivered to the farm and we had a steak dinner on the Henry pit last night.  The lighting looks cool at night.