Well I have to say this has got to be one of the weirdest springs ever. One day it is 80 and sunny and the next day it is 32 and snowing.  I love snow and the cold but after a certain point it is time for it to warm up.
This Saturday I'm headed to Nebraska to pick up a couple of grain bins with a friend of my family, Mr. Dowell. He runs a charity called Planting Hope International. This charity ships these grain bins overseas to a guy in Laos.  This man, Kirby Rogers, is part of a company that sets up grain bins as harvest centers, which are basically like our co-ops. The goverment doesn't mind them setting up churchs with these harvest centers because the centers are helping the country make more.  We are leaving around 8:30 Saturday to go pick up several bins which will later be shipped to Laos. I'm looking forward to it. We should get home around 6ish Saturday night.  A couple of my friends are going as well so it should be a lot of fun.

Not a lot going over these last couple of weeks.  Blake and I did get the siding taken off the outside of my new bedroom on Friday, got it sheeted, house wrapped, and the new windows put it.

 

Just last week we did have some excitement. My sister Bethany went out to check on her goats and found a baby. Then while we were out there one of the other goats went into labor and my little siblings got to watch a baby goat be born

This one(Larkspur) was the one that was born while we were out there.

This one (Lilac) was the one Bethany found when she went outside.

 

 This has been pretty much the extent of whats going on. I've started working Saturdays though so I will probably start posting pictures of what is going on there. 

 
 













I started gutting my new bedroom two weeks ago. Blake and another friend, EJ Swihart, came up and in one morning we managed to gut nearly the entire room.  It was a mess. The room we were gutting was built just after the Civil War so there no insulation and over 100 years of dust inside the walls.  We actually had a neighbor point out to us that in the places that the dust is inches thick, the 1930s(the dust bowl) probably had a major role in the amount of dust.

Before is on the left. After on the right.

Here is a picture of some of mess. Believe it or not this isn't all that bad. At one point the entire floor looked like the right side of this picture.

 

 

We managed to do the nearly complete destruction in just a few hours. We had to get it done so we could go move a play set. 

My dad and I have been working on the room some over the last week and have managed to get more done. We have drywall on the ceiling and the slopes and we have the carpet ripped up.  We are ready to put the floor down but we have to wait because dad wants to put lights in the ceiling in the dining room. That is why there are holes in the floor in the below picture.  We also framed for the new window but have to wait for a nice day to put them in because we have to take the siding off the outside to do that.

If look at the floor you can see the hole in that we are going to use to put lights in the dining room and you can also see the drywall on the ceiling and the slope on the right side of the picture.

 

Here is the new window frame

I'm not really sure why this didn't post but this was a blog post that was supposed to publish a few weeks ago.



A friend of mine, Blake Bowman and I got hired to move a swingset and this wasn't your run of the mill swingset. It was 17ft wide and 33ft long. We took the slide and monkey bars off of one side and the swings off of the other. We were than left with the main tower. We hauled the swing, slide, and monkey bars to the house and unloaded them and then we went and borrowed a skid steer from a neighboring farmer. Then we went back to get the tower. Our original plan was to lift it up and then take the stairs and rock climbing wall off and set it on the trailer.  However when we got back it was getting late and we wanted to get it moved before dark, so we just set the whole tower on the trailer. As can be seen in the picture below. Even though we were hoping to get done before dark we didn't and it was dark when this picture was taken.

This tower is between 12-15ft tall when sitting on the trailer and there is a beam that sticks out around four feet on the otherside, it is what is holding that rope ladder. After it was loaded we put the skid steer back on my trailer and strapped the swingset down. We had around ten miles to travel and it was going to take awhile.  We made it to the driveway of the house we were delivering it to without any mishaps but then things started happening. The first thing was that we hit a small tree and broke the beam off the side. Not a big deal that is fixable.  However when we hit the powerline, that was a little bigger deal.  It didn't break but I had to climb up onto the roof of playset and pick the line up and hold it above the roof while Blake drove out from underneath it.  Thankfully we learned later it was a dead powerline and of no importance. After that everything went great and we got it unloaded. Also we were able to fix the powerline and are in the process of fixing the beam.

Here is a picture of the full swingset, after we reassembled it.

 

I haven't had a chance to post for a while, I got really sick two weeks ago and I have been busy trying to catch up on school and some other stuff and my blog kind of got pushed off to the side. Otherwise not a lot has been going on. I was able to help a friend put a hitch on the pick up he just bought. That was a nightmare, what I though would be a two or three hour project ended up being a a seven and a half hour project, although we did get it done.  This picture was taken at about dark as you can see which was about four or five hours into working on it. (I'm the one bent over grinding.)
 


I am planning on remodeling a room in our house fairly soon. My dad said I can have it as my own bedroom but I have to be responsible for gutting it, putting in insulation, and hanging drywall.  I'm not into carpentry but it would be nice to have my own room so I've recruited a couple of friends and we are going to gut it this Saturday.  I'll be sure to take some pictures so you can see all that is going on.

 

 

This years shop project is nearly complete all I have left to do is paint it. I installed the floor and mounted a small hand crank winch on the front.

 

I managed to convince my sister to come take some pictures while I was actually working on it.  Here I am priming the metal where the floor will cover so the metal is protected.  I intend to take it to Abilene and paint it in my uncles shop but I wanted to put the floor on it so it is usable until I get around to doing that.  My little brother Stormy is the one off to the right in the bottom picture.  He has wanted to try spray painting for quite a while and since where I was painting is not visible, I decided to let him try.  So he is attempting to get the lid off of one of spray cans.

This picture shows the completed floor.

If you look closely right at the front of the trailer you can see the handwinch that I added. The reason it is angled back slightly so that their is plenty of handroom when cranking the winch. 

This pic just shows the completed floor and the winch from the front.

Well my family is almost done with a Christmas celebrations. Yep that's right we still have one more side of the family to celebrate with. We like to spread things out, it spreads the fun.  Anyway their isn't much going on this week. I'm pretty busy with school which is a bummer since this is the week my uncle took to cut wood so I'm not getting to help him.  My family is however going out to Great Bend, Ks to see some friends of ours and help them cut some trees out of their wind break. I'm hoping to sell several loads of firewood when we go out their but haven't got any takers yet so we'll see.
I got some more done to the trailer I'm building although since it has gotten cold I haven't really worked on it very much.  I did get  the electrical wire ran for lights yesterday and once they are all wired in I'm going to pull it to Abilene and paint it in my uncles shop.  I was originally thinking I would just paint it black but have since been considering painting it a different color. If anybody wants to give color suggestions, feel free.