Hello, friends & family! Not much going on out at the Pumpkin Patch Ranch lately. Our jobs keep us so busy, we haven’t been able to work on it much. Every once in awhile, I get motivated to catch up on blog entries, but once I do, you won’t hear from us very often. Of course, you don’t hear from us now, so . . .
Last summer we shared our vacation pictures with you all; that was fun. Before that, we left off with the beginning of the well house, pouring the concrete slab and starting the block walls during the summer of 2007.
Sam worked with our friend Mike doing concrete curbing that summer and fall, but we spent some of our weeks and weekends at the ranch.
By mid October, Sam had built the block walls halfway up to their eventual height of 80 inches, 10 courses of block. In the beginning, it seemed like every block had to be lifted and placed 2 or 3 times, to get it level and straight. He got better and better as the walls went up, but at 32 lbs. a block, he still figures he lifted thousands of pounds of block that year!
In early December, my (Jan’s) parents camped out at the PPR for a week, and my dad helped Sam build.
Pa and Ma brought their little home-built camper, “La Tortuga” (Spanish for “turtle”), which draws a crowd wherever it goes. It’s 12 feet long, 6 feet wide and tongue-in-groove cedar on the outside. Inside, it has a little kitchen area, tiny sink, a sofa that pulls out into a bed, and everything else they need for camping.
Pa helped Sam build the corner leads for the 2nd half of the wall height.
Sam (and occasionally I) were staying in Dennis & Joni’s trailer again. They’re our good friends from church, who live just a few miles from the ranch on the other side of the freeway. We also dragged Super Dave’s utility trailer out there, with scaffolding for Sam to use as the walls got higher.
By mid December, the walls were 9 courses high and the mornings getting colder.
Frost on the blocks! Frost on the Pumpkin . . . Patch Ranch. You have to understand, this is Arizona and we get excited about things like that. The PPR gets snow every winter!
The rust-colored pipe beside Sam’s right foot is our water well. Not much to look at for $16,000! It included the wiring box right behind it. The small tank to the left is our water pressure tank, which Sam set up and installed plumbing from the well to the tank, and electrical wiring from . . . our electric connection. I have no idea how he did this. Even though I was right there and handed him tools and stuff! This pressure tank will eventually be moved inside the well house. Sam also installed the electric meter box that you can see behind and above the pressure tank. That’s where we plug in power tools and lights and anything else that needs electricity. Like the travel trailer. Sam did the electrical and plumbing months before. The plumbing includes a hose connection with a “Y”, so we can attach the water hose from the trailer and the yellow garden hose. Isn’t he smart? He thought of everything.
We filled the corners with grout, a concrete concoction that drops down the centers of the block, hardens and strengthens the whole wall. I think we actually grouted the first 5 rows before starting on the top half, and did every section that had rebar coming up through, which was every 2 feet or so along the length of the walls.
The last thing Sam did as the cells filled up with grout was to install a “J-bolt” that stuck out the top. The “J” part went down in the concrete, and a wooden block with a hole in the middle held it in place, with a washer and nut holding it at the right height. A few weeks later, after the grout cured (dried), he added a wooden top-plate, held in place by these J-bolts.The dark spots you see down the blocks are the moisture in the grout seeping out of the blocks. And the homes in the distance are our nearest neighbors. We love having 12 and a half acres.
Christmas Eve, 2007, the walls are done!
And here’s my muscle-man who built it all.