This week was the culmination of weeks of planning, purchasing, and laying things out. On Friday afternoon, almost exactly a week from when I am writing this, we started what would be the biggest project we have tackled this year! I have alluded to it on several of my other blogs, but it was finally time to execute the project. We had all of the items that we thought we needed delivered from Home Depot, the equipment was here and my dad was scheduled to arrive Saturday morning. As we slowly started the project by getting the hang of the excavator and found the water line we would be tapping into on Friday Rob and I made a bet as to how many trips to the home improvement store we would need.... I said 5 he said 4.... continue reading to see if either of us was right.......
Saturday morning rolled around and Rob started the tedious task of digging a trench to lay our electric lines from our "barn" to the buck house, the waters and my run in shed. The plan was to terminate the lines at the coop and the run in shed, and in the near future add lights, and electrical outlets and fans to the areas, to make my life easier and the animals more comfortable in both the heat of summer and the chill of winter. My dad arrived and things fast forwarded. He hopped on the trencher and was able to run the ditch witch from the barn to the coop in no time. We did realize we needed some 1 inch conduit and an additional 2 inch LB fitting, so I ran out to make my first trip to home depot and Lowes, since Home Depot did not have the LB fitting.
Our amazing neighbor John stopped down and helped for several hours, hauling conduit out to the trenches, and helping to cover the trench by the barn. Day one ended, and we were feeling like maybe we could finish in 2 days....... boy we were wrong. Sunday started, and we finished trenching, ran all of the conduit and set the heat pipes for the waters, and ran the waterline. Rob had ran out to Home depot, Lowes and Tractor Supply on Saturday night to get additional plumbing pieces that we needed. After a very helpful customer in home depot assisted him, we learned a new fitting technique for PEX and utilized that along with the new tool to complete the raw plumbing job. We were also able to get our concrete pads set that we had worked and poured the week before! Side note these concrete pads were a labor of love, and they are adorned with our name, our goats names and some very key herd members hoof prints!
Day 3 started with running the electrical wiring, which thankfully, my dad is a retired electrician, so he was absolutely instrumental in helping us add these items to the panel, and run the lines and terminations. Just for reference, we ran and pulled about 700 feet of electrical lines and I never realized how much hard work it was actually manually pulling the wire through the lines. We used a shop vac and a bread bag to mouse the jetline through the pipes, but once that was through the manual pulling of the jetline attached to the wires was extremely hard. It didnt help that we had to pull the wires twice from the barn to the buck house because the jetline got tangled, and then from the run in shed to the buck house twice because the jetline broke. We were able to get one water set on day 3, but did not have all of the settings dialed in for use. I also made a trip to home depot to get street elbows that we did not end up using.
Day 4 we had to go back to work, so Rob and I worked directly after work until the last scraps of daylight to get the other two waters set and hooked up. It was in the absolute nick of time, because we turned the heaters on and that night the first frost of the year hit!
Day 5 we finally got the waters dialed in and functional! It was such a relief to watch the horses and the goats drink from the waters!!!
We still have some finishing touches like adding a bit more gravel around the waters to make it level with the concrete pads and I want to reposition the first water to straighten it, but we will tackle that this weekend, with the tri- axel of stone we had delivered. All in all this project was a ton of fun. Long hard days that left us exhausted, but I felt extremely accomplished and I truly enjoyed working with my dad and husband to help build our property into something useful that will help reduce our workload!!! No more running several hundred feet of hose to fill the stock tank, or falling on the ice, while trying to carry 5 gallon buckets in the winter, no more worries of burning the house down from running hundreds of feet of extension cords to run my stock tank de-icers. I am so thankful for all of the time, energy and hard work that my amazing husband and spectacular dad put into this project for me. It has created not only memories for years to come, but also a fixture that will be used over and over again!!
The next project is lights and fans for the run in shed and buck house. Do you have any suggestions on what you use and love? Let me know please! I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and Happy Goating!!!
