Well it's a lovely warm day, and considering what was on the ground that means MUD... the dreaded "M" word. I really, really love mud... don't you? Especially since it's all clay mud which as it sticks to your shoes adds 50lbs to your foot.. or at least feels that way. Today we went out and put the rebar stakes into the MUDDY ground. The ground is just squishy enough to make it easy to get into the ground, I almost wish we had the ground rods to put into the ground, they would be very easy to get into the ground right now. While we were doing the pounding my son who doesn't currently attend a church got to stand in the middle of the mud circle and hold our 100ft tape to make sure we had the right length from the center. We also had to measure the distance between each one which needed to be 6ft 8in between each one.  The rebar "arches" need to be slightly off of where we put our stakes so that there is an opening in the center of the top of the dome. traditionally this is where a chimney is put.  We are going to put glass block windows, vents and a whole house fan in a small  addition above the top of the dome in the center.  Silver is planning to find a way to run the chimney up it as well, but we need to figure out the logistics of it first. The ground stakes have to be in the ground 2 foot so the 5 ft rebar stakes need to only have 3ft above the ground.  So after placing all the stakes Silver went back around and pounded them into the ground till they reached the correct depth.           We only had issue in one spot: I am not sure if you can see it, but this one here is stuck in a frozen block of clay, so once we have enough above freezing days we should be able to go back and fix this one. Well it figures we'd have one that would not be able to be at the proper depth.  We should have really gone out and fixed some of the mud piles before the bad weather came through.. but you know what they say about hindsight. I'll also have you know that as I am writing this.. all that snow you see in the picture?  Yeah... it's gone, not there... just the MUD!     So when we finished putting the stakes in we spent some time looking for the orange "tape" to mark where the stakes are as they are a tad hard to see against the browns. It is much easier to see the outline with the tape on the rebar.  also this is taken at the place where our door for the house will be put.  The nice thing about it is that the door will open to just across from our soon to be outdoor kitchen.  I think that is very convenient. As you can see from this picture there is much more mud than snow now, at this point we had the kids moving the rebar from up front to the house ring as Silver is going to start making the arches. The arches is what  the second floor is suppose to be connected to so that it is more secure, I'm not sure if we are going to do it that way as yet and Silver is thinking we may only need to make half of a second floor based on how much space there is in the interior. As for the start of the arches... First, after we set out three pieces of rebar of course.  We needed to bend the rebar, Silver discovered after trying to use his "bending" tool that it wasn't going to work very well.  That is because when he first tried to bend it the tool bent. So as you can see he went and got out the pipe wrenches and used them with me standing on one end of the rebar while he hand bent them.  The one downside I have to say for the birdcage dome site is that they do not mention how they bent their rebar.  So we had to figure it out ourselves. So we had to bend two of three pieces, the two end pieces.  The center piece gets bent when you attach them together.  We discovered it's much easier to bend with the help of two children in addition to me standing on the rebar. So after the bending comes tying the rebar together. We are using rebar ties to connect them together, now we have seen people using zip ties.  While they will hold a great deal, I think using the metal rebar ties will be 100% better as then they will be part of the concrete with the rebar. Silver is planning on using a couple of zip ties then we put the arches up and need to temporarily secure them to the rebar stakes while we get the others in place.  Then will go around and use the metal ties to finish securing them. Incidentally we did not put this one in place as we have discovered we need to have a ladder or a scaffolding in place to do that as we need someone at the top to hold it in place while it is secured. As it is flimsy while being strong.  I know once they are all in place they will be much more secure, jut one by itself would not be. We only put one arch together so as to get the "idea" of how to do it for the first time.  Notice in the picture... no snow at all and all the MUD on Silver's shoes?  That was after he scraped the MUD off.  The kids finished bringing back all the rebar, after some issue over figuring out how to navigate over the trench while carrying the rebar.  We found one random plank to place across it, and it's kinda working. One child of course fell into the trench and had a fit over getting muddy, I guess a 13yr old doesn't think MUD is fun anymore.  Well at least she had changed into the jeans she didn't want to wear before it happened so the pants she prefers are saved for school.  So now we are all sitting around the house MUDDY waiting turns to bathe the MUD off.  I'll be last as I have to go back out in it to get the laundry down.  Then it's on to start cooking our dinner tonight.  which will be a beef roast mashed taters and peas.  YUM!   So I hope everyone enjoys their start of MUD season... I know I am... rolls eyes Be Well BE Safe and Blessed BE...

Ok, so remember the wood stove from last year the barrel stove that overheated our home. As you can see Stormy modeling it for us... Now this wood stove did present us with a couple of PROBLEMS, I think the biggest was the use of space. It wasted tons of space, and going on the space theme, it also wasted space in the barrel. We only burned in the front of the barrel, so the whole back half was not being used. The other problem it presented was that we couldn't cook on the surface of it due to the fact that it had no upright flat surface. I think Silver has effectively solved all of those issues. We have built a pot-bellied barrel stove. We started off with a new barrel stove kit bought for: $39.99 Got a new barrel that was food grade, and in case it had metal bungs a removable end on it. Silver was thinking if it had, had metal bungs instead of plastic we could just take the whole top off to clean it out once a month. We traded for the barrel but I believe it would have cost $15. We bought some screws with nuts that were 1/4-20-3in, this was to replace the screw that came with the kit where the screws would not be long enough we made sure to get about half of them flat instead of a rounded top to ensure that they would not interfere with the moving parts on the kit. That was $1.29 per package, we bought two packages. We bought a sanding disc for Silver's grinder to take off the paint on the outside of the barrel. That was $4.99 We did find a really good furnace cement that is almost like a putty... this item we are going to remember for when we build our house and make the rocket mass heater, as it is like refractory cement. That was 16oz for $3.99. We bought some (not wood stove) paint, for grills that are rated for over 2000 degrees at Loews for $5, to buy the stove paint would have cost us $10. Now for the building process when we got the barrel at home Silver took the top off to see if whatever was stored in the barrel was flammable, I'm not sure if you want to call it good or bad luck; but our barrel had liquid vitamin E in it. ...btw... it doesn't burn. We had about half a quart of it still in the bottom that we smartly saved. Then Silver turned the barrel over to let what could drain out. Then we got a degreaser and washed the inside out. Then Silver proceeded to use the sanding disc to remove the outer paint off the top first, and then painted it to make sure the top was done, then he did each section of the barrel separately to ensure that if there was not enough sand paper or paint it would not be partly done. The next day, after the paint was fully dry (yeah I know it's spray paint and dries almost instantly, but it was almost sundown at that point) Silver started the cuts. He first cut out the section for the door. Then he rolled the barrel over and cut the hole for the chimney on the exact opposite side. He put in the chimney flange and screwed that in place. We spent almost twenty minutes putting the door on, as we started with it having a gap around it from 0-2 inches. We needed to shrink that as much as we could, so Silver kept on tightening the nuts on the screws in rotation. We discovered one thing, make sure you check that the door will close evenly, then discovered that our door did not close all the way after we finished tightening the nuts. So we had to go back and loosen the nuts until the door would close. So the recommendation would be for anyone duplicating this to check your door as you are going through your tightening. Silver said if you don't have it closing properly you might have the door crack when you light the stove. After fixing the door into place we placed the removable side back on,which we kept to the bottom because the bungs were plastic instead of metal. Like I had said before if they were metal we would have used the removable side on top so we could just take that side off for cleaning. However as we cannot keep the plastic near where the flames would be for obvious reasons. That's ok, it just gives me more cooking surface. The next step we placed empty coffee cans on the bottom side of the stove, with the open end down. BTW the previous picture is after the cans...These are being used as part of an insulated “dead space” in the stove. Remember me mentioning the issue about all the wasted space? Well this way the extra space can be used to keep heat in the stove. After putting in the cans we took a bag of course vermiculite and filled the spaces and just barely covered the cans. Next we added another row of cans , these were the large fruit cans; smaller than #10 cans. This was then followed again by vermiculite, that then we covered with a few cut pieces of concrete board we had left over from last year as a base for our burn chamber.   (the previous picture)We cut two pieces and set them inside in opposing positions. On top of this we put down a piece of, I believe it's goat panel cut to fit over it; to be the reinforcing for the concrete mixture we are going to use in the burn chamber. Next we opened the container of fireplace cement and used it in the gap(s) around the door, fitting it on both sides of the door gap. Including the bodies of the screws, which; you will want to use a cut off blade and remove the ends or you may cut yourself on them. I happen to like the fireplace cement, and I'm thinking it might have uses when we go to make a rocket mass heater in the house when we build it. As Silver said it is like a refractory cement, which is what is used to make fire brick. The cement will cure at high temperatures only, so it will only dry until then. After filling the gaps in the door frame Silver mixed most of this bag of vermiculite: And about 5 pounds of cement, he made the mixture fairly wet; to make it easier to get into the opening. Using a trowel he covered the fencing and concrete board with the cement vermiculite mixture. He smoothed it as much as he could and left it to dry. Now a moment to talk about the mixture, we tried out vermiculite concrete in our normal barrel stove last year in the bottom to protect it verses using the sand that the person who makes the stove kits recommends. It worked much better and never cracked. This time we used fine vermiculite, I do not know if this will change how it works but we will see. BTW use PORTLAND cement there are no stones.. we used standard cement and the stones are now coming loose. The original idea was to cover the sides of the burn chamber with the concrete mixture, but we didn't. We did a test burn outside the second day after putting in the concrete. Yes, outside; do -NOT- test your ideas on stove making in your home, if you do you might burn down or blow up your home. The sides only blackened, the paint did not even burn off on the inside and the top surface heated nicely. We were sitting about 3 feet from the stove and we were getting hot outside the house. I'm sure it'll be much warmer than we need it to be in here however that's ok for me. We have changed what goes around the heater as well, no concrete board this time as it's flimsiness bothered Silver. We are using cinder blocks dry stacked instead. So, lets see... I now have a heater that has a use for all it's space, I can cook on it. Also it takes up half the space it took last year. All for about $56.70 instead of buying a $180 small box heater with two small burner spaces... if you wanted to use them as such. ...or of course going back to a standard barrel stove. I think this will work out much better for us this winter and if there is a problem we do have our old barrel stove as backup. Be Well Be Safe and Blessed Be...