Building Our Casa

Since finishing the outdoor plastering in early November, we’ve made a big push to finish everything indoors enough to move in.  The first thing that needed to happen was plastering inside, especially on the straw walls.  The ‘inner’ walls (the ones between rooms) were important too, but not as important as covering up the straw.  We were so tired of looking at the straw!  The first weekend we worked on it, we plastered one wall of our closet as a practice wall on Saturday.  On Sunday, our friend Shark came and helped us out for a day.  We worked all day and were able to get the two straw walls of the bedroom plastered.  We learned a lot that day.  We discovered that it worked well to have one person put up a first coat without concern with how it looked and to have another person come behind as it started to harden up and put another layer on.  That way we got a nice thick coat in one session.
On Monday, Morgan and I worked on the kitchen wall.  That evening, Dana (our electrician) came by to say hi.  He said that if Morgan could get all of the straw walls plastered by Friday, then he had time to come by on Friday and finish out the outlets.  They shook on it and Morgan prepared himself for a long week of staying up late.  He came out on Tuesday evening and started in on the ‘long’ wall that runs the whole south side of the house.  On Wednesday, Dana called to say that, unfortunately, he could only come on Thursday, not Friday.  Now the pressure was really on!  Luckily, Eric called Morgan and volunteered to come and help out for the evening.  They worked until 3 am (and split an 18 pack of Tecate), but they pulled it off!  When I was able to go out that weekend, the only straw left that you could see was where the various window sills needed to be put in, and there were working outlets and light switches everywhere!

After that, there was still quite a bit of plastering to do, but it was all on sheet rock covered walls, which is a lot easier.  On Morgan’s birthday, a bunch of his friends came out to help out.  I think that Morgan was planning on having them work on something else, but they just sort of took over when they showed up.  They plastered the living room, kitchen, hallway and a little bit of the bathroom in a couple of hours that morning.  It really transformed the house!

Having all of the walls covered really made it start to feel like a home.    Not only did they all work hard, we had a real crew to enjoy a feast of food and cake with.
Since then, Morgan has finished plastering the bathroom here and there.  Shark came and helped one afternoon with that.  We were planning on not doing the other two walls of the bedroom until after we’d moved in, or maybe even the spring.  It just didn’t seem like a top priority.  Last weekend, though, Paul and Otis came up to help out for a morning and they decided to make it happen.  The bedroom was fully plastered in no time with their help.  The only place left after that was the inner walls of the closet.  Morgan did that last Sunday and now the whole house is fully plastered inside!

In order to get the outside plastered, which we really needed to do before it got really cold, we had to lath around all of the windows and doors, put up chicken wire everywhere else and ‘sew’ the two sides of the walls together.  We thought that this part would be fairly simple.  Well, we were right that the concept isn’t difficult, but it actually turned out to be quite tedious and time consuming.  We worked on all of the wiring from October 6th to the 31st.  Working with the materials wasn’t necessarily difficult, but at times was quite annoying.

Lath is sharp!  Everywhere we put up wire we had to make sure the wall was shaped right and stuffed enough with straw.  This meant constantly filling up garbage bags of straw and taking handfuls of it and stuffing it in lots of places, often overhead.

Straw is itchy!  Nearly every day I ended up with straw in every piece of my clothing.  However, in the end we had walls with beautiful curves.  The ‘sewing’ is really time consuming, as well.  We had long metal ‘needles’ that we used to push and pull baling wire back and forth between both sides of the walls.  On one day we had three different teams going and got quite a bit of it done.

It’s the last step before the plastering, though, so the sewing teams could only do the parts of the walls that had been properly lathed and stuffed.  We thankfully had lots of help for both the wiring and the plastering.

However, every day we plastered we were desperately trying to finish wiring parts of the wall before Eric would get to that part with his trowel.

As it snowed for a couple of hours the weekend after we finished that first coat, we feel like we finished it just in time.   We don’t know if we have to do another outside coat before we can get our Certificate of Occupancy, but we really hope not!

We had really hoped to be plastering the outside of the house this last weekend, but there were simply too many things that needed to happen before we could start.  Morgan finished putting up the ceiling in the living room and bedroom.

He also made a beautiful seat for our kitchen window seat.

He also put a lot of work into putting in the french doors in the living room.  These were a real pain for him as he had to hand make the jambs and also had to add some wood to the doors to make them the right size.  We got the doors for free and someone had cut them down from the standard size to something smaller.  Since we want to be able to replace them with nicer doors at some point, resizing them to be standard dimensions was really the only thing to do.  This seemingly small project took a lot more time than he imagined!  But now they’re in and we can now fully enclose the house.  During last week, our plumber, Ivan, came up a few evenings to get our rough-in going.  Together, him and Morgan got quite a few things done in the kitchen and bathroom.  One of the things that was holding us up for the plastering was to have the metal roofing on.  In order to put it up, we needed to have all of the vents for the kitchen and bathroom in place.

By the weekend, we were ready to put the roofing up. Morgan worked all of the Saturday and Sunday morning putting it up. It looks so pretty! Of course, it didn’t all go up smoothly. Twice Morgan cut the hole for a vent in the wrong place. He got really frustrated, of course, but was able to work it all out.

Finally, on Sunday afternoon, we got around to starting the prep work on the outside of the house for the plaster. First, we had to put up insulation around the stem walls. Tony showed up and helped us make that happen.
On Monday, Morgan worked on closing in the gable end on the south side of the house with plywood and then Tyvek paper. After that was finished, we had enough daylight left to get to work on a start of the chicken wire which has to go around the outside. We’re so excited to get to the plastering. It feels like the last ‘big’ job we still have in front of us. We’re also really tired of the straw everywhere! Morgan said, ‘I’m almost as tired of the straw everywhere as I was of that big pile of dirt…’ (which we had in the middle of the floor-plan while we worked on the foundation and underground plumbing.) Soon it will be gone!

The last few weeks have been pretty eventful.  Morgan has made a lot happen.  With Eric’s help, the trusses were put up on the roof.

The trusses are another one of our amazing deals.  About three years ago Eric and his wife, Marie, decided to put a new roof on their house.  They ordered the trusses and the company showed up to deliver them on the expected day.  After they’d been unloaded, they realized the company had cut them to the wrong size.  They didn’t want to load them up again, so they just left them and returned the next day with the correct ones.  Since Eric obviously didn’t need them, Morgan hauled them to our yard and they have been sitting there until this past week.  They were able to put up all the trusses in a day.  Then, Morgan had to build the gable ends.

He also spent a few days that week working on framing in the utility room.  Then on Saturday, he was ready to put up the OSB boards on the roof.  Right when he got started in the morning, Nate and Rachel showed up!  They mistakenly thought the wall building party was that day.  They stuck around for awhile anyway and Nate helped Morgan get a few of the boards up on the roof.  Of course it started raining and then Nate had to go to work, so Morgan was on his own for the rest.  He was able to finish putting the rest up in the morning.

After that Morgan started working on the living room ceiling.  He had decided to plane down some of the reclaimed wood we had and put it up bare for the ceiling.  It took him a lot longer than I think he planned, but made serious progress on it during the week.  It came out really beautifully and is going to give the room a very warm feeling.
On Saturday, September 10th, we had our wall raising party!  When we got up that morning, we seriously contemplated canceling the event because it was drizzling and overcast in every direction.  We knew the one thing that we couldn’t do was let the bales get wet.  However, in the end we decided that we could get our volunteers to work on a different project if the rain didn’t let up.  Thankfully, by nine it had stopped raining and in the afternoon the sun even came out!  About 9:30 people started showing up.  First, Morgan had the guys help him clean up all the tools and wood he had been using to make the ceiling.  Caitlyn, Andrea and I put up weather-proofing paper on all of the wall post and window and door supports.  A group of people brought the first load of bales from where they’d been covered all summer to the house.  Unfortunately, some of them were wet even though they’d been covered all summer, but for the most part they were in great shape.  Then Christian and Morgan set about setting the first row of bales.

We were really grateful for Christian’s help!  He was the only one who came with a great deal of experience working with bales and his knowledge made everything go a lot faster and smoother.  After Morgan felt confident with a system, Christian took a few people to the bedroom and started working on the walls back there.  Besides cutting and setting the bales, each row of bales had to have lath which connected the bales to the wooden columns.  All the bales had to be ‘imbaled’ with rebar.  The bales also had to all be hauled up to the house.  Everyone found a job!

We worked all day, with a stop in the afternoon for frito pies.  Eric, Marie and Mark camped out and kept on working on Sunday.  On Sunday a few more friends showed up to help out as well!  At the end of Sunday, all the straw was up except for the area around the bond beams, which needs to have lath put up and then straw stuffed behind it.  All in all it was a very successful weekend!  Thanks to: Christian, Tyrell, Dave, Andrea, Brendan, Caitlyn, Todd, Stephanie, Tristan, Adam, Marie, Eric and Mark!

Since then, Morgan has been able put up the windows, finish the ceiling in the living room and bedroom and put up two the doors.  Thanks to Eric and Billy for their help with those projects!

Last, but definitely not least, our electrician, Dana has done the electric rough-in.  Essentially this means that all of the wires are into the walls, the boxes for light fixtures are placed in the ceiling, all of the boxes for the wall outlets are in place and the main breaker box is in place.  We are waiting for two inspections at this point:  the electric rough-in inspection and the framing inspection.  We had already called for the framing inspection before Dana came to do the rough-in.  However, we were supposed to call for the framing inspection after both the electric rough-in and the plumbing rough-in were done.  The inspector gave us a partial pass and we have to call him back after he can see the electrician and plumber’s work is done.  We’re hoping we can start on the outside plastering this weekend, but we have to get some of the plumbing done and pass some more inspections first!

Unbelievably, in the matter of a week Morgan has managed to put up the majority of the framing!  He had already been working on the window and door bucks during down times in the last few weeks.  Last Sunday, after pouring the last of the concrete, he started building and putting up the walls for the framed in portion (bathroom and laundry room) and the indoor walls.

On Saturday, Morgan and I put up all of the window and door bucks he had made.

We also put up all of the columns for the supports for the straw bale portions of the house.  Then he started making the bond beams.  Our bond beams in the plans are 3 2×8’s going, of course, all the way around the straw bale portion of the house.  Originally our ‘architect’ wanted us to use 3 2×12’s.  She insisted that by code that was what we were required to have.  Fortunately, we changed it on the plans to 3 2×8’s behind her back.  We found out later that, by code, we only needed to us 2 2×8’s.  Regardless, 3 3×8’s it is.

Our huge pile of wood from Amber’s aunt is really starting to come in handy now.  Morgan made one of the beams on Saturday and on Sunday started working on the others.  It had rained all Saturday night but cleared up for the most part on Sunday morning.   Midmorning our neighbor, Wesley, dropped by to lend a hand for a while.  Him and Morgan set to work, but less than an our later it started to pour.  They covered everything up in a hurry and sat it out.  Half and hour later it let up and they went back to work.  At this point, Morgan sent me out to try and call around and see if anyone could come out and give us a hand.  Christian and Eric had both said they would try, but it turned out that they couldn’t make it.  John S. said that he would try to make it in the afternoon.  Right after I got back, it started to pour again.  Wes and Morgan covered  it all up again.  Wesley hung out for a bit, but ended up deciding he needed to go.  Finally the rain stopped and Morgan started working on them again.  Then John and Jen showed up.  We were at first disappointed that Wes had gone, because we knew it would take at least 3 guys to lift up the other beams.  We shouldn’t have worried, though, since it rained on and off so much the rest of the afternoon that nothing else really got done.  It even rained most of the night too.  We really need the moisture, but…

Thankfully, we woke up on Monday to a bright and sunny day.  Morgan got right to work. First thing, Morgan put up the first beam he had made.  It was one of the shorter ones, but was still so heavy that I don’t really know how he made it happen.  Then he kept on working on making the other three.  Right about ten Eric showed up!  He also had brought scaffolding.  They got to work on putting up the next beam for the front of the house.  They got it up, plumbed everything up and nailed the bucks into place.  Right after this, about one, Christian showed up!  With three guys and scaffolding, I knew they were going to make it happen.  They finished making the other beams and then put up the longest one at 30′.  It took a lot of maneuvering, but they did it!

About 4:30 I had to leave for town.   Morgan tells me that they successfully had all four beams up at the end of the day and all support columns and window and door bucks plumbed and secured in.  The only framing left now is to put up the roof trusses.  Thanks, friends, for all your hard work!

Unfortunately, we do not have cell phone service at our site. You can drive a few miles out and usually get reception, but not actually having it on-site has been a little frustrating sometimes. (Also a little freeing some other times!) The Monday after the underground plumbing was ready, Morgan called in for the plumbing inspection. This inspector had never been to the site and Morgan left a message with him asking him to please call and let him know when he was coming. Unfortunately, he decided to come out on Tuesday without giving us prior notice. This would have been fine except for the fact that he ‘couldn’t find the road on the map’ and when he tried to call, Morgan was up on-site and of course did not receive the call. It’s true that the road isn’t on any map I’ve seen (except Google maps), but this really shouldn’t have mattered since the CID office has directions recorded in our file. Anyway, he didn’t try to follow the directions and instead decided to come back on Friday. The problem for us with that was that we were hoping to start pouring the slab on Saturday. In order to pour we needed to pass the plumbing inspection, fill in all the dirt in the plumbing trenches, tamp down the dirt for the whole floor-plan, put out the vapor barrier and wire for the concrete and call in and pass our slab inspection!
On Wednesday Morgan called the general inspector and told him our dilemma. The inspector agreed to come as late in the afternoon on Friday as possible to give Morgan time to set everything up after the plumbing inspection. He also asked him if he really needed to have everything completely ready and in place for the pour, or just on-site, and was told ‘we’ll try and work with you’. On Thursday, Morgan rented a tamper and started tamping all of the dirt all of the places where there wasn’t a plumbing trench. On Friday morning, the plumbing inspector showed up at 10:00 and passed us. Yeah! At 10:30 the general inspector arrived… Of course Morgan didn’t have anything in place, let alone the trenches even filled in! The inspector must have been in a good mood (and also really like Morgan), because he passed us anyway. Whew!
On Saturday morning, I met Morgan out at the site. We were joined by Eric and Mark Gurule and their mom, who was visiting from California. Later, Christian came out to help as well. Morgan had decided to split the floor up into large squares (about 4’x4′) sectioned off by metal bars that he custom cut and welded into place. Mark manned the mixer and Eric, Morgan and Christian filled in the squares and leveled them out. When they were leveled and dried out enough, Eric showed me how to add the pigments and then he troweled them in. For coloring, we had decided to try and technique that Eric said he had done for one other concrete floor. Our other options for coloring were to either add a pigment to the concrete while it was mixing for a solid color throughout or to wait until sometime after the floor was done and completely dried to do an acid wash. We heard that the acid wash is actually really bad for the environment and is also another step we’d have to do along the way. Eric’s idea was to take the natural pigment powders that are normally used for plastering and sprinkle them directly on the wet concrete. Nico also was kind enough to give us some pigments he had stored up.
It came out beautifully! Eric really is a master with the trowel and I had a lot of fun picking out the colors and getting my hands a little dirty.

That first day of pouring, we really only got about 5 squares done. It took longer than we thought to set up the metal to form the squares and making and pouring concrete just takes a long time. It also rained for a little while and we had to cover everything up and wait it out.

The next day Eric came back and Laura was also there. We got back to work and got about 8 more squares done. This time Laura helped out with the coloring. On Monday, it was Eric, Morgan, and I. By then end of Monday we were about 2/3’s of the way done.Eric decided that he couldn’t come back until Thursday, so I took Thursday off and we all met out there again. We got quite a bit done that day! Unfortunately, at about 5 o’clock the guys decided to do one more batch of concrete. After the concrete was in the squares it started to sprinkle. We covered everything up and for the next couple of hours every time the rain would let up we would uncover the fresh concrete, smooth it out more and pray for it to dry out a little.

Finally about 10:30 Eric told me he thought they were ready for pigments and so by the lights Morgan had set up I applied the colors. I’ll blame it on being pregnant, but I have to admit that by then I was a ‘tad’ grouchy. Thankfully we had finally ate something, but I still had to work hard to keep it together. As soon as my part was done I headed to bed. Eric and Morgan had to stay up until past midnight to keep up the covering up/uncovering and smoothing it out act. Those squares still came out beautifully!
In the morning I headed back into town for work. Eric had thankfully brought his camping gear, so in the morning him and Morgan were ready to go at it again. It rained, of course, for several hours! Morgan says that in early afternoon, they started pouring again and by five had all but one square in the bathroom finished. Eric had to leave, but Morgan poured the last square on his own. It was the only one he did the coloring on and it came out great!

 

Since we had the footer-pouring-day, Morgan has been working on our stem-walls. For most of the walls we used 8×16″ cinder blocks stacked three courses deep and two wide. Two courses up from the footers will be the level of our slab. The third course will lift the strawbales up enough from the ground to protect them from water damage. With two inches of insulation on the outside of the blocks, the stem wall will end up 18″ wide, the same as the strawbales. After they’re stacked, they’re filled with concrete. Morgan did this in small batches and slowly over several weeks, stacked up the blocks and filled them with concrete. My job was to go behind him with mortar and mud around the sides and in between the blocks.

After several weeks we had the outer row three rows deep and filled with concrete. We also had to fashion more rebar into the walls. We added rebar flat all the way around in the top row and also long upright pieces called ‘imbalers’ which will later pierce the bales as they are placed to make the walls. We also had to insert j-bars into the concrete where the columns for support and for the window and door rough-ins will be.The inner row we only did two rows high for now to be able to scree off that row for the slab, as the top of the second row of blocks is the intended height for the slab.
The only thing we had left to do now, before we could level out the dirt and get the pre-slap inspection, was the underground plumbing. We thought that our choices were to pay a licensed plumber to do all of the work and pull the permit or for Morgan to go and take a test which would prove his plumbing abilities (something which was allowed under a home-owner’s permit.) We originally thought that Morgan’s friend from Pecos who is an un-licensed plumber, could do the work for us on the side and then get his boss to pull the permit. However, it didn’t work out, so we got a quote from another (licensed) plumber that Morgan knew. He told us $5500 for the work and supplies for the entire house, not including the major fixtures like sinks and toilet. We were floored as that was completely out of our budget. However, he then told us he could also just do the schematic for us to turn in for the home owner’s permit. Huh? It turned out that it wasn’t a test that he could take, but Morgan could turn in a schematic drawing of the how he planned to do the plumbing and for $25 they could approve it in lieu of a licensed plumber doing the work. The licensed plumber did the schematic and the un-licensed plumber friend came and did the work along-side Morgan for a reasonable rate. The parts were about $700. We ended up paying him $650 for the underground part and will have to come up with more for the rough-in. Now we’re just waiting for the inspection!

On July 2nd, 2011 we managed to get about 12 of our friends to come out to the site to help us pour our footers. They had to be 12 inches deep the perimeter of the house. Most of the way we could just pour directly into the dirt. There were a few places where Morgan built wooden forms to block off an opening in the trench where the concrete didn’t need to go. Also, we decided to do a six-inch framed wall around the bathroom and utility room, but the footers had been dug two feet wide there anyway, so we made forms to narrow it to save us some concrete.
We started early and by nine they were ready to actually pour.

A few guys worked with the mixer that Morgan’s friend Nico lent to us. They shoveled in the sand and gravel, added the concrete and water, and took turns counting shovelfuls to make sure they got it right.

Someone else took it in the wheelbarrow to pour it into the footer.

After it was poured in some more people helped spread it out until it was smooth.

By one o’clock we were done!

Thanks: Paulo, Mark H., Otis, Paul, Dave, Eric, Scott, and Mark G. And also to Laura for helping with the food for everyone!

 

We have a permit! After we received our permit from San Miguel County, the only thing we needed in order to turn in our application for CID (for the state of New Mexico) were our drawings. Because we are doing a strawbale building, we were required to have drawings with an architect’s stamp. Therefore, we joined up with an architect friend, who told us she could ‘sit down with us and do the drawings in an afternoon.’ Five weeks later, after a lot of meetings with her, she told us that she doesn’t actually have a stamp. A week after that, she finally gave us the drawings. They were full of small errors, but they were close enough after so much time waiting. We attempted to turn them in without a stamp, but were immediately turned down. The next day, Morgan took the drawings to another architect he knows, who was kind enough to look them over and put his stamp on them. I believe this is not something that happens very often; we are very grateful for his kindness.
That afternoon, Morgan took the drawings and all of our paperwork (the application, which had been stamped by San Miguel, the home-owner’s permit statement and the alternative building statement) to CID. A few hours later, they called him back to say it was approved! It cost us about a hundred dollars.

We also have been told that our electricity will be turned on today! We had had all of our paperwork for the electric company in order for some time, but we needed to have an electrician come and put in a pole and box and then pull a permit for us. We decided to get quotes from several different ones. This took a couple of weeks, but it was a smart move because it saved us at least $800. The price was contingent upon Morgan doing all of the digging. He went up one evening and dug until 10:30 with a headlamp to make the required trench. Then Dana, the electrician, came with the pole and other supplies and they set it all up together. They had a little problem because they had two 8 feet rods that had to go completely into the ground. The first one went in fine, but the second only went a few feet in and hit a rock. Morgan tried on and off for several days to either get it in further or to get it back out! In the end, we had to ask Dana to come back out with another one and put it in in a different spot.

When Dana called in the permit, the inspector told him that he only comes to our area on Tuesdays. He said that he might make it the coming Tuesday (he called it on a Friday), but in the end he didn’t make it for another week. In the meantime, we took all of our paperwork to the Electric Co-op and payed the quote, about $1400. Then the inspector finally came, passed us and called the Co-op. They called us to say they would be up today to hook us up! Morgan is so excited to have access to power tools!

After getting our CID permit, we could actually start the building process. The first thing that needed to happen, was getting the dug footers completely ready to be filled with concrete. We had to place all of the proper rebar in the ground and make any forms needed. Morgan worked on this for days. He had to hand-dig out some of the footers, as they hadn’t been dug the same dimensions as what ended up in our drawings. He had to measure, cut, and lay down all of the flat rebar and then place them in rebar ‘chairs’ (little plastic forms which hold the rebar the couple of inches needed above the dirt). After that he knew that he need to have shorter ‘L’ shaped pieces that would rise vertically from the horizontal pieces he just layed. Luckily, he had went to the junkyard and found a whole stack of exactly what we needed and for only $56! The rebar he found was slightly thicker then what we had to use, but thicker will pass. Morgan had never done this part and wasn’t sure exactly how to attach the vertical rebar to the horizontal rebar. He tried to call a few friends to ask, but in the end decided to just ‘tie’ each piece to the horizontal rebar with wire ties. For hours I cut ties while he tied each ‘L’ in place. This took so much time! I’m pretty sure that Morgan was just happy to not be digging anything anymore. Once again, he worked into the dark with a headlamp. It’s been so hot in the middle of the day, that it’s much more pleasant to work in the evening. Even if it’s dark.

After that evening and more work the next day, he finished putting in all of the vertical rebar. As we were supposed to have everything on site for the pour before the inspection, Morgan went out to Pecos nearly every evening this week to take a load of gravel. He finished all of the forms and filled back in the trench for the electric pole. (We had to leave it gaping until the electrical inspection.) Finally, this morning, the inspector came and passed us on our first general construction inspection!
Tomorrow, there will be concrete.

That’s what Morgan said to me halfway through last weekend.

So far while we’re camping on the land in our fabulous camper, our only source of water has been from his parent’s house. We have a five gallon jug that we fill up with water from his parent’s well to use for drinking water, dishes, dog water, hand washing, etc. If we’re really conservative we can make it last for two days. Needless to say, we needed a better solution for our water needs.

Morgan got his hands on a great deal of an older 500 gallon tank, a 50 gallon tank and a stand for the large tank for $100. Morgan realized before we took all of it to Pecos that the large tank needed a new valve for the front. So, on Saturday morning before we went out he went to Home Depot while I went to the grocery store. When I got back he was standing in front of the tank cursing. The tank didn’t have a big enough opening for someone to climb into, but was much too tall for someone to be able to reach the valve from the inside of the tank. Thankfully, my small fingers were able to squeeze in from the outside enough to be able to start twisting on the inner part of the valve. Then while he held that part with a very long wrench, I tightened up the outside with another wrench. I wasn’t very good at this and it took much longer than Morgan had patience for, but we eventually got it water-tight.

When we got there, Morgan took apart the wooden stand. (It’s quite large and he had hurt his back putting it on the trailer.) Our friend John helped him move the top and the rest we moved piece by piece. After John and Jen left, we put it back together, upside-down. The Morgan attempted to turn it right-side-up. But since it had to go slightly uphill and was really heavy, he couldn’t do it. Finally, he got straps from the trailer, pulled it part-way up with the help of some trees and then was able to push it the rest of the way.

Next, our plan was to empty the 50 gallons we had put in the large tank in Santa Fe, bucket by bucket into the 50 gallon tank that we put on top of the stand. Morgan started doing this, only to discover that the valve on the small tank was also faulty. We’re not sure how much water we lost. Morgan thought that he could fix it with some apoxy. We had some dinner while we waited for it to dry. It still dripped when we turned it back upright, but very slowly. So we decided to go ahead and hook the water in the small tank up to the camper. We hoped that gravity would be enough to have water pressure in the camper sink. After messing around with various pieces of hose, breaking the clamp on the end of one of them and then using some wire to tighten it instead, we turned on the water. All we got was a drip, drip, drip! We would need a pump.

The next morning, after taking some more buckets of water from the large tank to the small tank, Morgan decided to prop up one side of the large tank on some bricks to try and get the water to flow faster into the bucket. Unfortunately, when he did so, the weight of the water on one side of the tank caused the whole tank to slide off of the trailer. It landed on the valve, which cause a huge crack all around our new valve. We basically lost most of the water left in the tank. We don’t know if it’s repairable.

After Morgan regained his composure from this very large mistake, we decided to turn the small tank back on it’s side so that we wouldn’t lose any more of the water we had left. An hour later a big gust of wind blew it over and most of its remaining contents spilled out, causing Morgan to say…
“I’m so fed up with water…”