New Roof Plans for Trailer

It's been a busy summer, but I finally added a new post to Grama Sue's Floor Plan Play Land .

For those of you who may not know, one of my hobbies is creating floor plans for working/country families. I love looking at floor plans, but they rarely have the features that Grampa Tom and I think ought to be in a home, like large mudrooms and master bedrooms that are away from the main living spaces.

The designs are, for the most part, dreams that we will never build, but I'd sure like to see some of them exist outside of my mind and my computer so I created a blog to show them to the world.

My most recent post though, is something Grampa Tom and I are actually planning to do :) Trailer roofs are notorious for leaking and ours is no exception. We often have to get up there to paint and fill the cracks that inevitably occur when a thin metal roof is blown around by the wind. We have often talked about putting a pole building roof over it, but not seriously, until one day a few weeks ago when Grampa Tom happened to mention our ideas to a couple of friends of ours who got all excited about it and told him they were going to help him.

This plan includes not only a roof, but a greenhouse designed for passive solar heating and cooling, a cold room for our veggies and lots of extra storage. Check it out at Grama Sue's Floor Plan Play Land


God Bless You All!

~Grama Sue

80 Degrees in the Frozen Midwest

This is a small low tunnel type green house that I planted and covered on the 19th of January. It was 34 degrees out this afternoon according to the weather app on my phone, but it was beautiful and sunny so I decided to find out just what kind of heat it was producing.

Took a  probe style thermometer out and poked it through the plastic.

80 degrees! 46 degrees difference! Isn't that amazing? 

We haven't had to many sunny days around here lately, but I decided to poke my head in and see if anything was up anyway. There's a couple of little volunteer garlic shoots coming up. The lettuce and chard won't be to far behind. It's supposed to be sunny the rest of the week. We might very well be looking at a bed of green by the end of the week!

I've got a friend in Hamilton (about 15 miles south of here) that says she's got robins in her yard. Spring isn't to far away!

God Bless You All!

~Grama Sue

This Week's Floor Plan

I've been working on floor plans again. Actually came up with two this week, but I'm only posting one. This home is 2025 square feet and wraps around a sun room/ greenhouse. Check it out at Grama Sue's Floor Plan Play Land. Let me know what you think!

God Bless You All!

~Grama Sue

Plastic Bottle Greenhouse Start

Here's the start of my plastic bottle greenhouse. It will take me forever to gather enough plastic bottles to make a whole greenhouse, so, I decided to start by making  panels. That way I can lean them against the house or against each other to make cold frames until I can actually build a whole green house.

These are 1 liter bottles. I plan to pass a piece of bailing wire through each stack and wire it to fence stays on each end. the stays are 42 inches long so I'm trying to make the panels 42 x 42. It will take 14 stacks of 7 to make one panel. That's 98 bottles. If I tried to do this with only my bottles, I might never get enough. However, I'll bet lots of people will bring me bottles once I show people what I'm doing at the markets. Hope I have enough for a whole panel by then. I need 50 more. That's almost a whole bottle of club soda a day. Hmmm ... well maybe I can do it. I do like club soda. Plain or with apple cider vinegar or lemon juice. I blame my old boss Karen Prewitt. She taught me to drink it.

~God Bless You All!

~Grama Sue