The Slow Motion Retirement Plan

[dhagood]

Im guessing the previous owner of the SxS was a rancher?

yep, he runs about 20 head of cattle and a hay operation just west of the denver metro area. he's selling some of his rolling stock to get a down payment for a ranch he wants to buy in texas.

Do you see the windfarm from your place?

i can see two windfarms, actually. if i'm up by the county road i can see the lights for the windfarm over by limon as well as the windfarm over by calhan. thanks for the offer of help, i may take you up on that some time :thumbsup:

and vtsnowedin, i'm having the deep mud now. here in colorado the average daytime temperature in winter is almost 50 (and about 15 at night) so my road is a mess in spots. drainage is general is going to be the operative word in next years projects.

 

[vtsnowedin]

and vtsnowedin, i'm having the deep mud now. here in colorado the average daytime temperature in winter is almost 50 (and about 15 at night) so my road is a mess in spots. drainage is general is going to be the operative word in next years projects.

Freeze and thaws cycles are a pain in the arrse. An old road contractor once told me he could build a road out of horse feathers if he could just keep them dry. When you get to draining and improving your roads I'll have a suggestion or two. No hurry thou. This was to be a slow motion retirement after all.

 

[R_Walter]

That's a nice looking place, but, as you know, bone cold in the winter.

 

[dhagood]

happy new year to one and all!

work has slowed down dramatically given the winter weather. i also seem to have caught some kind of bug or something...

one minute i was feeling fine and all of a sudden it seems like i had a list to port for some reason. the gator had a simple puncture and the tire was fixed in about 20 minutes. the tire is light, the gator is light, and removing and reinstalling the tire was a snap.

the tractor was a very different story. my wife is working on finishing some work we've been doing on a condo we own, so i am on the property by myself. there are neighbors around, and if i yelled for help somebody might hear me. then again, they might not. i thought through each move pretty carefully, took my time, and made sure i knew where to jump/fall/roll if something went awry. the tire is a loaded 13.6 r1 and weighs something like 500 pounds. with no air in the tire it was really difficult for me to maneuver the tire onto the front end loader, but i got it done and raised the bucket, backed up my truck, and let the tire fall into the bed.

the tractor tire was split for about 2.5 inches from a previous gash. the tractor was previously owned by a landscape company and they evidently drove over all kinds of things given the various cuts and gouges in the rear tires. i ended up having my local john deere dealership work on the tire since nobody else knew what to do with a loaded tractor tire (why would you put fluid in yer tires?). it took them 5 business days to get around to working on it (which doesn't count the new years holiday), but they unloaded the tire, put a tube in it, and pumped their magic beet juice back in.

john deere loaded the tire back into my truck on a pallet, so i was able to thread a chain through the center of the tire (and the pallet) and pick the whole mess up using the front end loader. with the tire was fixed it was much easier to roll around. everything went pretty well and i had all of the eight wheel mounting bolts in when i noticed i had installed the tire backwards. it wasn't too big of a deal to take the tire back off, turn it around, and put it back on. i'm glad that's over with, and things look a lot better now.

 

[cycle_gator]

Dave:

Happy New Year to you, as well.
Your adventures with your loaded tire are pretty reminiscent of my adventures with one of the R-4's on my Case. It is not a loaded tire but still weighs well over 200 pounds. Getting it off and into the truck was really fun.

Anyway, hope you are feeling better. I have a whole bunch of shots of my current project I need to get into a thread but the project has also been slowed by healing from a near miss accident, the holidays, and about 2 feet of snow with continuous freezing weather. Delays in setting up the thread? Just sloth, or other projects, like my reloading bench, etc.

Looking forward to more posts and take care.

 

[vtsnowedin]

(why would you put fluid in yer tires?).

It helps balance out loads in the loader bucket so you don't have to put something on the three point hitch every time you need to pick something. Helps with traction too if your pulling a ground implement behind. Once you get past what you can lift your going to use a machine to lift it anyway so exactly how much it weighs doesn't matter. Take care doing those jobs alone.

 

[dhagood]

so the power company in my area installed power on my property in march. the barn went in the middle of april, and i had my well drilled the middle of august. when i was talking to the well drilling outfit about what i needed, i asked if they would wire the electrical stuff (pump, pressure switch, etc) up. sure, they said, all their stuff would be wired up and good to go. so one fine day in september i went out there and the well stuff looked to be complete. the well outfit had installed a well pit and filled the pit with all manner of well related goodness. i strolled over to the hydrant, pulled up on the water control lever, and..... nothing happened. hmmm, i said, and called up the well outfit.

those nice folks said that sure, all their stuff was wired up and ready to go, and as soon as somebody connected some power to it why the whole thing would work most efficaciously. i stood there for a second with my mouth open, and just barely managed to not stutter "but but but you said...". clever fellow that i am, i completely misunderstood what i had been told. well, no harm done i thought, i just need to get me an electrician.

i already have described my struggles with the trenching which took an embarrassingly long time to complete. eventually, i had the trenching done and inspected, and i waited for my electrical contractor to show up. that took most of december, but right before christmas two guys showed up and got busy.

these guys were worth the wait. polite, hard-working, knowledgeable, and they asked what i wanted, where i wanted it, made a couple of good suggestions, and then proceeded to quickly do what i wanted done. out came the inspector who did his thing and commented that gary's guys did good work and signed off on the job. which was all well and good, but the power company didn't come out and hang the meter, which meant i had no power, which meant i had no water. bah.

in colorado, electrical inspections are controlled by the state and power companies don't do anything until the state says it's ok. for some reason, the results of my successful inspection didn't get passed on to the power company until the end of the first week of january. one day i came in, flipped on the light switch in disgust, and the lights came on!

i had a bad moment when i noticed that my power outlets weren't providing power until i remembered that they are on a gfci controlled circuit. i reset the gfci breaker and all was well.

the problem now was a cold snap. i didn't want to power up the well pump for the first time in zero degree weather, so i waited until it warmed up a bit, and

quite a lengthy journey, but we now have water.

 

[vtsnowedin]

I've just had a long hard couple of days dealing with government officials that don't understand that the money they are making my clients waste is a drain on the whole economy and that their existence and employment is a net loss to society. Glad to see you got through the bureaucratic morass without blowing a gasket.

 

[dhagood]

so my wife and i are entering the stretch run to getting our house on the market. once the current house sells, we'll have the money to build the new house. but in order to have somewhere to live while the new house is being built, we need to get ready to build the new house. so, we have our house designer turning our floor plan into an engineered house. to get the foundation designed, we had some soil testing done. these guys showed up on time and knocked out the testing in double quick time. the two guys have a nicely choreographed dance worked out between them as they operate the drilling rig to provide the soil core samples the foundation guy will need. it was pretty neat to watch.

to get the septic system designed, we needed additional soil testing performed. colorado no longer does percolation tests, you now have to have testing done to support an Onsite Waste Treatment System (OWTS). so, i rented a mini-excavator.

i dug two 8 foot deep trenches just long enough to get to the proper depth. this was the first time i operated an excavator/backhoe of any kind, so i was pretty slow. but i got down to where i needed to be, didn't break anything, and didn't hurt anybody. i'm happy with that. i also used the mini-ex to cut a water channel for a culvert i will be installing this year.

the results of all this will be a package of plans that will get us our building permit. when we move out of the house to enable the final part of the pre-market renovation, we'll move into our 5th wheel mobile home out on our property. we're still moving in slow motion, but the pace is starting to pick up.

 

[Green Power]

Any updates?

 

[dhagood]

thanks for asking

the house building phase of the slow motion retirement plan is to sell the house we're in and use that equity to build the ranch/retirement house without taking out any loans. we'll move out of the current house into a fifth wheel mobile home on the property while the new house is being built. theoretically, once this is done we will be debt free. we're likely to have some lingering credit card debt, but nothing too onerous. so, a bunch of threads have to come together at the same time:

we need to have the new house and septic system plans ready to submit for the building permit.
we need to collate, organize, decide whether to keep, donate, or dump, and move all the junk you accumulate in 32 years of marriage and 20 years of living in the same house.
we need to have power, water, and septic available at the property.
we need to have the fifth wheel ready ready to move in.
we need to get the current house ready to sell

once all this is done, we'll move from the current house into the fifth wheel and get on with it. and somewhere there will be the sound of trumpets...

where we are at right now is living in a house that is being refurbished prior to being put on the real estate market. we have just passed peak suck, which is the maximum the house is torn up/non functional/filthy during the reconstruction. peak suck includes:

no lights in any bathroom (got flashlight?)
no kitchen sink
no kitchen countertops
no cooktop
no oven
most of the carpet ripped out, but all the tack strips are still there
stuff stacked everywhere

this is the kitchen pre peak suck:

and post peak suck:

i spend a lot of my time removing tile and drywall and then patching drywall for new tile, moving stuff into a rented storage space or the barn, install new fixtures and appliances, and trying to impose order on chaos. i try to work a day on the house and then a day at the property, but the weather has not been cooperating all that well.

i should have some pictures of the new fence line soon.

 

[dhagood]

new fence pictures, which look just like old fence pictures. this first one is looking west, and connects with a north/south fence line that originally kept livestock out of our major stand of pine trees. I still have to hang the gate and finish installing some fence stays but it is otherwise complete.

this one is looking south, and connects with a short east/west fence line with a gate that you can't quite see in the picture.

these fences keep the livestock out of a L shaped area on the north east corner of our property that contain the barn, the stand of trees, the road, and where our house will sit.

on the current house front, we're getting closer as well.

 

[dhagood]

so our barn has been in use for almost exactly a year now. during the course of the previous year, whenever we've needed to stash something somewhere for some reason, the answer has been "put it in the barn". i mean, why not? people build a barn in order to store stuff, and we've had stuff we've needed to store. a lot of stuff. over the course of the last couple of months, we're now at "too much" stuff. here is the current state of things:

the car on the front left is our "official high mileage vehicle", ie a 2005 vw passat tdi. i'm averaging something like 40.5 miles per gallon in this car, with a high of over 45. what with diesel currently being cheaper than gas in most of the denver area right now, this is a win-win situation. or it would be if i could keep coolant in the vehicle. it's currently dribbling expensive coolant out on the ground on a constant basis. i started poking around and found evidence that the radiator was leaking. not a problem i thought, buy a new aftermarket radiator and install it and yer done. it's really easy getting to the radiator on this car, and the whole job took 4 hours maybe.

see the dried pink froth on the top of the picture. proof the radiator leaks, and now that leak is fixed. it's a crying shame the car is still dribbling expensive coolant out on the ground on a constant basis. it turns out there is a fitted o-ring that seals a plastic cooling system manifold on the back of the head that shrinks and cracks from all the heat cycling and dribbles expensive coolant out on the ground on a constant basis. so i've been working on that.

the semi-shiny thing you see is what vw is pleased to call a tandem pump. it is a combination vacuum pump and high pressure fuel pump, and it is exactly over the plastic cooling system manifold i'm trying to repair. i can't see the manifold at all unless i use a mirror, and the firewall is right in the way. i'm going to have to take the tandem pump off to get reasonable access to things which will dump diesel fuel all over everything. sigh...

back to the barn. my work area is behind the car, and is filled with things i'd like to have elsewhere, like a wheelbarrow which currently contains our big generator. behind the work area and to the right of the ladders is my lumber storage. on the right side of the barn, there is the tractor and behind the tractor and my chop saw is my wife's old volvo s70. the s70 has a problem with coolant getting into the engine oil. normally i would think head gasket, especially on a turbocharged engine, but a gas analysis of the coolant sez there are no combustion by-products in the oil which means it's not the head gasket. that is definitive i'm told, except for the fact the vehicle is using coolant (ie, not being leaked) and there is coolant in the oil. oil cooler? i'd like to work on this car soon. i've been saying that for a year.

between the s70 and my work area is the gator. behind the s70 and gator is generic stuff for which i haven't found a better place. on both sides of the barn are storage racks on which have been placed other stuff that used to be on the barn floor but had to be moved somewhere in order to cram more stuff into the barn. and so it was today. i cranked up the volvo and drove it out of the barn, down the hill, and into the trees because we have still more stuff that we need to put in the barn. not only more stuff, but higher priority stuff than an eighteen year old car.

finally, i worked on tightening up an original fence line and hung one of the gates. once i hang the other gate, i'll have the residential land fenced off from the agricultural land, and it'll be on to the next project.

 

[dhagood]

so i finally have the vw running again. what i basically did is to replace two gaskets on the back of the cylinder head. the total cost for parts was under 20 bucks with shipping. but with one thing after another of changing priorities, changing schedules, and rainy weather it took me something like 10 working hours spread over two full months to complete the task. bah.

no question as to why it leaked...

 

[Par4x4]

I just read your forum start to finish. I retired last November to 41 acres in SW Missouri. I'm getting ready to build a 30'x40'x10' pole barn with three 10'x8' overhead doors. My first purchase, after our house/property, was a Kioti CK4010 HST with FEL and 5' Bush Hog. I've been using the heck out of it and just started grading the barn site. Our property is mostly wooded with oak, hickory and elm. Loved following along with your progress. Keep up the good work and don't forget to enjoy retirement!

 

[dhagood]

thank you kind sir, and congrats on your retirement. please think seriously about starting your own thread about your barn build and other work you do. and if you do start a thread, remember to upload lots of pictures

not much work getting done on the property at the moment, but it is a good year for wild flowers.

one of the things i've been trying to do while out at the property is to take more time and enjoy the surroundings. i spend so much of my time in the future planning, contemplating, and visualizing how things will be tomorrow that i rarely take a moment to enjoy today. there are a number of patches of verdant wildflowers out now, and the valley has turned green with new grass. it's all just lovely, and i need to spend more time in the here and now.

i am still busy as all get out. have i ever mentioned that my wife and i are also renovating the kitchen in our son's condo? i'm going over today to install more cabinets. still working on the house so we can put it on the market of course. and then there's the vehicles. as previously mentioned, i got the passat running. this past tuesday i went to get it emissions tested and the stupid thing threw a fault code in the middle of the test (which means it failed). i think i have tracked it down to the anti-shudder valve which is very easy to replace. my wife's current volvo also has some issues which need to get fixed quickly.

when all that is done, there are a number of sheds and enclosures i need to build, but the big thing this year is drainage. drainage for the road. drainage for the barn. drainage for the parking area. i need lots of drainage, and i don't have any to speak of at the moment.

 

[hawkeye08]

We made the mistake of moving into a 1952 ~32' trailer in the middle of a field. We had no power, no water, no septic and the trailer does not have any holding tanks. We used a portapotty that had to be emptied often and showed and did laundry at friends. We sold our old house and used most of the money to purchase land with not much left over for building so we decided to build house first, then 10 years later got the shop built.

You are doing it right, shop and utilities first, then house. We also had 3 daughters 18months-6 years so it was an adventure for sure.

 

[dhagood]

not much going on at the property since we've been mostly working on getting our current house ready to sell. i did have to spend some time repairing the western fence line to keep some of our neighbor's cows out. that work has also done an admirable job of keeping our cows in.

 

[Green Power]

Nice looking cows. Anything new worth sharing?

 

[dhagood]

i've been meaning to update this thread for quite awhile now, but bad weather, the holidays, and laziness have taken their toll. and thanks for your interest green power, your post helped get me off the dime.

so its been six months or so since my last update. when i seriously started to think about what i could report what i've accomplished i was pretty bummed out at how little i'd gotten done. what this has mostly been is a juggling act, and i can't juggle worth beans.

if you'll remember, i was working on the ranch, our old house in the denver metropolitan area, and my son's condo. one of the things that was not helping my productivity was the amount of driving i was doing. if i worked at the ranch, i'd spend 2.5 hours driving back and forth between the house and the ranch. that certainly isn't terrible, but i drove over 40,000 miles during the past year and never left the state.

another thing that didn't help was tools. i drove my passat whenever i could because it averages 40.9 mpg. the downside of that is there is very limited room for tools. i tried toolboxes. i tried tool buckets. i scoured the internet for ideas. but i never got to the point where i could drive up to any one of my work sites and have all the tools or materials that i needed. i couldn't take everything with me and i couldn't list every tool or material i would need. if i was in town, i could easily buy additional materials. but out at the ranch, the nearest store with any kind of building supplies or tools was 24 miles one way and the nearest home depot is 40 miles one way. doing that once was plenty bad enough, but i had more than one day when i had to make multiple trips like that. i alternated being angry with feeling really stupid when that happened.

so i finally gave up working on the house and the condo. my wife and i hired a contractor to finish our son's condo. there was the standard battle with getting the work you think you are paying for done to a reasonable level of competence, but the condo has a working kitchen now and the carpet should be installed this week. we also hired several contractors to work on the house and that is getting wrapped up as well.

at the ranch, there is no great big project that i did, but a bunch of little stuff that adds up to... a bunch of little stuff being done.

i got the rv situated,

but i'm still working on the skirting. i have some lumber cut for one of the sections but haven't worked on that in weeks.

i got a very small cement slab poured and some decent steps built for entry.

i had the electricians back out to add more circuits to the barn.

once again i thought long and hard about doing that myself and decided there is no way i could do anywhere near as good a job as a professional when it comes to bending the conduit.

i got the gutters up on the west side of the barn

complete with underground water evacuation.

it was a bit tricky figuring out how to hang the last section of gutter at the end. just remember that pop rivets are your friend.

it's been pretty cold here on and off. we had a cold front blow through before christmas that dropped temperatures here on the eastern plains of colorado to -13 degrees fahrenheit. i dropped what i was doing and got a windbreak up for the cows just in the nick of time. it is still obviously a work in progress, but the ground has been frozen to the point where it's hard to do anything else at the moment. it's going to be warming this week and i hope to get back to work and turn the windbreak into a loafing shed.

and thankfully, the cows are hardy beasts, and came through with flying colors.

i have some more progress relating to the inside of the barn to show, but i'll stop this post here. i trust that everybody had a good christmas, and here's wishing everybody a good 2017 (2016 was a little bumpy...).