Donaldson Crew Adventures

I had picked up these knives for the boys and one for me from one of my favorite small online businesses - Thunder Crow/Creek Stewart. 

A little rainy/snowy/cold today so PJ, Noah and I built our knives today. (Hunter will have to do his when he comes home at some point:).

Here is what comes in the kit:

We started by carving and sanding the handle. 

We then uses the resin the fix the blade in the notch, did some burning on the handle to decorate, put some oil on the handles and did the final twine wrap to keep the blade in. 

Hunter and I drove to Washington yesterday to pick up a ‘project bike’. It’s a 3 cylinder 82 Yamaha 750 with a shaft drive (vs chain). It’s not running now so first part of the project will be engine work. 

Below are some pictures of what people have done with these bikes to get an idea of the finished product. 

I have build and put up shelves in each of the kids rooms except PJ and he asked for some this spring.  

I got a piece of cut juniper from a guy selling them on the side of the road near Sunriver for $20. I sanded it down, then cut it adding a light pre-stain and then polyurethane to bring out the color of the wood grain. 

We used some shelf bars we have had from our  first apartment in Huntington Beach after getting married.  

PJ is super excited!

We have been rafting as a family the last couple of years on borrowed equipment. This year we invested in our  own equipment. It’s hard to find something that everyone enjoys together and this is one of those things. With that you need a way to transport the raft so I set about building a removable platform for our trailer to carry the raft inflated. 

I have wanted to build an outdoor stove for some time. Over spring break I found someone giving away free bricks in town so picked up a used iron gas stove cover and made this design based on a video online. My first version used some thin metal mesh that melted on my first try so upgraded the mesh to hardware cloth I had in my shed. The metal mesh allows air to be drawn up from under the burn to keep the fire burning hot with only small pieces of wood.

We got some sourdough starter from our friend. Kelly has been feeding it. Last night I mixed up a batch, let it rest overnight and we baked it today in a dutch oven. It looks good, hopefully taste good as well :)

I got a set of wood carving knives for Christmas. I pulled some wood from the wood pile - Some old juniper fence rails that I cut up in the fall for firewood. Super dry as they were likely 30 + years old. I used a hatchet to split off some thinner pieces. The first one I carved was the spoon. From there I did the spatula a week later and today I tried a fork. The spoon came out of a different block of wood so it’s interesting how much darker it is than the other two that came out of the same block.

Built a picnic table for the front yard

Early garden harvest has started with radishes.

Since we moved into our house a couple of winters ago I have stacked wood on the south side of the house off the garage. When it snows the wood gets wet the last think you want to be doing is clearing snow off when its cold out.  I decided I wanted to build a partial open air woodshed to stack the wood in.  It would be partially open on the sides to allow airflow to help the wood dry but also covered to keep the majority of the snow off.  

In the late summer I slowly started the tedious job of planning out the size, and layout, followed by leveling and squaring the cement deck blocks that would be used as a foundation.  Once this was completed I ordered a load of gravel and rented a bobcat to pour in gravel around the bases to level the floor of the shed which would be made of compacted gravel.  From here I ordered the wood which showed up last week.  I worked at it during the evenings after work and a little on the weekend.  All in all it was done in less than a week.  A much more reasonable project than the crazy garden project from the spring.  

 I have learned that the key is not to rush in the beginning and be sure to get the posts squared up right.  If this gets messed up you spend a lot of time trying to fix issues later.  The picture above shows the posts going in with a few board nailed in to keep them straight and square.  I used cedar for the front posts and the cheaper pressure treated posts for the inside back as no-one will really see these once the wood is is and everything is stained. 

We haven't had a vegetable garden since we lived in Boise, so now that we had some space, I thought it would be fun to have one here at the new house. Few challenges - ground is rocky, soil is like sand, short growing season and their are a lot of animals that would love some soft leafy greens - especially deer.  In February I started researching and doing some planning.  The idea was that when we did our landscaping in the back, I would get the team to scrape an area and bring an irrigation line down to the area when they put the rest of the irrigation system in. My inspiration for the garden was here.  Beautiful but unfortunately no plans so I had to make up my own plans just by looking at the pictures. I also used the farmers almanac online garden planner tool just to see how it might look.    

 The garden would be a set of raised beds, with a 5-6 foot wooden fence around it.  The back landscaping went in late march, so I ordered the wood and set to work.  The biggest challenge was getting the base level.  its funny how the ground feels pretty level until you actually start to measure it.  The west side (right side in most of the photos) was at least 10 inches lower which meant getting a load of gravel dropped in the driveway and a lot of hauling gravel in a wheelbarrow down to bring it up somewhat.  Additionally... like a lot of plans, they seem right until you get started so due to large boulders messing up post placement and other challenges I had to make a number of changes and concessions as I went along.  Here is a series of photos of the build process.

Here is the finished product.  Ultimately I think it turned out pretty nice and we look forward to growing some fresh veggies for years to come!  The only thing left to do is install the drip irrigation system.  Abbie and PJ helps plant as well... for now we are hose watering it until the  irrigation is running... hopefully in next couple days.