4/26/19
Building Summary: Today I cleared all obstructions from the hall leading through Jacobhouse, but we did not move the appliances on account of heavy morning rain. So, I instead found a couple other things to do. I emptied the garbage can, and I neatened the PVC parts by placing them into a heavy-sided box. This was followed by my fixing the leaky valve to the left of the water heater. I cut out the entire section of pipe with cutters, fashioned a new section with a better valve, and then I glued it all together*. This afternoon, I finished the job by wrapping the brass fitting three times with teflon tape and tightening the flexible hose end onto it.
Commentary: It was a rainy morning outside of Jacobhouse, but inside it was warm and dry. I like the sound of rain inside the container home. It isn’t loud, but it is just audible enough to let me know that inside is the right place to be. The strange thing about the sound, though, is that a small amount of rain is heard just as easily as a large amount of rain, with the only true variance being tempo. I suppose that makes sense. It isn’t like some drops are falling harder than the others. They fall at the same momentum while the thickness of insulation in the container’s top creates enough of a barrier to dampen the sound whether it be one drop or a thousand.
As for highlights, I have one to share from late this afternoon. It had been a busy few hours at the farm, and I wanted to check in on Jacobhouse and perhaps connect the brass fittings (which I did end up doing, as per the summary above). While I was kneeling before the water heater, I heard a flutter of wings and saw a shadow flicker up past me via the late day sun beam shining in through the front window. I knew that one of the wren-parents had arrived, but I didn’t look up. They don’t like being ogled at… But that’s beside the point. As I was tightening the brass fitting with a wrench and pair of pliers, I heard a tik on the floor beside me. When the tik was repeated twice more, I looked down, and there I found the little, brown bird hopping along. It paused after a few hops, tilted its head at me, and stared at me with its glittering black eyes. At that moment, I remembered a scene from a certain book that gave me the idea for this entire blog. The exact quote took some searching to find, but when I did, it brought me a similar feeling to that moment in Jacobhouse:
“Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time.“
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Final Note: Tomorrow, if the farm permits, we’ll get the appliances into Jacobhouse. If not, I’ll do like I did today and find another task to accomplish (likely starting with some sort of soffit activity).
*I ended up gluing the entire piece together in the Master Blend freezer room. I could have done it in Jacobhouse, but I didn’t want me (or the wrens) to be stuck in glue fumes when I could not open both ends of the container on account of the rain. The only bit of gluing I ended up performing in-house was the attachment of the entire piece to the hot water ‘stub-down’.