Our doorposts were mounted Monday, 28-Jun-21 22:23:54 CEST

The gypsum plates swap Monday, 12-Jul-21 21:39:13 CEST

Sunday, 04-Jul-21 22:04:30 CEST

Started on a new pile of gypsum plates

This week we started on a new pile of gypsum plates. We finished the bathroom for now. We will come back to that later.

Monday 28 June

Our daughter successfully finished her examination to get a driver's license. That is good because it will make her more mobile. She will not get a car just yet, but she sometimes goes to long-distance places where people are taking turns to drive, and then it is convenient to have the license.

We went to the new house in the evening and put up three gypsum plates in the southeast bedroom. After the gypsum plates, we tried to tidy up the first patch where the sheep went. It still got long grass lying down. It will be challenging to get this patch up and running when the grass is lying down. I already noticed long grass started rotting. We discussed the challenge and decided on getting a brush cutter with a battery.

Tuesday 29 June

Today was our daughter's birthday. After work, we went to the new house to give the sheep their food supplement. It turned out they had not eaten the supplement of yesterday. The new patch had so many nice things to eat they forgot to eat their supplement. They got fresh hay at the bottom of their shed. It did not appear as if they used the shed significantly because they had found a place behind the house as well.

I discovered that the alkmene apple trees did not produce so many apples this year. The belle de boskoop apples (Goudrenet) had more apples. I hope we will see them grow big and pick them before the wasps are doing it. That would be great.

When the sheep were looked after, we went back to our old house. We biked to the city center from the old house, and from the center, we took the train to Amsterdam. I wonder how commutes like these will be in the future when we live further away from the city center. If there is one drawback of the new house, it is located in a more remote place. That is obviously the advantage of the new house as well. In Amsterdam, we went to a restaurant to eat dinner, all four of us, to celebrate her birthday and driver's license.

Wednesday 30 June

Today the brush cutter arrived seconds before we were about to go to the new house. We got the cutter with us and started charging the battery. Then we went ahead putting up gypsum plates on the wall in the southeast bedroom.

The first wall of that bedroom is finished! The regular pile of gypsum plates is also finished. The next pile has the green type of gypsum designated for wet rooms. For the rest, if we want to use more plates with all four sides with indent, then we need to get them from downstairs. That is going to be a hassle.

Halfway through the afternoon, we went to the location where my wife would get her second vaccination of the Phizer vaccine. Google gave us a touristic route. On the way home, we decided on a more straightforward route. It turned out that it was full of roadblocks. The result was not better at all. After we passed a roadblock, we came to the next.

When we returned to our new house, my wife started to put up isolation in the southeast bedroom. This is the second time we put up isolation in that room. This time we screw each plate in a couple of places to not fall down before we got the gypsum in place.

I went outside in the rain and tried using the brush cutter. It is strong enough for the things we got growing on our farm. It worked well for the task of cutting the grass that was lying down. Actually, cutting the grass was done on a whim. The work afterward was the challenge, collecting the grass porage. I combed the ground with a rake to get the things collected. I mounted big piles. I put two wheelbarrows on our new compost, but it was too much. The subsequent wheelbarrows I placed in the path around the edge of our plot. Hopefully, it will be okay to walk on that in a couple of days.

Thursday 1 July

Today we worked from home the whole day. It was not sunny, but it did not rain so much. There came a few scattered droplets now and then. In the evening, we went to the new house to give the sheep their food supplement.

We started working on the bathroom on the first floor. Here we are using the green gypsum plates. The gypsum plates for bathrooms are 35.84 kilos, almost 36 kilos. They are heavier than the regular gypsum plates. Regular plates are only 30.576 kilos.

Our ladies are a bit lazy. If they are provided food without the need to do anything, then that is much better. The only thing you need to do is to call for us a little. When we worked in the bathroom, they heard our voices, and they could not understand where we were. We were somewhere, and they had to call for us. I closed the window. After a while, I could see they calmed down and started eating. They even ate from the rapeseed bushes. The seeds from the rapeseed. It is good because they got plenty of this currently, and it would be good to stay in this place for a while until other patches are ready for grazing.

Friday 2 July

It is already Friday! I went to the office to work, but that was pointless because people were not there. So I went back to our old home to work instead. I can concentrate much better from home, and I got a larger monitor there. I thought that perhaps we would be able to stop early, but that did not happen. We went on working until half-past six. I asked my wife if we should not stop working, and she said she had just a few more things to do. After a while, I told her she had to stop regardless because we had to go and look after our sheep.

At seven in the evening, we stopped working for today. Then we went to the new house. There we put up more gypsum plates in the bathroom on the first floor. The first plate for today was easy. The final plate for today was next to the window on the north wall of the bathroom. It had holes for electricity and water and whatnot. It is fair to say that this was the most complex gypsum plate we set up ever. Perhaps the plate in the kitchen downstairs was equally tricky?

We predrilled the holes, but we forgot a couple of things: electricity to the lamp above the mirror in the bathroom. When that was fixed, we could finally mount the plate.

Saturday 3 July

Today it was my birthday. I had no ambition this year to celebrate this in any significant way. I got messages of people congratulating me throughout the day, and that was nice.

I noticed that the driveway got a faint notion of a green line in the middle. The idea is that it will be green in the middle of the driveway, but it is not happening so quickly as I thought.

We continued working on the bathroom on the first floor today. The last plate of the north wall was easy. Then it was time for the east wall, but we could not start working there because the plumber had to finish connecting a pipe in that wall. We decided to continue with the south wall. Our electrician had mounted the electricity for the lamps, but my wife was not happy with the location.

I asked our electrician if it was possible to move the first lamp a little. He said I could do it if I were in a hurry. I decided to try doing it, and that went fine. I replicated what he had done. I extended the electricity pipes and mounted it all. Am I on the level of a junior electrician now? We can continue with the ceiling, and that is good.

Our son worked with the brush cutter to trim the first area where the sheep had been grazing. He worked the whole day on that. He had collected 6 heaps of grass.

My wife has been restoring the isolation in the ceiling in the southeast bedroom lately. Today she finished that project. That is fantastic.

When we were done for the day with gypsum in the bathroom, we went outside and made one heap of the smaller heaps our son had made. Then we gave the sheep their food supplement.

We worked hard on the house this week. I had almost no time for blogging. Either that or when there is time to blog, I am too tired to blog.

When we went to the garden center last week, I discovered a shelf with products to protect the garden against various animals. I found a product against snails: nematodes. It is tiny worms that live on snails. I had not heard about nematodes before. My wife knew about them, but she was not interested. She was skeptical of using nematodes for our plot. She is reasoning that our plot is simply too big to be provided with a high amount of nematodes all over.

Nevertheless, we bought a package of nematodes. It is a unique product because the package was empty apart from a leaflet with a unique code. At home, the package has been lying idle for over a week. This morning I decided to order the nematodes with the code.

That was when I found out that the nematodes could not be delivered. Not today anyway. It feels strange that we bought a package with a promise to get us a product that cannot be delivered.

It is also so that sheep can be infected by nematodes. I wonder if it is the same nematodes that go after snails? My wife will ask the expert we bought the sheep from. We will see.

Sunday 4 July

It is Sunday, and I woke up with a sore neck. I think it has to do with that I am not used to working above my head. For this, I decided to wear a scarf. Usually, keeping the neck warm is doing the trick for me in combination with paracetamol.

The day started off sunny with just a light overcast. It had been raining during the night. This is the best weather, from time to time rain and in between sun. The plants are growing like crazy in these weather conditions. Our son had almost finished the first field where the sheep grazed. Today he would finish that work. We decided to work indoors in the bathroom on the first floor.

We had the ceiling finished at three in the afternoon. The last wall needs to remain open because our plumber has work to do in the wall. The suer air pressure relief pipe needs to be mounted. The suer pipe system needs to get fed with air at the top location. For example, when flushing a toilet, it creates a kind of flood wave in the system. The air is going down in front of the flushed water. Behind the wave, the air is also dragged with it.

That means that the system needs to get new air feed from the top to allow the wave to travel freely down the suer pipe. If that is not provided, you get a system with gurgling sounds. For this, we got an air inlet pipe on our roof. The only minor thing is that it needs to get connected to the suer system. As you can see in the photo here, the gray pipe at the bottom left corner of the wall needs to be extended to the roof pipe located outside the image.

My wife is doing a course in risk management for her work, and she got her exam tomorrow. For that, she had to practice more on the material. When we had finished the ceiling in the bathroom, she started work on her course, and I went outside to help our son with the garden.

He had worked on the yellow part of the photo. That was part of the first field that our sheep grazed when they arrived at our farm. Between that grass and the road, we got a section with less grass. We tried a couple of times to sow grass here, but it failed due to various reasons. Last time it failed because it got too cold just after it had sprouted. We got some grass but not at all so much as on our grass field.

The area next to the road has been dominated by weeds since the beginning. It has been difficult to get grass seeds to sprout here. The soil here is the soil from when the road was built. They dug out the road and placed the mud next to the road. The result was a bumpy surface of stones made by clay because much of it comes from the deeper ground. I estimate that six meters along the road, we have this issue. Last winter, the freezing temperatures did wonders to the mudstones. The water split the clay. Many times the clay split into thin layers. The seabed has built up the clay in layers, and when the clay is freezing, the layers are separated. When it started raining, the chunks of clay melted by the rain. That has made the surface more even, and that is nice.

Now I took the brush cutter and cut the weed from this area. It was a little tricky because I did not want to cut the trees and bushes we planted in early spring. For this, I put a barrier tape flag on every plant I could find. Now it was easier to avoid causing havoc.

I put the remains on top of the mountain that our son had made this weekend. A mountain like this can melt down considerably in one year. I do think we had it this big already last year. We used some of that material elsewhere but not much at all. For now, this is what we have to do.

My son went around the freshly cut part and made bare soil rougher with a rake. The idea is that the seeds are trapped better in a rougher surface to have better conditions to sprout. It is my idea that it will work better. I have done no research on that. I know that it is more work, but we really want the grass to grow, so it is better to try this. So far, no single place where I tried this method has the grass seeds failed to sprout.

While we were working on this, it started raining. We continued working, and both of us became soaking wet. When working hard outside in summer conditions, it is not so bad to get wet. One has to watch out for getting cold. Since we were active, we kept warm although we were soaked. When we stopped working, we went indoors and changed clothing.

This was it for this week. We started the week in the southeast bedroom. There we finished the north wall. When that was done, we moved over to the bathroom on the first floor. We did this because the topmost part of our gypsum pile was the green wet room type. Had it not been for the air pressure pipe of the sewer, we had finished the bathroom. Now we finished cleaning up the first field where the sheep had been grazing.