There’s no pun intended, really, but after looking at all the weights and sitting with it for a little bit, I realized that I did actually need to buy a bigger truck to pull my house.  That’s one part of “pulling things together”.  The more difficult and comprehensive aspect though is fitting together all the puzzle pieces of moving from working on the outside of my house to working on the inside.

I needed to coordinate the work that Dan, my carpenter, Michael the Younger, my welder/jack of many trades/solar mount system designer, Michael the Elder, my electrician, and Mark, my radiant floor heating installer from ABC Plumbing, needed to do so that everyone could be doing what needed to be done next.  This was complicated by Dan living in Oklahoma, Michael the Elder working in Alaska and Mark, the only one in his company who installs these floors, being overbooked.

So, what’s happened lately is the radiant floor is installed along with the special water heater that it took three months to find (more on that another time).  I bought a new (2008) white Ford F-450, diesel, 4WD truck – her name is Cavallo Bianca (White Horse) – Bianca for short.  Dan arrived back here and installed my beautiful bamboo flooring first thing to protect the radiant floor heating panels and then finished up with the siding and caulking.  I got many coats of stain/oil on the siding (with the help of Tyrone, a former neighbor from back in Baltimore).  Michael the Younger did the redesign and welding of the shelf space under the gooseneck of my trailer and I now have room there for four propane tanks, eight batteries and my 3600watt Onan generator.  Also, I have insulation in 3/4ths of my ceiling, Glo-Step folding stairs and all of this has happened since July 12th.

In that time I also moved Gyrtle to ABC Plumbing for the radiant floor install and then back to Allfleet.  I started to have a series of flat tires and discovered that all of the trailer tires had the wrong kind of valve stems on them so had to replace the stems on all five trailer tires.  I don’t really understand why Jayhawk Trailers would have set me up with automobile valve stems instead of heavy duty trailer valve stems.  Luckily I was in parking lots in a town and had help to get the tires off and on and the trailer jacked up, etc.  In doing that I also learned how to change my trailer tires all by myself if I need to – so that’s a good thing all in all.

Gyrtle has now been moved to a new home in the parking lot at our CleanTec warehouse to finish doing all the inside work.  CleanTec is a business my brother Mark, Michael the Younger and I have started, but I’ll tell you more about CleanTec in another post.

Time for some photos!