Offgridburbia

This thresholds needs some TLC

After the push to get the roof on, I took a couple of weeks off from the shed. It was nice knowing that as August turn unseasonably wet the it wasn’t going to melt away.

I got back to business last week. There are still lots of details to go before plastering. Small details you know like doors and windows. Before installing those features I had to do some work on the door and window thresholds.

Since putting in the door threshold almost a year ago it’s taken a beating from rain and foot traffic and the rough opening for windows were also about six inches too tall so I had to build those up.

A small gap to fill

We were out of dirt and our dirt supply yard was closed due to rain so I picked up some bags of fill dirt from Lowe’s. After rounding up my tools, extension cords, water hoses, I found that the concrete mixer wouldn’t start. Plugging it the would cause the breaker on the GFCI outlet to pop leading me to believe that there was an electrical short somewhere in the motor.

After tinkering with it for an hour and a half, running back and forth and resetting the breaker only to have it shut off again I removed the motor and took it home with me. I watched some videos on small motor troubleshooting and multi meter usage but didn’t really get anywhere. In the end I just wiped off the accumulated sludge, removed all the leads, gave everything a good dowsing of WD-40, reattached the leads and the motor started running. Hooray!

This week, I reinstalled the motor and mixed up a batch of cob with lime. The lime is especially important for the thresholds under the windows since they’re more likely to come into contact with water. Mid afternoon, it started raining again. Did I mention how nice it is having a roof?

Motor troubleshooting and YouTube watching

Motor reinstalled

Threshold forms

Keeping the lime stabilized soil moist. Much like concrete lime stabilized soil shouldn’t be allowed to dry out too quickly.

Hopefully our last load of dirt for this project.

While the rough openings were too long, they were an inch or so too narrow. Shaving off that extra bit with a machete was more work than I expected.

Pounding in the window frame

Do you worst rain

Windows installed.