(Jul 26) Prepping For The Cistern

We ARE in the dog days of summer here in North Texas. It's now been over a month since we've seen rain and the 100°+ days continue to roll in. Nothing in the forecast for the next week but "HOT and dry".  We got a little done this weekend. I trimmed the metal and laid the tar paper on the roof of the storage building. This should hold for a bit as we aren't expecting any rain any time soon. :(

We also started setting the pad for the cistern. A couple of weeks ago, we put some tall stakes in the ground to represent where the cistern would sit. We wanted to make sure it wasn't going to block the views from the windows in the house too much. Hard to make a 1550 gallon black jug completely vanish from sight! I just didn't want it to be the first thing you saw when you drove up to the place. I also didn't want it to be front and center in front of our windows. We worked hard to put all of those windows in and want to enjoy every one of them. :) Our ideal location would have been at the NE corner, behind the bathroom, but because of the slope in the land, that would have been impractical. It was much lower than the rest of the cabin and we'd have been fighting gravity from here out. We finally chose the SE corner, opposite of the kitchen. We backed it away from the building a bit to leave a walkway around the sides and surprisingly, it was barely visible from either of the kitchen windows. Elevation there is also much better than on the north side. We were one timber shy of finishing it and will bring it next week with a load of gravel. We cut 2' pieces of rebar, drilled holes through the multiple layers of timbers and hammered them through. Should hold nicely. Really wanted the cistern base to be solid and level since it's about 12,000 lbs when full.

The rest of the weekend we spent relaxing in the cool of the house. We have to remind ourselves at times that it's OK to just enjoy our time out here. It doesn't have to be about work every minute there. We watched a couple of movies, took a couple of naps, fixed some great meals and fed/watched the wildlife. Combine all of this with some progress on our homestead and it was a great weekend!