After discovering to my shock that compost bins actually cost around $125 unless you are getting some kind of deal (such as the local city buying 10,000 of them or something), I decided to make my own out of an old garbage can. Here's how I did it:



First I turned the can upside down, so that the wide part of the compost bin will be at the bottom. I then cut off the can bottom (now the top) using some sturdy tin snips. There was a mold line in the plastic there already, so I did not have to measure conveniently enough.



Building the lid was by far the most complicated part of the bin-building process. First I used the cut-off can bottom as a guide and cut a piece of scrap plywood to use as the body of the lid. The idea is that the can bottom will be the "plug" part of the lid, and the plywood will cap it on top so it can't fall all the way in.



Before I could screw the two parts of the lid together I had to put in some filler plywood in the can bottom so that the plywood circle of the lid would rest smoothly on the top and be fully supported. These scraps come to exactly the same level as the outer edge of the plastic.



Screws coming in from the bottom hold these plywood scraps firmly in place. These are just miscellaneous drywall and deck screws I had in the spare parts bins.



Here's the can bottom temporarily screwed onto the large piece of the lid for test purposes. I don't have photos showing what else I did to the lid but basically it consisted of cutting out the hand holes and screwing down the handle parts so the plastic would lie flat to the plywood there too, and I also primered and painted the wood a dark brown with outdoors latex paint. It matches the house trim.



One more step I had to do was to drill air holes in the can itself. Since there were many vertical lines in the plastic not a lot of measurement was required there to make it look relatively even.



Here's the bin in use. It looks oddly Mission or Prairie Style doesn't it? LOL

Last time I was at my mother's house I saw they were using a covered shallow ceramic bowl to keep each day's kitchen scraps for the compost and that seemed to work out really well. So I found such a bowl on eBay for about $5 and we have already been using it. It works great!



It is about 8" across so it holds a lot but doesn't take up too much space on the big center island in the kitchen. So from now on, each night after I've taken whatever the vermiculture bin needs, I'll throw the rest in the big kitchen scrap compost bin out back. w00t! One more job crossed off the list :D

Today I took one of the last steps of wrapping up the CSA veggies for this year which was to process all the bags of herbs that had dried in the refrigerator. There was Marjoram, Basil, Summer Savory and three different flavors of Thyme.



Basically this involved grinding up the dried herbs individually with a mortar and pestle and putting them in jars. While I was at it, I also sorted out our herbs and spices which had been stuffed into numerous small cardboard boxes for about 7 years now. Needless to say the lack of organization had allowed us to accumulate a few extras of various things, and even a couple empty bottles stashed here and there.



Here's the new arrangement. I made a stepped storage shelf by cutting the corner edges off the cardboard boxes and taping them into the shelf in formation. If it works out well I'll rebuild it someday in wood.

Punch list on water filter project:



As shown above, progress has been made on cleaning up the undersink water filter installation.

1) I still need to investigate the leaking from the cutoff valves. After some research it seems what I need to do is tighten a packing nut on the shaft of each. I have not yet gone to look and see if I can easily identify said nut... here's hoping!

2) I received a very kind private LJ message from someone offering me advice on most of the points in my punch list. They suggested tightening the nut on the beige tube more. So I took 2 wrenches and using them together managed to get about 35 degrees more of a turn out of the nut. Lo and behold, the slow leak has stopped. Cross off #2!

3) The person also recommended against bothering with wood under the toggle bolts, saying it should work just fine as it is. After thinking on this I realized there's no harm in simply waiting to see. If the drinking water faucet gets loose I can always add the wood at a later date. If it doesn't, win! So cross off #3.

4) And, #4 magically crossed off itself. The next day, the water was coming out like this:



Smooth and full, with same diameter as the pipe it's coming out of. My best guess is that it took overnight for the water to find its way completely through the filter. But who knows? At least item #4 is done ;-)

I am awaiting the arrival of the water jugs so that I can begin what appears may be a rather lengthy process of filling them.

OK so, I did some math and calculated that we could save money long term by switching from Culligan bottled water to filtering our own water at home. The water filter would pay for itself after approximately 8 months, assuming a new cartridge was bought after 6 months.

Culligan costs:
===============
$35/mo with only me here
$55/mo with both of us here


Water Filter Initial Outlay:
============================
147.69  (1) Undersink water filter w/first set of cartridges
 53.51    (4) 5-gallon water storage jugs with re-usable silicone lids
 35.95  (1) Water dispenser crock for use with 5-gallon jug
 0.00   Plumbing (done ourselves)
------
237.15


Estimated time to pay for itself:
=================================
Worst case 8 months, assuming no refund for Culligan bottles, I'm alone the entire and a $50 replacement cartridge is bought after 6 months.


The dispenser and re-usable jugs are so that we will still have some emergency water storage, which the Culligan bottles conveniently provided. With the dispenser in the basement I can use the filtered water for plant water, thus rotating through the jugs on a regular basis keeping that water new enough to drink.

I did a bunch of research on water filter types/costs/capabilities, compared the capabilities with the water contamination report for our city water, and bought this water filter:



I felt quite proud of myself until I realized that this part:

0.00   Plumbing (done ourselves)

Would have to be done by me, since my spouse is not back for another 2 months yet. D'oh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I suppose the most charitable thing to say would be that after my adventure with the water heater valve snapping off I no longer fear the great unknown of plumbing but another explanation might be that I didn't think things out clearly ;-)

At any rate, today I set about installing the !@#$%^%$^ and here is how it went.



First I scouted out the area under the sink and picked a good place for the unit to live. Although the manual doesn't mention this at all, my Spouse had cleverly pointed out that it's important to be able to get the filters in and out easily once the unit is installed. I chose a spot in the center, more or less behind the centerpost.



That still leaves plenty of room for the trash can to go back in next to it afterward.



The next step was to hook up the incoming water (yellow hose). I had to turn off the valve and in the course of this I discovered both the cold and hot water valves (I screwed in the hot one first by mistake) drip at the handle. Greeaaat. After removing the beige tube running up to the faucet, and its connector, and the small-to-large pipe adapter, I discovered that the beige tube's o-ring was too scuffed up to re-use. So I had to go buy that.

Unfortunately it was time for my first ever eye appointment so I had to go do that, and when I got out of there I was way too screwed up on goofy eye-doctor eyedrops to be able to see inside parts bins. Wow, am I glad my eyes are not that bad in real life yet! I had to get the poor guy at the hardware store to shop for the part for me.



Here's how it looks with the yellow tube and its junction added in. Alas the connection for the beige tube leaks despite the new O-ring. I guess I probably needed to buy the entire assembly, not just the ring. It is not a bad leak but coming back 20 minutes later there is a ring of water welled up at the joint. So that will have to be fixed, as well as those 2 faucets. Sigh. I know I am way too new to plumbing to be hating it yet. So I am trying to keep a good attitude.    :-P

The next step was to mount the faucet. Instead of drilling a new hole somewhere I opted to re-use the hole of this really dumb soap dispenser that I always forget is there anyway:



The trickiest part of removing this was that the nut for it was tucked up behind the wash basin and against a cabinet, where no ordinary wrench could reach. I assume it was on the sink before the sink was installed in the counter. I ultimately managed to get around this by removing the pump handle, then grabbing one rim of the cylinder with a pair of vise grips and rotating. Once it was loose I reached up with my hand and removed the nut manually. Luckily they had not used thread lock!



There's the hole left over. I installed it in the hole as-was but afterward I decided I should have put some wood blocking underneath for the toggle bolts to clamp against. I think that has much less potential for future slippage than just pressing up against the underside of the steel sink.

By the way, the extension cord running past in the background is for the microwave. The right hand side of the kitchen has no 3-prong outlets, only 2-prong ones. Yet another project on the to-do list... hopefully to be done by my Spouse, not me! (evil grin)



Here's the faucet, mounted. Hooray! That little window on the base contains a battery and an LED that will blink in 6 months when it's time to change the filter. They also mention in the manual that it is time to change the filter if the water starts to taste like it's contaminated. Ya think?

OK, so, punch list on this water filter project:


Oh yeah, did I mention the water only dribbles out, after an initial gush?



I am not sure why this is, but I think it has something to do with air being trapped somewhere. I guess I will have to figure out why that is. It's definitely inconveniently low-flow right now.

Er... mission semi-accomplished?  (weak grin)

That title got your attention didn't it? ;-) Note: This is going to be another of those posts where I add the pictures in later, so be sure to check back.

OK! I feel like I am coming into the homestretch on the DNS/NTP/Mailserver change over.

Mail:
The receiving mailserver, WTF, is now up and running and receiving mail. I don't have the per-user custom spam blocking fully implemented yet but I did all the research, and got it partially done last night. Spam mail is still trickling in to the old mailservers so I will need to put in some forwarding aliases to prevent any more from arriving. I suspect some of these spam spewing zombie machines have caches of mailserver IPs they use regardless of real-world configurations. Some of these undeliverable spams have been bouncing off the same non-existent junct.net recipients daily since I registered the domain 7+ years ago. Why shouldn't they cling to bad MX IPs with the same tenacity? The other things I still need to do are to set up a choice for SSL-encrypted POP3 and also SSL-encryption for outgoing mail that is being relayed through non STARTTLS capable servers. Fun stuff!

DNS:
All domains are switched over to using WTF and OMG exclusively and the old name-servers back in Minneapolis have been physically powered down. There are still a couple of clients domains that I don't have control over that never got switched over, who will just have to play catchup I guess. Until then those websites will be unreachable. This is why people are supposed to put me as their Technical Contact when they register the domain... so I could reach in and change the DNS by myself. Ohwell.

NTP:
WTF is also the master NTP (internet time) server for the new network and that is running well and OMG is synced to it.

----

Now that everybody who is a non-techie is completely catatonic, I'll talk about the rest of my life ;-)

I haven't been doing a whole lot besides working hard on getting this server stuff switched over. Luckily as I say I think I'm in the homestretch there. The rest is all relatively non deadline oriented.

The weather has been really wacky here lately. It's fall so of course there are beautiful colors. The colors are somewhere between peak and spent I'd say. Today is quite cold but the other night we had a freaky warm night. It had been coldish all day (50's) then suddenly heated to 67 degrees outside around midnight. I walked out into a steamy blast of heat... very weird. Haha. I really need to get the weather software running on ORLY so you guys can see the weather here, both data wise and the weather-cam. That is next on my list finishing this mail/dns then getting a basic LAMP (Linux, Apache webserver, MySQL database and PhP-capable) webserver running for the new network.

Our cat Daisy was incredibly hyper this morning. So much so that the other animals, even the dog, were standing around watching in awe. Mitsuyo, the dog, actually ignored her freshly laid-out food in favor of walking over to the living room and gazing at Daisy who was racing around frenetically like a fruitbat on speed.

Today is the last Summer delivery for the Chequamegon CSA, the fruit and vegetable farmer co-op I hold a share in. Then there will be 3 fall deliveries and that will be the end for this year. I have additional chickens (and fresh turkey too!) to pick up this fall as well. Hurray for the freezer! My preservation project for today is to find out if it's possible to make leek and potato soup for freezing. I have 3 huge leeks and a whole lot of potatoes to deal with and that would be a nice recipe if it's possible. We'll see!

I have been keeping an eye out on eBay for these glass tulip lighting fixtures that we are using in the kitchen. They are made of downward-drooping bent glass petals with brass or fake brass trim. The glass is slag glass in various colors. They were made for decades so there are slightly different styles and quality levels from the different decades and they also come in different diameters. I am nesting them so the medium size ones have a tiny one inside, and then a pointy light bulb so the total effect is flower-like. They will be hung so that the kitchen ceiling resembles a lush flower garden. It should be, in the words of one person who's seen the plan, "trippy" :D  Unfortunately I am still down about 5 fixtures that I need... the smallest diameter ones, some white/beige and some colored. These things go through phases on there where sometimes they sell for insane money ($50 apiece or more) and other times you can pick them up for $15. I think there are also considerations such as manufacturer and year, color rarity etc. but since I don't know all those details I can never tell when they'll apply. Still, I do know that if I keep watching diligently the ones I need do pop up. Constant vigilence!!

I will add in the photos for this entry soon.