#365 Big Farm to see Ben in Hillsboro NC, I went to Wilmington NC to wire Savannahs house

We went to a restaurant in Hillsboro with whole fish and I couldn't resist

After visiting Cheryl we headed towards where Ben lives. He talked to the owner and they decided to let us stay at something called the big farm. It's about 68 acres and he lives about 5 miles away at something called the little farm, only 4 acres. I think the situation here is called Argo tourism where there is some ceremonial farming that goes on and some RVing and some tiny houses. It used to be just purely transient just for one or two night stops. Now I think it's turning into a tiny house village. My son Ben was in a pickle back in February as the state parks were all closed and honestly, he didn't know where to go or what to do. I had seen this place and suggested he contact them. It was a good fit for everybody and he's been there ever since. He had really found favor with the owner. Said she liked him more than about anybody who’s lived there. He's very handy and helped save the chickens by building a chicken wire roof over their area. It keeps the hawks out and he's been a great guy to have around.

As we arrived Ben met us and helped us get settled in. We hooked up to a water spigot which was actually about 200 feet away but we managed to get there with their hoses and our hoses. We stretched our electrical cord out and it was able to reach an electrical area but initially, it was only a 120-volt 20-amp outlet which isn't a lot in the summer but it was good enough to get us started. That was enough doings for day one. We were pleased to see Ben and had a nice dinner together.

After a few days, I created a 50-amp circuit that allowed us to have both air conditioners and be fully functional. I wanted to visit with Ben and be helpful with his Skoolie project. I asked him to consider what would be the best use of our time and we all decided that painting the bus would be a big deal and would be very important. When you're too close to a project you can get used to how it looks but when you stand back and pretend that hey you've never seen it before It looked pretty bad. Of course, it used to be yellow and black, and now it's got these metal white primed panels in, and just every kind of color spots here and there, and it just really looks rough. It was always worth just finding out what it cost to actually have it painted and he got some quotes back from 6 to $10,000 so we pretty quickly decided he could do it himself in the backyard. He wanted to get a quality paint and it turns out that enough paint to do the bus in a couple of colors plus a couple of gallons of clear coat would be about $1,000. Certainly, a good chunk of money but nothing compared to paying others.

Ben and I thought the project would probably take no more than one weekend and of course, that was very foolish of us. I already knew this but painting is one of those things that takes a lot of prep hours compared to the hours of actual painting but that's how it goes. It made sense for Ben to move to the Big farm during the bus painting process. At the little farm, there were around 10 Rv types and tiny houses. It would be smelly and possibly overspray. At the big farm we could hang out easier and no one else was around to offend. Although Bert knows Azura he always kept a distance away. Ben also has a cat named Kinx and those two kept away from each other intentionally which I assume avoids fighting. Typically Ben and Azura would come over and say hey each morning and as Ben and I would begin work on the bus Azura would hang out inside our rig all day with India. She seemed quite happy being her grand-dog.

We started work on the bus and sanded it and scraped and prepped for what seemed like forever. We used Bondo to fill holes. We sanded and sanded and then we sanded it some more. Then when we thought it was done, we had to get it good and clean. After that, there was all the taping, taping, and masking, and putting up brown paper. After about a week and a half, we will finally be ready to shoot some paint.

We used my air compressor that Ben inherited and a gun that we bought from Tractor Supply that worked fine but it did fail after a few 10-hour sessions. We had to buy another one because the gasket would tend to fail. I think eventually they refunded his money for that bad paint gun gasket. We painted and painted and I got to tell you sooner than later it started looking great. He was just so pleased with the shine the clear coat provided and in the end, it was worth all the hassle. In between all the working India and I would go hiking every other day and we had a really good time finding trails in and around Hillsboro. We even took Azura, Ben’s dog with us a few times.

One of our regular hikes was at an old race track

At about week two I went down to Wilmington to do the rough-in wiring for our daughter Savannah's house that we had just bought for her back in December. It took until June to close because there were 11 heirs involved. It was quite an ordeal to close on the property. The contractor's name is Dominic and I had been working with him for 10 plus years. He made living flipping houses and I would re-wire them for him.

He had completed all the demo and the framing and it was ready to be wired. I guess I could have paid somebody to wire it but that felt weird as I'm the electrician in the family and I needed to know it was done right. I laid out a wiring plan for the house and purchased all the needed parts. Early on I focused on creating a new 200 amp service so I could use it as a T- pole and work safely inside with all the existing wires off. I spent some time on the water pump as I wanted to find out if the well worked or not. I couldn’t rent a pump for testing so I took a gamble and bought a new water pump and just hoped everything would work out. If the well was dry it was a 400 gamble possibly wasted. Initially, I could never get the pump to pump well water in a stand-alone way. I had a garden hose assisting the priming of the well. I kept on having small leaks on the suction side but sooner or later I figured it out. I finally got it tightened properly and it began to pump water on its own. Savannah and I were quite happy about this and

here’s a video.

I was getting about 5 gallons a minute which is all one could ask for. If this all worked we can use them well to irrigate and avoid expensive water bills. I spent a little too long on the well and had to get busy with the electrical system. I worked on all the wiring and got it ready for the rough-in inspection.

I mapped out and figured out how I wanted to do some underground sprinkler lines and so forth and rented a ditch witch to take care of all that ditching. Also, I did a large ditch for a 100-amp wire that would power the shed. Of course, that's way more power than you need out there but I thought maybe it would be a good RV connection someday if I came by. You also need a little extra conductor to handle the voltage drop as it's about 100 ft away.

I finished the ditch but it wasn't that clean so I had a guy named Eugene the plumber to open the ditch up for me by hand to get it 18” deep and ready for inspection. After a week or so of all this I was kind of worn out and done so I headed back to Hillsboro to where India and Ben were.

About a mile from the farm was this cow. It felt like I was in Texas

I had asked Ben to kind of hang out with India a little bit as she might get a little lonely and might want some company. He did and it was quite touching to see him as Mom bonding once again. In the evenings they started binge-watching The Flash, and they genuinely enjoyed themselves.

Whenever I was and Wilmington the worst possible thing happened, I thought the new transmission was failing as the speedometer started going haywire. It will be going from 0 to 100 to 50 erratically and because this speedometer obeys the transmission, I thought there was a problem. There was also a certain amount of jumping around with the transmission because it was getting such a false reading from the speedometer it didn't know what gear to be in. I thought it was going to be a warranty problem with the brand-new transmission so I called them. They said it sounded like an electrical and/or instrumentation problem. I got so concerned that I took it to the Dodge dealership and they kept it all day. The bill was like $800 and he said was we solved a lot of problems but I don't believe we quite got it but Gee I don't know and that felt like the worst $800 I've ever spent.

I had started having this gnawing feeling in the back of my neck because my sister Cheryl has been saying for a year, Why don't you just buy a new truck? I would just say something like, you know that's for rich folks and who would spend $70,000 on the new truck. Oh my God, can you believe how much they want for those things? There’s just no way I'll ever do that. When all this started happening, I just felt like I'd about had it. I talked to India and we began to make the decision it might be time to give up. I always thought if I put enough new parts on the truck it would be new, but I guess that’s just going to take a lot longer and still might not hold true. I told my Sister Cheryl I was ready to consider it and as soon as we got to Sedona I would pull the trigger. She said if you go west in that falling-apart truck I may have to kill you with a wet noodle.

The truth is we did give up. We start shopping for trucks online and I would say more but there's a whole other blog for going to Texas and buying the truck. I'll let that blog speak for itself and after we got the truck, we were kind of behind schedule we hit the road west. We went by to see my little sister Cheryl and show off the truck then we were to start our trip west towards Sedona.