Distillery part 6: Utilities and progress!

A lot has been accomplished the last few weeks. 

This is the transformer where the huge wire comes from the pole, then the secondary wire runs up to the building. They did this part first.

Then they connected it to the pole.

 Hooray, no more generator!

Next, it is the spray foam insulation guys!

It was cool to watch, it goes on wet and immediately puffs up, it dries right away. Then they scrape it down so that it is flush with the 2x4's. He was using a round metal curry comb! ( a comb to groom horses, usually).

 A glove we found on the floor the next day. This stuff sticks to everything except plastic! They wanted to do the walls before we put up the ceilings because we were putting a wooden ceiling in the tasting room. So they are going to come back and do the attic floor at a later date.

We decided to hire someone to hang and finish the drywall. It was the best decision we have made so far! We really suck at it. Well worth every penny. Jeff and his crew did a fabulous job, and they are fast! The drywall was hung in 2 days by 3 guys. The taping, mud, and sanding was done by 2 people in 4 days. It was done in less than a week. I don't know why his phone number is not on the van, but he is out of Cortland and you can google "the rock company" to get his contact info.

These guys had the distillery side almost complete on the first day. We were really impressed with the way they could measure and cut the hole for an outlet, and then put the drywall panel up and the hole was in the right spot (in a matter of minutes). Vince and I had done some drywall work in our old house in Killawog and in this house, and we would always screw this up somehow!

The ceiling is done!

 The tasting room.

Taping the seams.

They were walking around on these stilts!

While the drywallers were working, Vince was busy putting the finishing touches on the boiler for the radiant heat system. The propane tanks were delivered and the floor was warm that evening! I call that crazy looking pipe and hose thing "the pantookler", it looks like something from Dr. Suess! It does hum a little!

We had to get a working phone number so that we could put it on our TTB permit application. We didn't really want that expense right now, but what could we do? So, here is Frontier, putting the phone cable in. They have this cool little machine that digs a trench and puts the cable down in the ground at the same time.

They dragged the cable up to the building...

and worked their way down to the road...they left the cable on top of the ground where the creek is, they said they'll come back in the spring and bury it under the creek then.

The ground was really soft that day, they got it stuck a few times and had to pull it out with the truck.

"Hello, you have reached Dragonfyre Distillery! Call back in a year and maybe we'll have some moonshine to sell you!"

We now have electricity, heat and a phone! Yea! 

We now have an electric bill, a propane bill, and a phone bill! Blech!

thought for the day

so here is this great picture that needs a caption (or not, but I gave it one anyway), and that is the thought for the day, or your week, or your life! 

This my brother, Dave.

He is a great adventurer! He has been all over the world - Europe, Japan, South America, and all over the USA. I think he, and my other brother, Jeff, got all the adventure genes!

He took a kayaking trip to Bhutan in November of 2015  (If you want to see more, he has some videos of this trip on you-tube, MoabDaveRules). This picture was taken by Phil DeRiemer of Adventure Kayaking (if you are interested in taking a trip, go to www.adventurekayaking.com)


Dave is the person that took me on the two big travel adventures of my life. When I was home from college one Christmas, he stopped at the house to pick up some stuff for a trip he was taking to New Hampshire to spend a week with some friends at 'The Grant', a piece of wilderness belonging to Dartmouth College. They were going to stay at a cabin and do some cross country skiing.
He looked at me and said "do you want to go?" I still don't know what compelled me to say yes! I'm not crazy bout being cold or camping in any form. But I was 18 and I guess it sounded like fun at the time.
We grabbed some warm clothes and hopped in the car.

I had no skiing equipment, in fact, I had never cross country skied before. Dave said we could borrow some stuff from the college- skis, poles, boots and a backpack.
It was dark when we got there, and we had to ski a mile to get to the cabin. Remember, I have never done this before, and now I have a backpack on also. (never backpacked either!) I go about 4 feet and fall over sideways! They pick me up and I try again. I couldn't even make it out of the parking lot! So one of the guys skis in with his stuff, comes back out and gets my stuff and takes it for me. I don't remember how long it took to get to the cabin, but I got there!

The cabin was divided into 2 sections, the common area with a table, and (I think) a 'kitchen', and the sleeping quarters which consisted of bunks and a woodstove. There was an outhouse, but I have thankfully blocked that scenario out of my memory. It was COLD there, I think I shivered all night long!

The next day we skied to another cabin that was 100 miles away. Ok, it was only 5 or 8 or something like that. I did ok getting there, but I started getting blisters on my heals on the trip back. It was torture! Dave would ski ahead and come back to urge me on... he kept force feeding me cheese and gorp, his mantra was "EAT OR YOU'LL DIE"! And he kept saying "Not much farther, it's just around the next bend". NOT.
Well, I made it back to that cabin, but I wasn't in any shape to do any more skiing! I don't know what I did the rest of the week, but I remember being pretty ripe by the time we got back to civilization. My hair was really long then, almost to my knees, and I remember washing it 3 or 4 times before it felt clean again!

The next adventure was a motorcycle trip to Colorado. I had just graduated from college and didn't have any immediate plans, so Dave asked me to go west, young woman! Why not? Dave had bought a motorcycle from my other brother, Jeff. He went and got a motorcycle license just for this trip. We shipped a bunch of clothes via UPS to the house he was renting with some other people in Denver. And off we went.

The bike had only 1 muffler, it was very loud, and the chain had to be tightened every so often. We would ride about 8 hours a day, we stayed with college buddies of his on the way out. At the end of the 2nd day, we were at Bish Mumford's place in Indiana (I think) Dave said he lived on a pig farm. I pictured a farm like the one Wilbur lived on in Charlotte's Web. It was actually a commercial pig farm and it was huge. It was a beautiful place, big enough for Bish's mother to host horse jumping events. They were getting ready to host a wedding that upcoming weekend (we were there on a Wednesday), I would have loved to have stayed for it, the ceremony was going to be out in a field, with hay bales for seats. This was back in 1980 and I had never heard of anything like that!  Bish had a Rottweiler dog that was a real character, and he had his own place there with a pool and hot tub. We were there for 2 days, it broke the trip up nicely.

 The weather was good for the most part, but when we got to Kansas you could see the rain storm in the distance that you knew you were going to end up driving through. It was like those cartoon rain clouds!

I stayed in Denver for awhile (I really don't remember how long I was there, maybe a month?) had a sub-adventure of white water rafting, (I think it was a job that Dave was checking out, a rafting guide, which he did end up doing at a later date) which included camping in a tent and watching Dave get catapulted out of the raft when his paddle got stuck in between some rocks in the river, and he just waved and said "I'll catch up!" as the rest of us went merrily down the river, (while I was screaming "that's my brother!!!" and thinking I'd never see him again). He caught up and all ended well there.
He and his house mates did not have a lot of money, or stuff. They had a party one night and there were so few dishes and silverware that when one person got done eating, they would wash their dish and then pass it on to another person! It was quite an experience. He made guacamole for that party and actually got me to taste it! I'm glad I did, because I really like it. I'm surprised I tried it, because I am a really picky eater and guacamole is not the most appetizing looking food!
 
   I took a Greyhound bus back home which was WAY worse than the bike ride out!

I think those 2 trips got it all out of my system, because to this day, I am content to just hang out at home, no desire to go anywhere!

so, anyway, that's Dave. the most awesome brother there is.

distillery doors

I can't remember why we started looking at doors so early in this whole project. That and the sink for the bathroom. The sink was the first thing we bought! More on that another time though.
So. The doors.
We found this awesome door on line called a speakeasy door. It was a heavy wooden door with a small window that had a metal grate over it. The ones we found on line were anywhere from $2,000 to $4,000. We went to Lowes and they did one of those estimates on their little computer design program, and when we got to the end of that process, the door was $4,900! We did look at some other entry door styles, but by now we've got our hearts set on this door.
Ok, we need to get creative, cause we are NOT spending that much money on a door. Besides, we need 2 doors!
Could I faux paint a plain door? Probably, but still not happy with that idea. Then I looked at our refrigerator, which we had covered with thin wainscott wood strips.

Maybe that would work, but would it hold up to outdoor conditions? We decided to do a 'practice' door on the back of our garage. There is a plain steel out-swing door that was just painted. So we bought some pine wainscott and I stained it with exterior stain and applied 3 coats of spar varnish. I think we did that in September, and it still looks great.

it looks pretty cool! even with that ugly door handle.

 We figured we give it a try for the distillery doors.....

We had to buy fire rated exterior doors that open out. These are steel insulated doors with the wire mesh in the glass window. Not very attractive...

We decided to go with the cedar wainscott instead of pine, we thought it might hold up better to the elements.

We laid out the panels and pre-cut everything to fit each door. I numbered and labeled the back of each piece so I would know which door the pieces went to.

The tongues did not fit into the grooves on a lot of the pieces, so Vince just cut the back edge of the groove off so they would butt up against each other. The front part of the groove still overlapped the tongue.

I put 1 coat of exterior stain on the back and 2 coats on the front, then 3 coats of exterior spar varnish. I also put 2 coats of dark brown exterior paint on the doors to help protect them just in case any water may get behind the wood, and if any of the door was not covered by the wood, it wouldn't be as noticeable.

We glued the strips of wood onto the doors with Gorilla brand glue, then put some heavy weights on there to hold it down while the glue set up.

We bought some fancy trim and cut that to fit around the window.

Stained, antiqued and varnished. Then we glued them to the doors.

Now to start the details! We bought these furniture tacks and Vince drilled tiny holes so the wood wouldn't split while putting them in. We added a dab of glue on the back of each tack for extra measure.

Drilling out the holes for the knob and deadbolt.

We got this garage door kit at Home Depot for $35.00. We had found some faux hinges on line but they were about $35 each! So we decided to go with these since the one kit would do both doors.

 

I rubbed a little metallic copper paint on them to add a little character.

Vince had to chisel the wood out from where the door handle goes, the door was too thick for the latch shaft. We did not have that problem with our 'test' door on the garage. The deadbolt was fine.

The finished door, installed on the tasting room entrance. We are looking for a cool dragon doorknocker to put on it.

This the one on the distillery entrance, Vince put one of the door pulls on for a doorknocker.

We are really happy with the way they came out, they ended up costing about $650 each by the time we got done, not including the latches (they were $130 each). I think they will make a great first impression when people come up!

Distillery part 5: what we got for Christmas!

Christmas eve day, 2015
It is 60 degrees out at 9 am!
Daryl comes to dig the trench for our electric supply to go from the pole to the building.
Alan Young, our well driller comes to work on the well.
My brother Dave, who is home for Christmas, comes up to help Vince and Daryl's son Derek put the conduit over the electric cable.

It is so warm out that the guys end up working in their t-shirts!

This is the wire being delivered a few weeks ago. NYSEG told us what kind we had to buy, the sample we got from the field engineer, Paul Blakelock, was a foot long and weighed a pound! Vince looked up on line how much it would cost- $13.00 per foot. And we needed about 300 feet. Holy Crap! So he looked around some more and found a place in NJ that had it for $2.85 per foot. WTF? I think we should go into the electric wire resale business! So Vince ordered 400 feet just to make sure we had enough, because the wire has to go up the pole 40 feet, and we weren't exactly sure where we were putting the underground vault for the transformer yet.

Here's a little plug for Daryl. If anyone in the area ever needs excavation work done, he is the guy to call. We call him the "bulldozer whisperer". The first thing he ever did for us was dig our pond, and we wanted an island in the middle of it. He said he'd never done that before, but what the heck, he was game for anything! That was 15 years ago and since then he did the excavation work for our house, garage, Mom's trailer pad, he dug our 2nd pond, and did Vince's parents place when they built their house. He is excellent at reading the land and figuring out drainage so we wouldn't have any water issues. He will work around trees if you want to save them if it is at all possible. And on top of all that, he is a nice guy!

By the time I got out there, the trench was dug up to the creek and the guys had that much wire in the conduit.

Vince and Derek, Vince gluing sections together. They were gluing 10 pieces of conduit together, then sliding it on to the cable. The conduit comes in 10' lengths. So they were sliding 100 feet of conduit at a time. It got stuck on some small rocks a few times. Not fun. Vince said it was like wrestling a 400 foot anaconda!

The trench started filling up with water once Daryl got near the pond and creek. It had been raining for a few days before this, so the ground was really saturated and the creek was running pretty good.

Daryl's getting ready to dig the trench across the creek. They thought if they could divert the water it might keep more of the creek bed from washing out while he dug in there.

We save everything, so this recycled tin is from a shed that was on the property when we bought it in 1998. Vince had it out in the "you never know when you might need it" pile.  It came in really handy today!

It worked! They put the cable down in there and Derek is putting some dirt on there to keep the pipe from floating up. He actually got down in the water and stood on the pipe to hold it down!

It made a great waterfall! Eventually we will put some stones in there and make a real one so it doesn't wash away the dirt covering the wire.

They got the hole for the vault in and finished the trench up to the building. The wire from the vault up to the building is a smaller size than the giant wire coming from the pole.

Before the trench can be filled in all the way, we had to put caution tape in there. It is supposed to be a red caution tape that is specific for underground electric cable. Daryl forgot to bring his, so they sent me down to Greene's to buy some. They only had regular yellow caution tape, so I stopped at Greg's Variety and they had red tape that said 'Danger'. Since it was after noon on Christmas eve, I didn't have a lot of time to run around and look for the correct one, so they just used both of those together and we hope it will be approved! (it was)
Vince was resting and sweaty and I was cold. All I was doing was watching and taking pictures!

Now he's filling in the rest of the trench. As he pushed the dirt back in, the water just gushed up out of there and ran down the side of the road. It's a good thing they had put in a drainage pipe under the end of the road- the water hit that pipe and went under the road and out the other side!

While Daryl was filling in the trench, Dave and Vince started putting in the grounding rod for the electric service to come into the building. There were three 4' pieces of copper rod that had to be driven into the ground (mostly rocks and gravel surrounded by a little dirt!) Vince finished getting the meter box wired today (the 26th), we are almost ready for the rough wire inspection!

These pictures are from before Thanksgiving when Alan first got there to drill the well. He had a major delay when his engine quit working one day, he thought it was the fuel pump, but when they put a new one in, it didn't fix it. It turns out that it needed a new timing chain and gears.... Since he had already started drilling, he couldn't take the rig to the shop to get the engine fixed, so he had to pull the engine out and take it to get it fixed. Thankfully the weather was so mild, it would have been even worse if had been below freezing! He had it back in the rig last week and hit water at 135' on the 24th. 10 gallons a minute! yay!

So it was a Merry Christmas for us! Water and an electric line! Ho,ho,ho, kersploosh!

P.S. We have since been approved for our rough wire inspection and electric service hookup, now we can insulate and sheetrock....and get the water hooked up..... and get the heating system going.........to be continued!