When I first moved to Dancing Rabbit I lived in a different tiny house, an even tinier house. Wisteria Lodge is only 240 sq ft, but it’s a nice little two story space and its passive solar design makes it easier to heat. Keeping with its name it does feature a wisteria vine growing on a trellis halfway up the south side. Check out this video to find out more interesting tidbits about the house and to hear the story of how it ended up at Dancing Rabbit.
It’s a good thing I have plans to get out of the cold if being swooped down on by the polar vortex is going to become a regular thing thanks to climate change. I’m getting the mudroom finished up and preparing to leave Dancing Rabbit for the winter, so maybe I don’t have to worry about how my house performs. But even so, it’s nice to know it does pretty well on a sunny day when it’s 5 degrees F. The problem is that we don’t get very many sunny days in winter, so I think I’m better living somewhere during wintertime where I don’t have to heat my house.
The next stage of winemaking for my homegrown grapes is racking, when you decant the wine must off the lees. The wine is getting clearing with each racking and this will get most of the leftover yeast out of the wine. I share a little trick for cleaning out your tubing that I’ve found useful.
I make a lot more progress on the mudroom in this video. It’s amazing how much of a difference giving form to walls can have on the impact of a structure. This video goes into more detail on how I turn reclaimed pallet wood into decorative siding.
At Dancing Rabbit we try to build our houses out of reclaimed and natural materials as much as we possibly can, so I’m siding my new mudroom with reclaimed pallet wood. We’re fortunate enough to have a guy nearby who reclaims good boards from deconstructed shipping pallets. I was able to get some of the better boards for doing the exterior siding on my new addition.
This is the next in the series on making feta cheese on a homestead scale from fresh raw cow’s milk. In this video we add the rennet and set and cut the curd. This is the fun chemistry part of the process where the milk transforms into something else. I also talk a little about raw milk products and why they are so hard to come by in our economy.
