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Post by heavyhitterokra on Dec 4, 2021 13:41:44 GMT -6
$7.50 per hundred is about $150.00 per ton, not too shabby. I can remember not too many years ago when scrap steel was something that a person had to pay extra for in order to leave it at the dump. They used to charge me $5.00 per appliance every time I went to the dump. Back when we first bought our house in a foreclosure in 2004, the previous occupants called all their friends and family and they dumped every old hot water tank, washing machine, old cookstove, dryer, old car door, anything they could dream of that was scrap iron in our yard. Broken glass was nearly ankle-deep in places. They piled old appliances against the house, like Indians piling firewood against a settler's cabin to burn it down in the movies.
I made countless trips during that time to the dump and paid hundreds of dollars to get rid of all those old appliances, old car doors, old hoods, engine blocks, you name it. Nowadays, they'd be doing me a favor by delivering old scrap iron to my door that way ... How times have changed.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Dec 6, 2021 8:37:52 GMT -6
The person living here previously had passed away. The house was foreclosed on and squatters had moved in while it was on the market for 5-years with no water or electricity. You can only imagine what it must have looked like when we bought it. They had several years to accumulate the amount of trash that we hauled off. (Good thing we were young). I'm not sure I'd have the energy or the strength to do all that over again?
Good news is that it was a brick house and the value of the home went up about 4 fold after we cleaned it up and remodeled it. I used to work construction, so I was used to huge messes to clean up. We jumped in there and hauled everything off, gutted it, re-wired it, re-plumbed it, re-floored it, re-insulated it, re-sheetrocked it, re-trimmed it, replaced all but one door, replaced the broken windows, replaced all the kitchen cabinets, re-painted it, replaced the appliances, put in a wood stove, then eventually got central heat and air. It took a little over a decade to get it finished.
After the house was livable again, we set in to clean up the 5 acres around it. There were trash dumps in several locations on the property. Piles of old tires and broken glass everywhere! I got a grant from a Clean-Up America, type organization to help pay the rural dump fees, so we basically just supplied the free labor.
The bad news is that now, our property taxes have also gone up about 4 fold. It's a happy place to be now though, and no amount of money could replace that feeling. Plus, it's a good feeling knowing that you left something better than it was when you found it.
We have a great community here now. We just had a wonderful Christmas Dinner at our little community Churchhouse yesterday afternoon. I think there were about 14 of us, mostly neighbors, and a few good friends from Stilwell. Things like that are beyond value. God, has blessed us here with peace and joy to last a lifetime.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 27, 2021 12:43:37 GMT -6
I'm done. I just ordered several 110 conibears. I'll never get them all but at least they won't be around long.
There's so many squirrels they're fighting over territory, screaming in the night in the far part of the yard or tearing up the house.
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Post by macmex on Dec 27, 2021 15:15:59 GMT -6
I used to use them on muskrat.
When we last lived in NJ we had so many squirrels that we started having squirrel for supper once a week.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Dec 27, 2021 20:11:51 GMT -6
I use Atwood's peanuts in the shell for squirrel bait. They love those and they are only about $1.49 per pound. squirrel dumplings are hard to beat.
I do have a friend though, who is a chef, who supplied me the following recipe:
Ron,
Here is one I cooked up.
This is a slow cooker process, sotherwise old tough squirrels don't fry well.
Stick them in a crock pot, or slow, saltwater boil.
When the meat falls off the bone-debone it.
Mix Cream cheese, green chilies, some cumin, garlic, onions and onion powder. Saute the onions first, then add Monterrey jack cheese.
Dip some corn tortillas in hot oil (or you can roll them).
Spoon the meat, cheese, mixture into tortillas and roll them into enchiladas.
Mix a little fat and flour to make rue. Now I cook my cream cheese for the sauce and add it into the rue. it's work but it will be a nice sauce with no lumps when your done.
So, back to it:
Make sauce-green chili, chip stock, with the same seasonings as above. When the cream cheese rue has tightened the sauce sufficiently, pour it over the enchiladas and bake until bubbling around the edges. top with Monterrey jack cheese and melt a bit.
So it is, I call this concoction: "Monterrey Jack Green Chili Squirrel Enchiladas."
That should work nicely to help tidy up your surplus squirrel problem.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 28, 2021 4:27:37 GMT -6
I'm too spoiled to eat them, but could use extra dog food.
Dog food, not fleas.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Dec 28, 2021 5:39:17 GMT -6
Squirrel is surprisingly good fare, if boiled in salted water long enough to make it tender (About two hours). Well worth the effort. We use it to make soup mostly. It turns out much like chicken noodle soup. We call it "Squoodles" Squirrel and noodles.
Since squirrel has very little fat, it also makes very good tortillia soup, in lieu of chicken in that recipe. Sounds like the weather we have moving in this weekend will be excellent homemade soup weather too! That kind of weather always makes me want to cook something good, and homemade, to warm up my innerds.
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Post by macmex on Dec 28, 2021 7:45:07 GMT -6
Ron, your chef friend has a great point. A crock pot is wonderful for tenderizing and for getting all the meat off the bones. Some years ago we had a brother-in-law, nephew and niece from an urban area, visit us. The nephew, particularly, wanted to learn to hunt and shoot. I was amazed to find that there are some naturals out there. When we gave him some basic instruction he picked up a gun and was shooting like a pro within an hour. I helped him get the squirrel which had been robbing our chicken feed and we fixed it in the crock pot. The nephew was THRILLED with it. The rest of his family... not so much. Yet I have to say that squirrel stew as exceptional.
I hardly ever shoot squirrels now as one member of our family has a red meat allergy and I'm generally, already up to my limit with butchering jobs. So, why shoot something when there's already a waiting line of jobs to do? Then, only two out of three of us could eat it. Still, it's a good meat and a great skill for anyone to master on the road to food resilience. Most of my Cherokee friends have very fond memories of squirrel and dumplings. Apparently that was a mainstay for the old timers.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Dec 29, 2021 14:48:26 GMT -6
I have very fond memories revolving around squirrel dumplings. My grandma used to cook up anything we brought to her for Sunday night supper at her house. I guarantee no squirrels were anywhere near her house in winter. We had to walk about a mile away to find one dumb enough to show itself in daylight. Squirrels were prized in those days.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 18, 2022 19:15:30 GMT -6
Haven't set the traps out yet. I keep imagining broken fingers.
Was battling fleas while we replaced some of the sub flooring. What a mess. The last of the particle board and vinyl tiles went out in the trash this morning.
A couple weeks prior to the renov, I switched from a cheap laundry detergent into a DIY laundry soap.
Still, I think we won that battle. The OTC flea drops didn't work at all. Couldn't bath him while waiting for it to work, so it got really bad. I had to use some carbaryl. After vaccuming like a maniac, I bought some insecticidal cattle tags, snipped a piece off and wired it to his collar. That did it. The tags are not as toxic. The whole time we're vaccuming up to 4 times a day.
Right about this time is when the new laundry soap gummed up the sewer line.
I cannot treat the yard for fleas, but the tag should help tremendously. We'll try to keep the brush under the trees mowed this year and I'll get rid of most of the tree rats. I'm actually considering cutting down the pecan tree because of them.
We still need to clean and sand the baseboards we pulled out and repaint them. We still need to surface the floors, but it needs to wait. I'll be removing wall paper all this year and refinishing the sheetrock.
That DIY laundry soap was cleaning better than the cheap detergent and even was more expensive. I decided that clean clothes were a nice thing to have, so I bit the bullet and bought expensive laundry detergent (Persil) and it is fabulous. Recommended amounts are not always needed but I use ample on lil misses laundry so she can snuggle into a nice smell.
Hopefully, we'll get a new roof this year. You ever had a leaky roof where you put buckets on the floor? Yeah, that bad. Then, we can think of the finer things, like flooring, bringing the stove to code in the meanwhile. Since we put in the new subfloors and bought new efficient oil filled heaters, we haven't needed the stove but it hasn't been cold for long anyway.
Slammed together a compost bin today with pallets and daisy chained zip ties. Filled it while keeping the weight centered. What a relief. Just isn't right without a compost bin. This one is 4 sided, help keep the dog out of it.
We cleaned up the front yard, the porch and removed trellises and debris, fallen dead wood, tree trash, trash from the street, tree pecans and made it ready to be mowed and trimmed. I really hate picking up sticks in spring readying it to be mowed when I really need to be growing and planting.
Next: wood shed, a rack with a roof. It's like the compost, organic material builds up but when there's no place to go, it gets crazy.
The brush pile is over 5 ft. I can't burn or cook out. It's too dry. We had to use a tremendous amount of water just to activate the compost today.
Culled a rabbit so I could shuffle the 🐇🐰. Like musical chairs, but with cages and rabbits.
I made a massive grocery run recently. Tin cans in case blocks and bags of flour and corn flour wait to be processed and homed. The freezers are stuffed and await canning sessions.
The rbbitry is unkempt and waiting to be renovated. That bad boy is like the missing compost and wood shed combined. So hard to get their poo out.
I'll be glad when a new routine settles in. The human pathways are well established now, but efficiency hasn't come about just yet.
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Post by macmex on Jan 18, 2022 20:04:36 GMT -6
Sounds really busy, Bon! My wife just asked me to plant the front yard in Old Timey Cornfield Pumpkins this year. We'll see if this notion persists or if I wake up and find it was just a dream
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Post by chrysanthemum on Jan 18, 2022 21:12:10 GMT -6
Bon, I was tired before I read your message. I think I’m more tired now. Whew! It is good to get things done, but the doing sure can be hard. macmex , I dream (in the daydream sense) of planting my front yard in pumpkins or watermelon. It’s a funny little patch of land where some grass grows occasionally (we mow a couple times a year because we don’t water the area to keep the grass growing). I’d love to turn it into an area for sprawlers. The problem, of course, is deer. We’d have to put up fencing, and it would have to be tall. I’d also have to water, and I’m really about at my limit with my two existing gardens. That’s why it’s just a dream. I don’t know Jerreth, of course, but I think it sounds perfectly reasonable to ask such a thing.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 19, 2022 3:40:54 GMT -6
I agree with jerreth and chrys. Go big this year. Cannot have too much pumpkin!
You know, we didn't buy enough plywood to redo the dining room. When the boys were all done, bill and I just looked at the intersecting floors in silence wondering why we didn't complete it. I really had to think about this. It all started with water damage from the washer. Years of it. So, we decided to get at it.
The dining room is also particle board but it doesn't get heavy traffic, so it's not breaking apart. The 2 layers of old vinyl tile look dreadful, but the floor is solid.
But a little later, I came to the conclusion why we didn't Reno all of it. We're simply not familiar with having the means. We were focused on Reno the worst of it and stopping so we can pay the utilities, never realizing we have enough to do it all now. So bizarre. We'll be picking up more plywood after payday to finish the job.
Just a recap:. We were financially oppressed by the gov by avg 8k annually for nearly twenty years. On avg they were cutting us off at the knees by taking 35 to 50 percent of our cash flow. Nobody could stop them. In 2019 we were relieved of our house payment and that was nice, but in 2020, they took the usual and our stimulus too, making out with about 14k from us in that year alone.
That's when I had the Convo with God and asked him to do something.
Suddenly, in 2021, they abruptly stopped without any notification. We started seeing the money bill worked so hard for. We also gained the helicopter money (tax credits) and enjoying being debt free.
All glory to the Most High.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jan 19, 2022 21:21:31 GMT -6
Bon,
Great story!
We've had some projects like that around here too. Our old farmhouse had particle board floors under the carpet and under the tile. (That stuff really, really, really, ought to be outlawed!)
My wife's dog decided to army crawl behind the toilet one day while we were both away at work and it broke the water supply line loose from the toilet tank. When we got home, the whole house was flooded. About two weeks later, our entire floor looked like a roller coaster. Our bathtub and hot water tank fell through the particleboard floor and had to be supported from underneath by concrete blocks. We had to rip out all the carpet, and all the tile, then chisel out all of the old particle board to replace the floor joists in the bathroom. Once all the old nails were pulled, we recovered everything with real plywood ... We didn't have insurance, because it was just a rickety old farm house, so no one would insure it. After buying the plywood, we didn't have enough money to buy replacement carpet, so we hand-painted the whole floor. I found a sandy color of paint at a secondhand store that was labeled, "Buffalo Run" so in the boy's room, I painted the floor that sandy color, then hand painted sage brush and buffalos running across their bedroom floor. (They loved it!) Years later when we moved away, the boys went back to that old house and took their bedroom floor out to have the paintings on the plywood framed. They divided them up to hang in the kid's rooms of the houses where they live now.
We did something similar in our summer kitchen after we moved here. We didn't have money to buy flooring, so we hand-painted bricks on the concrete slab, using brick-sized sponges dipped in brick-colored paint. First, we painted the base color to look like mortar, then, we hand-painted the used brick pattern over that. When it dried, I sealed it with several coats of floor wax. It turned out well enough to fool most people into thinking it was linoleum and has lasted about 15 years so far.
Finally, after more than a decade at the old farmhouse, we got a chance to move away from that place, to buy this one. When we first bought this house, it was about 50-years old. It was in such ill repair at the time that the bank wouldn't finance it unless we agreed to renovate it before we moved in. Which is a crazy thought, because the bank owned it at the time.
The doors had been kicked in and the neighborhood dogs had been living inside, sleeping on the furniture. The windows had been broken out, and there were birds living inside. There was brush grown up all around the house where the yard used to be. (The bank tacked an extra $10,000 onto the loan for the rebuild) but they gave us only 30 days to complete the project before the final inspection. We had to replace the doors and windows, haul off the old furniture, tear out the old flooring, spray for termites, ants, and fleas, re-tile the house, cut down the trees, mow the grass, tear out the sheetrock, rewire the house, re-plumb it, re-sheetrock it, re-paint it, re-roof it, tear out two walls of the garage and rebuild them because of termite damage, and build new kitchen cabinets in that short amount of time. There wasn't enough money to hire contractors, so we worked tirelessly, 18 hours per day, 7 days per week until we were exhausted. (Looking back now, I can't imagine having had that much energy once).
The day of the inspection, the bankers drove up, saw a light fixture on the outside corner of the freshly painted house that still had Romex hanging down, got back in their car, and drove away. They told us over the phone that we had not passed the inspection, even though they had not actually inspected it. (We were furious!) They didn't know we had pulled an all nighter. We were still inside that morning, working on it at 8:00 am, so they didn't know that we saw them drive away without coming inside.
Finally, they returned later in the day and we passed their inspection, but we were so exhausted that a lot of the things we did were too rushed. So nearly 20 years later, we are stuck with things like no shut-offs under the bathroom sink because we didn't have time that day to run to the hardware store for more parts.
I totally understand what it's like to just hit the high spots, trying to get by on a scrap of next to nothing to work with. Best of luck on your flooring project. I know you guys will see it through with great workmanship.
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Post by macmex on Jan 20, 2022 4:57:43 GMT -6
When we lived in NJ we had to deal with "inspectors." If I wanted to take down a tree, we had to have an ecological inspection and assessment done by a county inspector. It cost $20 and one had to fill out an application, of course. After three months, they'd show up and, usually, sign off on the job. I got around that by applying to take down ALL OF THE TREES behind our house. They officials were astonished at this, but I explained that I wanted to be able to choose and that we were going to put in a paddock. There was some political drama going on at the time and apparently they were distracted and signed the application. So we were free for the rest of our time in NJ. House inspections were awful too. No matter what, they would find a reason to fail the inspection, incurring another fee and wait while the home owner fixed the problem. One time they failed my house inspection because they found an electrical wire, hanging out of the basement ceiling with the conductor exposed. They failed us for it even though it was plain as day that the other end of the wire was right there, and not connected to anything. So, we could have simply pulled that wire down and been okay. By then, however, I had learned, "never argue with the inspector. He'll just find another reason to fail you." I simply nodded and let him go. Then I put a wire nut on either end of the wire and re-applied for the new inspection. After a week or two the same inspector came back, went straight to that loose wire, saw that both ends had a wire nut on them, and passed us! I didn't dare remove the wire. I figured that inspectors were kind of like chickens. They do what they do mainly by habit (chickens, by instinct). Very little intelligence was involved.
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