It was in 1999 that I relocated from a rural area of Northeastern Pennsylvania to Northeast Florida. I had been planning a move to Florida since my grandparents took me on vacation to Disneyworld when I was 12 yrs old.
I couldn't wait to get away from the simple life, the farms, the endless boredom of living in the middle of nowhere, not to mention the miserable weather. Finally after years of waiting the opportunity arose for me to move. I had put in a transfer request with the airline that I work for and there was an opening in Jacksonville, Fl.
Finally! I was 26 and I was out of there, so long hicks so long cornfields, so long snow! . I arrived at my new home and life was good, i had the beach just s few minutes away tons of things for single guy to do. I was out at the clubs night after night, dragging my poor hungover ass to work everyday and I was having a blast!
I kept that up for a few years and eventually met a woman, fell in love (so I thought at the time). After about a year and a half we split up, two weeks later I get a phone call at work, shes pregnant. I moved back in and tried to make it work but it wasn't meant to be so we went our separate ways. I did however take responsibility for my child and I'm now the proud daddy to a beautiful 6 yr old daughter, more on that later.
Fast forward to 3 yrs ago, I had been living in a townhouse in a no so great area of town but still within a mile of the beach. The place next door to me had been vacant for awhile but eventually someone moved in, I knew someone was living there , I would see a car in the driveway but months went by and I never saw my new neighbor. As luck would have it, one day I came home from work and decided to take a nap on the couch. I woke up to about 2" of water covering the entire bottom floor of my house but I couldn't find a leak anywhere. My next thought was maybe it's coming from my neighbors place so I rushed around the back to the neighbors patio door and proceeded to scare the hell out of a girl living there. Apparently just as i went to knock on the door she spotted me at the door with one arm in the air looking like I was about to smash the glass.
After a near heart attack by this girl I manage to tell her I'm the neighbor and I have a flood in my livingroom and want to know if it was only in my place. A moment later another woman comes to the door, a beautiful blonde in pink PJ's.
She laughs and says "you about gave my daughter a heart attack" I apologized and explained the situation and found out the leak was coming from somewhere in my place. I called my landlord who had maintenance come over and check things out, turns out a water pipe had broken in the downstairs bathroom just underneath the tile.
Fast forward a bit more. I eventually got to know my new neighbor and I would go over and we would sit out on the patio and talk for hours and hours. One thing lead to another and we eventually started dating, got along really well and we have been together ever since. Needless to say the pretty blonde in the pic is Gena and I'm the ugly guy in the other pic. In my defense I had been helping do paint and bodywork on the bike in the background and the pic was after the 3rd 15 hr day in a row
Beginning Homesteaders
Beginning Homesteaders part 2
Moving right along. After about a year of dating, my neighbor she decide she really needed to go back to school and become a nurse like she has always wanted too. To make things easier on all of us financially she and her daughter moved in with me. She concentrated on her nursing school and graduated a little over a year later.
We had been talking about getting a house for quite awhile but neither of us had good credit and didnt think there was any chance we could get a mortgage, we couldn't even get a credit card approval let alone a mortgage. I started working on fixing her credit report, mine is hopeless especially with a bankruptcy on it. After a few months of getting her report cleaned up we saw her credit score start getting better and better.
Eventually it was high enough to get an approval on a home loan. We decided that we were tired of living in the ghetto neighborhood, if you seen the movie "Friday" that the only way I can describe it.
I couldn't believe I was saying it but I actually missed the very lifestyle that I couldn't wait to get away from years ago. We talked about getting a house in the country, growing our own foods, raising chickens and pigs, setting up a solar system and doing as much as we can to be self sufficient.
Another reason for my decision to get away from the city was my daughter, I wanted her to be able to experience things that I did when i was a kid and not being so concerned about her playing outside alone.
We searched and searched for the right place. We found a few that we wanted but they fell through and then one day we were just driving along and spotted a for sale sign in front of a home and we both knew that was the place we wanted.
It was only and acre but laid out like a football field, zoned open rural, right up the road from the inlet to the ocean, close to the beach, totally fenced in and gated and on a dead end street. The home itself, a small 8 yr old but very well cared for singlewide mobile home.
I'm Happy to say that we closed on the house last week and life is good.
The intent of this blog is to chronicle the evolution of our small homestead.
I'll be adding a list of our short and long term plans and add photos as we go.
thats all for now.
an added note: the way the blogger is set up it publishes new posts to the top of the blog, to keep it in order I have to change the dates so new posts are dated earlier than old posts
Todays Project Saltwater Reef Tank
Back a few years ago I had put together a saltwater reef aquarium. Lots of work to get everything going but once I did it was a self sustaining, balanced ecosystem with no mechanical filtration except for a protein skimmer, in simple terms a device that injects air into the water to create bubbles and cause foam which traps organic compounds before they begin to decompose. pretty much the same thing ocean waves do when they create seafoam.
Once it's up and going the entire system takes care of itself, nitrifing bacteria colonize calcified coral skeletons AKA live rock. the live rock becomes the natural biofilter in the system. Invertebrates such as snails, small hermit crabs and cleaner shrimp are introduced into the system as cleanup crews. they control unwanted algae and sift through the dirt and rock cleaning up all the debris.
Now that we have a house of our own and aren't renting I decided to set up my reef once again. First thing I needed to do was change the color of my tank stand. It was originally pine that was coated with polyurethane clearcoat but because all of the cabinetry in the house is a red mahogany color and I am going to use the tank as a room divider between the dining/kitchen areas I wanted the tank to match the rest of the cabinets.
Stripping clearcoat from wood is not as easy as it may seem. I started out with 80 grit sandpaper and a small electric sander but after about an hour of sanding and getting nowhere fast I decided to go the chemical stripper route. The first chemical stripper i bought was a cheap all purpose stripper, I learned my lesson in a hurry, you get what you pay for.
The stuff was useless and I ended up going back to the store and buying a can of Formsbys wood stripper. Brush it on, wait 30 mins, scrape the finish off. It worked pretty well but still not good enough. In my frustration I looked over at my DA sander and air compressor and decided to give it a shot. It slapped on a disk of 60 grit paper , fired up the DA and it tore through the clearcoat easily, a little to easily actually. The DA left some deep swirls in the wood that weren't so noticeable on the bare wood but when I hit it with the stain all of those areas got really dark.
At that point I decided , screw it, it's staying that way. Once the stain soaked in i coated the entire thing in polyurethane clear. I also needed to close in the back of the stand since it was going to be seen from all sides, simple fix, some furring strips and a 24"x24" sheet of plywood and the stand looks like it was made that way.
here are some pics of the finished stand
The next thing I had to do was build a canopy to house the VHO (Very High Output) lighting for the tank. My lighting system should put out 440 watts of 10,000k (sunlight spectrum)light. Most types of corals need intense lighting to thrive and this should give me enough to keep almost any type of coral.
for the canopy I used 1x4" lumber with 2"x2" posts in the corners, i made it 14"high with a 2" overlap that will go over the top of the tank.
I'm no carpenter so I'm pretty happy with how it came out. 
heres the tank sitting on the stand with the canopy frame on top. I still need to cover the frame with plywood and build a hinged lid for the top. 
thats all for today, i'll post updated pics when the stand/canopy are complete and lights have been installed.
Reef tank part 2
Continuing on with my saltwater reef tank project. Today we went to a store called Bio-reef to check out some of the stock and pickup some supplies for the tank. I got a bag of instant ocean salt to mix up 50 gallons of saltwater and on the way home we stopped at Home Depot to pick up (2) 50lb bags of play sand for the tank substrate.
I got home and cleaned out all of the shells I was storing in the bottom of the tank,
then we poured in one of the 50lb bags of sand. turns out I only needed one bag. oh well it was $3.50 a bag so no great loss there.
I crushed up the shells that i had sitting in the tank and added them to the sand. the shells contain a high amount of calcium which helps to maintain the proper PH levels in the water.
Next came the rock.At one point this rock was loaded with life from the reef in figi, it also cost me about $4.00/lb when I bought it years ago. Sadly, after I tore the tank down and pulled the rock from the water everything died off and now it's just base rock. What i'm going to do is purchase some fresh live rock and add it to the base rock. this will seed the base rock and after a short while you wont even know the difference, the dead rock will be live again.
next steps:
finish the canopy, add the lighting, fill up the tank, drop in a dead shrimp or two to start the cycle, add a few pounds of live rock to the base rock and throw in the cleanup crew. Since I live at the beach I'm going to go collect a few dozen red legged hermits if i can find some this time of year.
