Answers to Evas questions

Understandable. She’s really great. Jennifer’s the owner, and she’s told me their plans are probably two, more like three years out. I will need to move, and they want to build another house for her mom to be here, and they’re going to be here. So, but then she also was acknowledging that, you know, building costs are getting really absorbent. So, you know, but in other words, two or three years is a good thing, and I’m very absolutely adamant to make sure that it’s paid, that the property is taken care of, that she has any concerns or anything like that.

We have a little bit of communication. We text each other pretty frequently, actually. So, and the land, let’s see if I can get it. The land next door here is a little less than a quarter of an acre. So, I’ve got the rabbit tractors on it now. That again is a year-long lease. By the way, this house and this land here is $1,400 a month, in case you’re wondering, which I feel is a pretty reasonable amount. It’s a really large two-bedroom, two-bath house. I’m using for storage and all kinds of stuff.

Anyway, this quarter acre, I’m leasing for $400 a year, which is actually really expensive for agricultural land, but, you know, the neighbors are the folks up the hill there, Amelia and Thomas. So, yeah, that’s that, and that’s also on a year-to-year basis. My experience with stuff like that is once you get it set up, there you go, you just keep going, right? Let’s see. So, yeah, would I, you know, really prefer to absolute life, right? Because I’m going to be putting the solar panels up, although I’m going to do it in a way I’m not making any roof penetrations.

I’m going to be, you know, putting together the rainwater collection system, you know, clearly investing in infrastructure, in rabbit tractors. You know, rabbit tractors can all be moved, right? And I see the rabbit tractors as an investment on building these things to last at least a decade, hopefully two decades, right? So, wherever I can, I’m using… Oh, hey, sweetie. We got one of the free ones. Oh, yeah, see if I can get that shot here. This is not my favorite camera. Sorry. Yeah, because I told you, I think you, you know, you really need to prepare for at least a decade and actually really what it is, is your life is changing completely.

If you can get through the next decade, you’re probably going to be fine. It just won’t look like what you think it looks like. Hi, ducks. All right. So, Eva, that’s the situation with the lease. And yes, before I leased the property, I mean, it was fully like, hey, I’ve got a school bus, I’ve got all this stuff, and she was fine with that. So, you know, we were all upfront about it. Now, the tent thing here, that’s a 20×30 tent. And I really should have done better with this. My other camera’s charging up right now.

You know, they have these guy wires going down into the ground to stabilize it. And it’s also attached into the rock. No, I did not put this up. I hired some guys to do it. One of the things I’ve been driving, I used to, I was buying some of those, they pop up, you know, tents, easy ups or whatever. And in the first rain, they would always completely collapse. And I was going around because there’s a lot of these in Puerto Rico that are surviving all kinds of hurricanes. And the secret is, you don’t want the tarp to come over the rail.

Let me see if I can make that, see if I can get this. Yes, you don’t want the tarp to come over the rail. You want the tarp to be on the other side of the rail, so that way all the water will fall off and it never cools up. And yeah, and there’s probably several people, I know this one young man, he’s got a business. And he cuts the metal poles and he buys the tarps. And you can either just buy it all from him and set it up yourself. And I’m like, No way.

So this thing, it’s a 20 by 30 space that’s covered. You know, how long will it last? Probably several years. You know, it’s good enough for this lease period that I’ve got, and good enough to see what’s going to happen next in the world. It costs $1,000 for it to have them all the materials and to have them do the install. So just give you a rough idea. But it turned out to be a really good space. It’s a really nice workspace. And it does mostly stay dry. Now cages, people was also asking me about these cages.

So I’ve got several versions of cages. And these, I call them the pens, man, these are heavy duty, like I’m talking heavy duty. Somebody’s got a lot of metal into this. They were just sort of a random, the guy I was buying the cavies from lives over in Mocha. I was telling him I needed some cages and he haven’t had these. And he sold them I think like $150 apiece. And honestly, they’re not the best cages ever, because the doors are kind of small. But I needed them fast. And what’s great is like nothing’s going to get in here.

And in that particular moment in my life, I had I was going on a trip where I would buy the cavies. And then within a week, I was going back to pick up some rabbit livestock. And I just wanted to make absolutely certain that the cavies would be safe while I was on this other trip. So it worked out. You know, now, these cages are ones that I picked up off of Amazon or eBay. It actually is technically called a cat, a catio, right? It was really meant for cats. I went ahead and put like some half inch by half inch stuff on the floor.

And I’m always keeping grass on there so your feet are nice. I’m not it’s sturdy enough for guinea pigs. And honestly, this three level three foot by two foot diameter thing costs $57 delivered from Amazon. By the way, it’s August 226 right now. I’m giving you those numbers because if you’re watching this later, prices are getting really different. Yeah, I’m not really thrilled with these, but you know, it worked and I bought two of them just because I had these guinea pigs come in and just put two together in there. I got to see if they’re going to actually get along or not.

They’re currently fighting a little bit. Anyway, guinea pigs, you know, political management of guinea pigs. I decided I don’t want to go with any more of these, but that’s good. I also built a table that is on with a half inch by half inch mesh for the bottom. And the idea is that the stuff falls through or I dig it out and I’m because I want this is really valuable. The soil bedding and the feces really valuable to me is another part of the component of this business. I want to create is a nursery where I grow the plants that you need to feed the cages and the rabbit.

So yeah, so those are the cages. Now the next set of cages, I was looking like, what am I going to do? I really need to ramp up. There’s now I got all these guys and they’re reproducing and growing. And so I’ve got a couple of months before I can really need to get a bunch more. And what my next thing is, is to take something like this, these metal shelving units and reconfiguring it that way with some two by two or half inch by half inch wire mesh and making some cages out of that.

Just stay tuned and I’ll show you what that ends up looking like. So everything is always a progression, right? Everything is and you never know, like you never know what’s going to work now, what’s going to work later. I always have, let’s see if I can see this up here, I always have a couple of travel cages and things like that or small cages, these, there’s a couple of them here on shelves just because you never know when you need to isolate an individual or when you’re going to the flea market and you may pick up more, you know, right? And being a farmer with small livestock and that’s just a basic, you got to have several different carry cages in ways to do that.

So that’s it on cages and infrastructure. And honestly, things change all the time. They are always changing and adapting as this works and that doesn’t work or we change this out or whatever, you know? So you’ve got to really stay flexible. I will keep you updated on the new design that I come up with. I’m buying those metal shelving units from Home Depot actually, like $180 for a four foot by two foot by six foot tall thing, which is pretty good fine to get me going. Anyway, and then she asked me about power tools and I really want to encourage you, especially ladies, if you haven’t been using power tools, really, really, really recommend it.

So I have numerous drills. I use power drills all the time. I usually have two or three of them. So for example, one has a drill bit for a pilot hole and then this one has the bit for a hex nut and then this one has the bit for a Phillips set on it. And that’s because we’re building these other rabbit tractors and, you know, it’s just so much easier to have a drill pilot hole, grab the other drill, do that rather than always changing out the bits and stuff. So but power drill, definitely learn how to use a drill like this thing.

I used to be back, you know, when I first started building stuff, nails and hammer, like that’s all we had, basically. And man, now with the advent of batteries and this stuff, this is amazing. Another one I use quite frequently is just a small circular saw. This is a smaller one. I like this because I can handle it real well. They do make them bigger, but I like the smaller size and it gets the job done. Another thing I use a lot of is a jigsaw. And this is for when you’re wanting to make interesting cuts.

And another tool that I use a lot of is this chop saw. Here, all of this stuff, by the way, this is a fantastic tool. I just love this chop saw. I build a lot of stuff with chop saw. Now, if you notice, I got all of my stuff as Makita, which is a Home Depot brand. And they’re all battery operated. And once you get into one tool system, you get the batteries, the batteries are pretty expensive. And you get a bank of batteries, the same batteries working all the tools. And you kind of get committed that way.

I just always use Makita. I’ve used it for years. And then other hardcore farmers that I know use Makita. DeWalt is another really, really good brand. I wish I’d have known before I moved to Rico. Milwaukee is everywhere here. I don’t have a lot of experience with Milwaukee. Yeah, Makita builds really good stuff. The batteries, I’ve been getting some of the cheap knockoff batteries. Everybody I know says they don’t last long. Don’t waste your time. Me and my friend, oh, you know, Tom Lynn Gillespie from the Living Farm over in Colorado.

And Tom said, Tom, how many Makita batteries do you have? And he said, I have about a dozen of the five amp ones. And he said, they just last and last and last. Don’t worry about it. You’ll be fine. Just get a bank of them and, you know, use them and rotate them regularly. So yeah, I think he said he’s had some for more than a decade. And like, that’s pretty good. So yeah, I definitely, definitely recommend Power Tools. They’re a game changer. With those drills, like you can take a drill and put a screw in, attach two things together.

If it doesn’t work, it’s really easy to back that screw out and undo it, right? And it’s way, way better. Back in the day with nails, we had to pull the nail out and the nail was useless because it was usually crooked, right? So much easier. And there’s all kinds of things you can put on a drill, like a thing, the screw paint or whatever. One thing I’m really, you were really missing that I wish I had and they don’t have a battery operating one is a drill press. Yeah, and a bench with a big heavy vice on it.

If I had my way. Those are the power tools. And of course, I got an assortment of hand tools. I can show you one other quick thing when I’m doing projects like this. So with, with the building the rabbit tractors, there’s all kinds of pieces. I generally use buckets to organize stuff. So this is a bucket that has all of the paint supplies. This is the bucket in the area that has the I’m using stainless steel zip ties. This is the, that’s my favorite. There’s a nifty little tool. When you’re using stainless steel zip ties, they usually give this to you for free when you buy them.

So I tend to keep all that stuff together when I’m doing a project. This is, this is for building the four handles and working with the vinyl coated stainless steel cable. So I tend to categorize tools into buckets. So that way, like we’re working on this. Okay, here’s all the tools for that. And that way it’s really easy to find things. And I’m a huge, huge proponent of organization. Like I just hate that. Where is it? And walking around the house for five or 10 minutes going through room after room over and over and over again.

And you can’t find the dang thing. Like I just hate that experience. So I really, it’s worth it to me to spend a little extra time to make sure everything is organized at the end of a job or the end of a period of time. Just clean up, make sure the tools are all where they need to be. I had a friend came by, she was working for me. Anybody comes work for me, by the way, I’m like, you can use my tools. If you mess my tools up, you’re buying my tools. I hope I’m not.

She’s this brand new. Actually, this one is pretty new. I’ve had this for years, many, many years. And this thing has cut a lot of stuff. So yeah, I take care of them. Alrighty, I hope that answers your questions. And you know, anybody else has some other questions related to the operation or whatever, I’m more than happy to answer them. It’s fine. Okay, we’ll talk to you later. [tr:trw].