The Journal of Plymouth Rock Ranch

Most of you answered correctly!
Ben…….a 15 passenger van WITHOUT a/c……….in this heat!  Are you nuts??????  Our van’s a/c fan went on the fritz yesterday on the way home from Church.  In this weather, we stopped, bought a new fan motor and headed to a friend’s house/garage to get it fixed before driving home in a [...]

Skylar’s on a good find streak right now.  We’re praying that it continues ; )
Our family’s computer collection consists of a 7 year old Dell desktop computer.  Its been faithful.  But its old.  I call it our Dinosaur.  Its full, its slow, its cranky.  The MS Word program has glitched and won’t print any of [...]

A few weeks ago Skylar was working at a house in a rather nice subdivision. He noticed an older, out-of-place, obviously hadn’t-been-driven-in-a-long-time 1991 Honda Civic sitting in the driveway. We’ve been keeping our eye out for an older good mpg vehicle for the boys to drive. Driving the F-350 or E-350 into [...]

Remember the houseplans that Roo drew?  And remember how his houseplan featured beds, which were evidently important to him?  And remember how I noted that when the girls and I draw houseplans, we always, always, always focus on the kitchen as that is what is important to us as we spend so much time cooking [...]

The animals were thrown a little off kilter by our Week of Thanksgiving.  It was a little disconcerting to have so many visitors over the course of 5 days.  Darby, for one, loved it.  The cows?  They had to go sniff the new cars, watch the walls being put up and as the cabin began [...]

The Scene From Afar

This is Fun!

Determination

Everyone Helped : )  Even His Tongue!

Discipleship at its Best

I Spy the Photographer

Taking a Break

Roo Built this Airplane All By Himself!
You Sit on it and Then Rock Back for Takeoff and Rock Forward for Landing!
He Must be a Builder’s Son : )

Pooh Bear Worked Too

For All of the Planning and [...]

When one works in the dark, one must have some light.
So before it got dark, Ryker and Grandpa Ringer worked on getting the lights ready for service.

Great Pose!

The Worksite All Lit Up
We Had One Light in a Tree
One light on the Trailer Roof
and
One Light on the Ground
We Just Kept On Working!

Even the Little Guys Helped [...]

There is a large center beam that runs down the center of the cabin roof.  It’s made of two engineered beams that we had to glue and screw together.  Here’s some pictures of that process:

Mr. Torres and Crew with the Glue

Grandpa Ringer, Ben and Pooh
What Teamwork that Spans the Generations!
I Love This Picture!
Now comes the [...]

Ready….

Set…..

Go!

The Last Wall Stands Up!

Contemplating the Changes in Our Lives
A Memorable Moment
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What it looked like prior to removing the tent.

Uncovering our kitchen and living area!  Now, we are totally committed!

Camera Shy?

Revealing the Sheeting

Oh Yeah!

The Canvas is All Down : )

Exposed to the Elements

He’s Determined to Finish Getting the Tent ALL the Way Down

Mission Accomplished with a Smile : )
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One of the things that amazed me when I first met Rick was his ability to build, whether it be an engine or out of wood or whatever materials he had to design and build with.  He learned this from his father, who could design and build anything.  This is really the way God designed [...]

Monday morning found Rick going to Bandera bright and early to look at wood burning stove pipe accessories before he had to fly out.    One thing we’d failed to consider was how we would vent the wood burning stove in the cabin.  The tent had a fiberglass panel and rubber ring that surrounded our stove [...]

Rick, the two boys and Perry, who had worked his busiest weekend of the year prior to coming to help us, were up into the wee hours of Saturday morning working by flood lights that were on our trailer roof, hanging from trees and shining up from the ground.  We were back up at 7 [...]

The promised pictures of Wednesday’s progress on our tent enclosure project were left in our camera at our Thanksgiving Day host’s house : (  So, those will have to wait until we can get our camera back.
Friday brought more helpers, most of whom came with our last minute calls for help.  We are so grateful [...]

The consistent rain has made it difficult, at best, to prepare for this project.  The guys dug footings that kept getting filled in by rain.  The mucky muddiness made working around the tent difficult.  Then on Friday, we got tons and tons of rain.  We weren’t just soggy, we were in mud up to our [...]

Since moving to Plymouth Rock Ranch, we’ve lived many adventures.  We’ve also lived rather unconventionally.
We started out literally camping in our 5th Wheel trailer for the 1st year.  The second year God provided a 17′x26′ canvas deck tent for us to add to our minute 5th Wheel living space for 11 people.   Boy Howdy, was [...]

My mission for my 2 weeks in Washington was to try to get Rick settled into an apartment as cost efficiently as possible. Every penny he doesn’t spend there is a penny we can put into getting our tent enclosed into a cabin and running water, a sink, cabinets and countertops put into the kitchen.  [...]

This has been the month of spending time and money on maintenance……especially vehicle and a/c maintenance.
Since returning from Boston, we’ve had two blow outs on our two big vehicles, making the purchase of two sets of new tires for these big vehicles necessary.  Praise God that He brought in the work to purchase these new [...]

That’s the number one rule for a salesman. Ryker seems to have some of my dad’s salesman’s genes in him. He’s very good at finding the really good buy so he can buy low. And then he’s turned these items around and sold them on eBay to fund other items he’s been [...]

All gone!  Remember the 47 boxes of cereal we bought on clearance for 50 cents per box?
The 47 boxes of cereal lasted us 5.5 weeks.  We officially finished them off on Wednesday, June 24th.  That works out to 8.5 boxes a week.  That actually took us longer to get through than I had guessed.  Though [...]

The guys have been having to get up at 5 a.m. and be out of the tent by 5:45 a.m. to get to their jobs.  This makes our usual breakfast mode of operations of oatmeal or homegrown eggs obsolete for them.  We’ve tried to have easy-to-grab breakfasts ready for them, but we’re having a hard [...]

This past week Callan and I had the opportunity to attend a goat milk cheese and soapmaking class in Uvalde for 4 days.  We had a great time and learned so much.  The timing of this class is so perfect with Phebie calving last Friday, Leah due to kid on Wednesday and Festival due to [...]

Some dear sweet friends of our gave us a lawn tractor that wasn’t working when they moved.

Ryker has been working on diagnosing and fixing it’s problems and seems to have conquered it with the help and guidance of his dad.

One of our customers gave us a little trailer that works just perfectly with the Craftsman.

Ryker’s [...]

Another of our time sensitive projects is putting a kitchen sink with running hot and cold water in the tent.
When our trailer kitchen had to be torn out due to a water leak and mold, we returned to heating our dishwashing water and washing dishes in tubs again.   This is doable in a pinch, but [...]

Chicken Tractor Turned Greenhouse/Sprouting Seed Protector
Note the Creative Greenhouse Boxes Callan is Using
Recycle…Reuse….Save $

Background:  Fruit Tree Anti-Animal Food Yard (cedar wood and wire made into a cage)
(These are the trees that are in buckets and still need holes drilled and raised beds built)
Foreground:  Raised Bed, Planted Tree, Anti-Animal Food Wire Cage

Callan Caring for Planted Tree

An [...]

Our friends over at Frugal Hacks, a blog for sharing frugal advice, have just added a forum to their site.  To get this forum up and running, they are having a $125 cash prize contest.
If you’re interested in joining other women who are or aspire to be frugal in their management of the resources the [...]