Arte De Timo

Category: My Old Mini House

  • Compost – Part 2

    Here is a video tour of my compost bin (I promised a video). The bin is over a year old now, and hasn’t shown any sign of material or design flaws. It may have dry wood termites in it, but there is enough redwood that it might take a decade before they do any harm…

  • Another object from the back yard.

    This one came from the old shed in the back yard I took down last spring. There were a whole bunch of little bits of things that ended up there from the various occupants and users over the years. This one stood out as something odd to find in an old wooden shed. Let me…

  • Compost – Part 1

    Compost is a great topic with all sorts of room for discussion and investigation, so I am going to take on the topic in parts. It is also a BIG topic. Understanding compost requires a few layers of biology, a layer of agriculture, a layer of physics, and some thrown in construction, environmentalism, gardening, and…

  • The Urban Orchard

    The urban orchard isn’t one of my ideas of course, but it is one of those secret little treasures that people discover when they have a bit of land, and have an interest growing food. Besides the fact that I inherited the beginning (or maybe the end) of an orchard with our house, I have…

  • The economics of a rain barrel

    My water company charges $2.99 for a unit of water, which is defined as 100 cubic feet, or 748.5 gallons. This breaks down to just under 4 tenths of one cent per gallon of water that comes through the pipes. So what do we get for that 0.4 cents? We get water from a local…

  • Finds from the yard

    I posted a couple of things I found in the attic of our tiny little house. Here are a few things that we have run into in the yard. The white disk is a piece of glass. My original guess was that it is from a bike or motorcycle light.  But, under perfect light and…

  • A couple things from the attic

    I finally made space on my kitchen desk for my scanner, so now for some fun scans of odds and ends I have found. Here are a couple things I found up in the attic when I was rewiring up there last year. There was lots of gross stuff up there (more about that later)…

  • My Tiny Really Old House

    Since we moved in to our house a little over two years ago, I have been on a quest to figure out how to live well in our tiny old house. The house is from the 1880’s or 1890’s as best I can tell, and was added on to in the 1920’s or 30’s. It…