Over the summer just past we experienced our first bad drought here on the farm. Most of New Zealand was hit hard, followed up by a sucker-punch from COVID-19 that added insult to injury for already-struggling farmers. Along with cutting into our winter feed supply because the grass wasn’t growing, another major challenge we had to contend with on our farmlet was the malfunctioning water supply for our hot and thirsty livestock.

One of our ongoing DIY projects has been our waterwheel pump, whose early iterations I posted about a while back. Over the past two years, the (sometimes) working prototype has seen a variety of experimental amendments and re-imaginings. But we were forced to radically step up our game when the river’s water level started running worryingly low, refusing to turn the waterwheel at all…

Through toying with various pulley arrangements (learning how pulley ratios worked as we went), teaching ourselves to weld, figuring out and refurbishing a hundred-year old piston pump, and extensive face-palming with trial and error, we surprised ourselves by creating a system that supplied more water than our animals demanded even during a drought. Victory!

Before I delve into the harebrained and arduous journey of how we reached the final product, here’s a video tour of our current working waterwheel-pump setup:

So, now that you’ve seen the satisfying conclusion to our water supply tale, let me show you what it took this particular fool to get there.

Going back in time, perhaps a year or so ago, we were still using the PVC pump I had constructed, with a scotch-yoke mechanism converting the rotary motion to linear. This was far from efficient, with high levels of friction and wear. You could even see the drive shaft bow slightly!

(Bonus: In the above pic, Char inadvertently captured photographic proof of the Stonybrook monster bathing in the river…)

For a time, the scotch-yoke served its purpose, working well enough to supply water to the farm for – I think – over six months. During that time, I replaced the crappy wooden piston head I made with a proper one that I had custom machined at the local engineers. I designed it in Sketchup, with the intent to have a pivoting joint near the head for a future idea I was working on.

The new machined piston head (with channels for o-rings) was form-fitted to the PVC pipe I was using for the piston cylinder. Yay, no more leaks! (For now…)

Tight fit. It needed a good lubing.

Get your mind out of the gutter. Shame on you.

So anyway, the new form-fitted penis piston head solved some issues, but with the scotch-yoke mechanism seemingly degrading in efficiency, the waterwheel was slowing down considerably on the push stroke, especially when the river was low.

Since the waterwheel slowed on the push stroke (pushing water up twenty metres) and sped up on the pull stroke (pulling water up from only a metre or less), I tried to steal some of the excess energy of the pull stroke to add to the push stroke. First I tried a cable weight, which rose the weight on the pull stroke, converting that potential energy to the slower push stroke.

Understand? Don’t worry, it’s not important and didn’t amount to anything, just nod and smile.

After testing with a poorly balanced sack of gravel, I zip-tied some heavy steel miscellany to a upturned pulley, which weighed ten kilograms or so altogether, suspended by a cable that was attached to the scotch-yoke.

This strange setup did actually improve efficiency, so I made it semi-permanent by substituting the cable weight for a strong spring, which works on the same principle.

So as the piston shaft was pulled back, the spring would stretch. Then when the piston shaft was pushed forward (pressurising the water line uphill, which has more resistance), the elastic energy stored in the spring was transferred. It was working harder on the easier pull, and working easier on the harder push. A trade-off.

I also added some weights to the outer edge of waterwheel itself, at strategic locations that seemed to help it maintain momentum. I also put a pipe farther upstream at a higher elevation, with the end of the pipe positioned above the waterwheel fins, to add a bit more gravity to the equation.

Desperate, I even put plastic containers on certain fins, which were filled by the pipe I put upstream. It was messy, inelegant, and unappealing. It did, however, work… for a time.

But when the river’s water continued to subside, and our water demand wasn’t being met, I was forced to throw out the high-friction scotch-yoke mechanism. (At this point I should have experimented with widening the fins, but it wasn’t until Char chimed in later on that I realised I could.)

I instead utilised the pivot point I had designed into the piston head. This way, the piston shaft would pivot vertically as the piston head plunged into the piston cylinder (like a crank arm).

But this only lasted so long, as the PVC diameter was too small for the angling piston shaft. And things tend toward chaos over time, especially if you’ve bolted everything firmly in place and there are unseen forces at play. So one day, unsurprisingly, I came down to find this:

You can also see inside that it wasn’t the cleanest operation.

Rubbing salt into the wound, the waterwheel drive shaft decided to break again around this time as well, with the waterwheel itself running aground somewhere downstream. You can imagine how exasperated I was with the whole project. A “working” prototype… which kept breaking.

So, after nursing my bruised pride, I resolved to teach myself to weld. I planned to construct a thicker drive shaft with a heavy-duty welded brace for the waterwheel face/hub, and a welded support frame for the whole enchilada.

A quality welder was going to be a serious purchase, but screw it, I thought – there were other welding jobs that needed doing (barn door latch, etc.), and a little MIG welder is pretty necessary on a farm – especially when you’re relying on hay-making equipment like a mower, tedder, and baler. Not to mention the trailers, quad bike, and horse float which will also indubitably need quick fixes here and there during their lifetimes. It’s also another step towards self-sufficiency, being able to repair and create with steel.

So we treated the purchase as an investment. And seeing as how the proof of concept for getting water to the farm was guaranteed, I might as well do it right and build a unit that wouldn’t break!

I started out by cutting the steel pieces for the hub brace.

Like magic, a super strong hub brace suddenly appeared. I was surprised how easy welding was. I expected it to be painstakingly difficult. It’s actually super fun and pretty straight-forward (with MIG welding, at least), with instant practical results.

After stripping back the mill scale and cleaning up the spatter from my welds, I slid the bearing blocks onto the drive shaft and brace. Then I sprayed it with steel primer.

A few slaps of black to stop it from rusting.

Same process for the frame.

Then once everything was dry, I test fitted it all. Looked a bit too sleek to be going outdoors!

I also welded together an “arm” for the end of the drive shaft opposite the waterwheel, to replace the pulley I had been misusing as a crank arm.

I fitted this piece over the end of the new drive shaft (before painting it), and drilled holes for engineering bolts. Ah, the miraculous drill press – another invaluable tool for DIY.

I also used this opportunity to harden the mild steel around the bolt hole on the piston head, because I had noticed there was a bit of wear from the hardened engineering bolt which it continuously pivoted on. I did this by using a blowtorch to heat the steel up to a nice cherry red, then quenched it. You can see where the colours appear on the steel is the area that I hardened.

It was time to install the new system down at the river, which took a bit of fiddling to bolt it in place on the wooden supports, because the dimensions had changed slightly from the previous build. As you can see, by this stage, it had rained and the river was back up to a decent level.

The trickiest part is always putting on the heavy and awkward waterwheel, which I’ve needlessly had to do about five times to date. Sometimes alone. Ugh.

I replaced the broken PVC pipe acting as piston cylinder, aligned everything, and let her rip. Here it is after it had been operating with this setup for a while, where you can see the piston shaft’s vertical movement has pushed on the lip of the PVC, cracking and warping it, causing a minor leak:

There was a lot of pressure in the pipe, causing the whole pump to shift backwards as well, so I rigged up a quick brace from some brackets I had lying around.

Didn’t work as well as I’d hoped, but it held together for the time being. I think the system successfully operated like this for another few months or so, before the PVC failed again, despite me letting the pump rotate freely to allow for tolerance.

Another major problem with the pump I’d made was that the o-rings were wearing out way too fast, even despite lubrication and being perfectly fitted and sized on the machined piston head. They would need replacing every couple of months, when leaks would begin to spring.

I’d had enough of the inefficiencies of my homemade linear PVC piston pump, so I went digging to find the old colonial farm pump I had originally tried to incorporate into the system. Back to basics, I suppose?

I didn’t have high hopes that I could get it working – and I had no idea if those kind of pumps required a high RPM. I assumed they did. (Spoiler alert, they don’t. Had I known this, or bothered to find out instead of needlessly experimenting, I would have saved myself a lot of time and money. Do your research, folks!)

The old pump was a little worse for wear, broken in places, rusty, grimy, gunked up, and required some replacement parts. Luckily, pumps like this (Davies B1 Series Piston-Pump) are fairly common in NZ, so I was able to source the replacement parts online. The fact that these are still sold new (at a whopping NZ$2,500+) and serviced widely to this day, is a testament to their time-tested robustness and efficacy.

I started by stripping apart the wet end, where the old gaskets had perished and fused to the steel.

The washers and springs were in surprisingly good condition.

Don’t you love messy mid-project bench top shots? I do.

I took an inventory of all the pieces I took apart, and made sure to record where they went, and in which orientation (photographing as you go helps). I removed the steel stand and the platform for the motor, since neither would be needed, and only added unnecessary weight to the already heavy beast.

I took a wire brush to its rusty parts, and de-greased the whole unit with some methylated spirits (denatured alcohol). I also washed the stinky putrefied oil out of the crank end by flushing it with diesel a couple of times, then methylated spirits.

Some smaller components were heavily rusted, so I soaked them overnight in vinegar and citric acid (don’t forget to neutralise the process with baking soda or similar, or the acid will continue to corrode the steel).

They shined up pretty nice.

New replacement gaskets, hooray!

New leather “buckets”, huzzah! These act as the plunger or piston head inside the pump. Being leather, they conform perfectly when wet.

Don’t you love tidy mid-project bench top shots? I do.

I fitted the appropriate pipe fittings to the intake and output, slid a small aluminium pulley onto the crank shaft, and screwed the pump to a wooden base.

Now that the pump was all ready to go, it was time to play with pulleys. I had a very rudimentary understanding of pulleys and how their ratios worked, but I was soon to learn a whole lot through tedious experimentation. Pulleys are expensive, so I wanted to use the assortment I salvaged from the farm. There were a variety of sizes, but annoyingly their bore diameters were all different.

I thought (incorrectly) that I needed to get the RPM quite high to operate the pump, so I did some calculations and devised a ratio that might work.

I reckoned that the resistance of the pump would slow down the waterwheel, so I aimed for a higher RPM than the pump was rated for (200 RPM) to compensate. I wasn’t necessarily wrong, but this was a rookie mistake.

Back at the engineers, I had them machine an axle that would fit a couple of my pulleys and some spare bearing blocks I had from the previous waterwheel drive shaft.

I then welded together a support frame for my ridiculous arrangement, which at the time I thought was awesome.

I also welded together another pulley shaft to go on the drive shaft of the waterwheel.

After a month of fiddling, I had everything I needed, finally ready to build waterwheel 3.0!

Back down at the river, I eagerly installed my vision.

It spun pretty fast! Albeit wobbly. My optimism was increasing.

The V-belt tensioner I devised consisted of a chain and some cabling that could be adjusted on a steel stay.

I built some temporary belt tensioners which I bracketed on to the frame to prevent the V-belts from slipping. The pump was installed, then it was ready for a test!

Aaand… fail.

Didn’t work. I mean, it did, but it slowed the waterwheel right down. Why? Well, it turns out that a pulley is a lever. Yep, that’s right, a lever. Without going into a technical rant (which would likely only further expose my incompetence in these matters), basically what I had designed wouldn’t work because I was trying to get a high RPM from something that didn’t actually have that much power.

So even though I could get the system spinning really fast by itself, as soon as I added resistance to it from the pump pressurising water, all of that leverage brought the waterwheel near to a halt.

I stood back, looked at the over-engineered monstrosity I had constructed, and then had an epiphany. I quickly disassembled the mess and produced this elegance:

Yep. Worked a charm. Why not try that to start with? Idiot.

The ratio of pulleys was quite extreme, and I was starting to understand how they interacted. So I experimented by changing out the large pulley for the medium one, which worked a bit better. It seemed there was a “sweet spot” for the pulley ratios. I knew this one wouldn’t work when the river’s water level would inevitably recede over the drier months, but for now, it was working. And this time it was simple and elegant.

It was especially effective when the river flooded. It was good to see that the new drive shaft brace and frame I welded stood up to a powerful torrent.

As expected, when the river started flowing less, the pulley ratio didn’t cut it. So it was back to the drawing board.

I even built a flexible joint to try direct drive, now that the pump proved to work at a low RPM. A direct drive meant there was no leverage slowing the waterwheel via pulleys, only the resistance of the pump itself.

It did pump to the tanks on the hill, but alas, ’twas not fast enough. More experimentation with pulleys was needed to find that sweet spot.

It was surprising to discover that very small diameter pulleys (as pictured on the pump above) add considerable resistance to the setup due to the V-belt having to wrap around a smaller circumference. There was a lot of energy being wasted on pinching the V-belt around the tiny pulley. I realised I needed to use the larger diameter pulley with a medium sized one for the pump end, so the V-belt’s limited flexibility wasn’t wasting energy.

But we didn’t have the right size or fit on hand. We tried this setup, which confirmed it was just a matter of the right ratio, but the pulleys were just too similar in size:

We tried various combinations of what we had on hand, and it did pump to the tanks quicker than the direct drive, but still not as fast as we needed. We did some calculations of how much each cow and sheep on our farm would need per day in the peak demand of the summer heat. For fifty cows and eighty sheep, the waterwheel needed to be pumping up two litres per minute, for a total of at least two-thousand-five-hundred litres per day.

So I sacrificed one of the smaller pulleys which didn’t have the correct bore size, by welding a bracket of the correct diameter over its bore hole, which I could tighten against the crank shaft of the pump.

Once it was on, it was pumping up the most we had seen. The river was low, so we knew we were on the right track. If only there was a way to make the waterwheel itself turn faster…

With Char’s brain power added to the mix, we spent a weekend experimenting with making wider fins for the waterwheel, which produced instant results.

First we flattened the tin fins (150 x 150 mm) and added wood to either side, widening them to a total of 300 mm.

Then we chipped away at the weir (natural channel in the bedrock) with a wrecking bar to accommodate the larger fins.

We even built a little dam to divert some of the river’s velocity towards the weir, which helped immensely during the drought.

See that devilish grin? That’s my renewed optimism shining through.

It was quite helpful to record the fins in slow-motion, to see how the water interacted with the them hydro-dynamically, and how eddies were being created in places. We noticed the flatter fins produced less turbulence than the previous bent tin fins. Fascinating.

With each small improvement to the overall system, we saw incremental increases to the output at the stock tanks on the hill, which we re-measured whenever we made a minor change. With a “good enough” ratio of pulleys, widened fins, a tailored weir, and a little rock dam, we saw a three-fold increase in output from a measly eight-hundred litres per day from the direct drive to over two-thousand-six-hundred.

That brought us to our daily demand! YUS!

But the output was pretty damn close to our demand. Ideally we’d produce a decent surplus to cover our asses if future droughts were worse (likely).

There was one last thing we could do to push us over that threshold. The makeshift pulley we had fashioned to the pump was producing some inefficiency. It was wobbling due to my quick chop job, and it wasn’t as small as we would have liked. So we forked out fifty bucks and bought the perfect pulley, crossing our fingers that that’s all it would take to iron out the kinks…

And guess what?

That simple amendment took us from ~2,600 litres per day right up to ~3,300!

That truly is a picture worth a thousand words. It gives me the fizz.

Of course now we want to see how much we can squeeze out of it by attaching a dynamo generator to charge batteries… Oh the potential!

We’re thrilled to have such a quaint (and quiet!) solution to our farm’s water supply. Not only does it save us time and money, it has a character that makes us smile. It’s an attraction. Something a bit quirky. It’s a delight to amble down to the riverside just to sit in the dappled light of the forest and be hypnotised by a little waterwheel’s endless dance to the tune of a babbling brook.

Here’s the numbers for the more analytical among you:

• Our peak summer demand for 50 cattle and 80 sheep is 2,500 L per day. Our petrol pump outputs 576 L per hour. So we had to run it for 4.5 hours per day to reach our demand. 4.5 hours costs approximately NZ$10.00 per day. (Since our petrol pump is small and each fill lasts an hour, that’s also 4-5 trips to the back of the farm, jumping fences, hiking down to the river, refilling the pump, etc., every day during peak demand.)
• The incremental improvements to the waterwheel pump were:
  • Direct drive: 864 L/pd
  • 560mm & 360mm pulleys: 1,584 L/pd
  • 560mm & 65mm pulleys: 1,872 L/pd
  • 560mm & 260mm pulleys + dam + half of fins wider: 2,300 L/pd
  • 560mm & 260mm pulleys + dam + all of fins wider: 2,664 L/pd
  • 560mm & 200mm pulley + dam + all of fins wider: 3,312 L/pd
• Surplus generated during peak summer demand: +812 L/pd
• Disregarding the “educational costs” of the waterwheel’s previous iterations, the estimated cost for the current waterwheel setup (excluding the free pump and large pulley) is NZ$500.00.
  • ~$100.00 steel
  • ~$100.00 wood/concrete
  • ~$40.00 hardware fixings
  • ~$60.00 pipe fittings
  • ~$100.00 bearings
  • ~$100.00 pulley/V-belt
• That means that the waterwheel only needs to pump for 50 peak demand days to pay itself off, since we’d otherwise be paying for petrol. That’s a no-brainer. It would only have to run for a year to pay itself off if you include the price of a new piston-pump worth NZ$2,500.00 (and that kind of pump is overkill).

Living out here has been the most important education of our lives. And I don’t just mean all the practical skills we’ve acquired in the past five years. Sure, we’ve taught ourselves how to operate and repair shaky old farm machinery, erect fences, resource management, and animal husbandry. But those aspects of country-living are learnt skills like any other. There are deeper, subtler lessons on offer out here on the farm, where life and death go hand in hand, and the success of one’s endeavours are at the mercy of nature. Here, where blood, sweat, and tears are palpable, one is forced to reexamine their attitudes towards life and question their very worldview.

When we moved to the farm almost five years ago, I was only beginning to emerge from an eight-year-long bout of severe depression and anxiety, worsened by constant pain from my arthritis. My spirits were lifting at the idea of a new life where I had the space (and head-space) to be closer to nature and could fill my days with productiveness and creativity. But that promise of a brighter future in the countryside became quickly tarnished by the reality of the job I had signed up for.

Our first couple of years on the farm were both exhilarating and frightening (at least to me). There was the excitement of claiming our own bucolic space to restore native bush, grow an orchard, and get our hands grubby with fulfilling DIY projects. But in tandem to those aspects of hobbit heaven was a litany of unfortunate events when it came to lambing and calving.

We tried and failed to save lambs stuck inside their mothers, forcing us to put the ewes out of their misery. We watched with tears in our eyes as the babies within squirmed for a minute before becoming still. We had to make the call to shoot sick animals after weeks of hopeful treatment. We had a pet cow that gave birth to an oversized dead calf, who then never fully recovered and died herself, despite an exorbitant vet bill. We performed a cesarean operation on a ewe by shooting her and then hastily cutting into her uterus to save her lambs. We even had to remove another oversized calf that had died inside its mother, by cutting its head and forelimbs off with a piano wire whilst still inside her to safely fish it out. All of this when we were new to farming, fresh from the city. Fate, it seemed, was intent on throwing us into the deep end.

For someone like me who obsesses over morality and regularly encounters existential dread, being suddenly exposed to these frightful bloody facts of life was a catastrophic shock that made me question whether life was worth living at all. Melodramatic, I know.

To put how I felt into context, consider this: I have the bad habit of neurotically subscribing to philosophical schools of thought and letting them mould my worldview a little too authoritatively. During that time in my life when we’d just moved to the farm, I called myself an anti-natalist – the rare and controversial position that it is ethically wrong to create life, that it’s better off not existing. To an anti-natalist, willingly bringing life into the world is akin to rape, for the creature cannot give its consent to life, and you have condemned it to all the potential/inevitable suffering that goes with it. It assumes that a life has a net-negative value. It had even been a recurring theme in our discussions about having children one day.

As you can imagine, that dissonant worldview of mine was only exacerbated by me being the guardian of a field-full of creatures which could suffer (some of which were), and by having a very tangible hands-on involvement in the prolonging of any suffering as well as their demise. It was traumatising seeing animals in pain and not being able to help them, and feeling indirectly responsible for their suffering.

The dead vegetarian inside me who I had buried years ago was scratching at the surface, raking me with questions like: “Is farming really something you want to be a part of?” — “Do you really think you’re the kind of person to stomach this aspect of life?” — “Do you really want to become the kind of person this life will make you into?” — “Is this really how you want to spend your life?” And no monologue was more repeated in my head than the self-deprecating mantra “I can’t do this!” – the very same defeatist mindset I had to applied to school, university, work, and even at low points, life itself. I felt like a fish out of water.

Every livestock death or illness on the farm was darkly coloured by this perspective I held, which was fortified every time there was a gruesome task to be done. To make matters worse, I was alone out here for much of it, as Char would commute to Auckland and stay there for half the week. She was supportive and empathetic, of course, even apologetic, and listened to my incessant woes. But I shortly realised that no amount of complaining was going to change how powerless I was to influence the unpredictable nature of life on a farm.

Our plan has always been to get the farm to a financially viable state where it pays for our living costs, so then we can both live here full-time as semi-self-sufficient homesteaders (where the more joyous work of gardening and the like commences). So during this bloody crisis, I was desperate to conjure up some lucrative alternative to sheep and cattle farming, but failed (I’m certainly no entrepreneur; business has never made much sense to me). I had a straightforward decision to make: Quit and destroy our future vision… or soldier on. With that in mind, I realised there wasn’t really any choice.

For the time being, working the farm was my job and the path forward to the self-reliant life we had envisioned together. I told myself I could continue to be scared, horrified, and angry – but I must do what was required of me anyway. It would take a lot of mental and emotional effort as well as an iron will – traits I inherently lack. Nonetheless, I couldn’t let our dream die. A boy had to become a man.

Over the years as I became more competent on the farm and more confident in being able to handle any task, my worldview began to miraculously shift… I was no longer viewing grisly events as wounds that would scar me, but as opportunities that would grow me. A psychological workout to build emotional resilience, you could say. Char and I talked about this on many occasions, and we found that we dreaded the unfortunate less and less, naturally adopting the attitude of come what may. We were realising that at the end of any troublesome task we felt just that little bit wiser and more confident, whatever the outcome, success or failure.

I discovered that my depression was lifting consistently with this change in attitude, and my anxiety too (perhaps with a little help from mindful meditation and stoic philosophy). It became apparent that my worldview had previously been informed less by logic and more by fear. Fear of trauma, fear of losing control, fear of not being able to cope. It’s amazing how we seek self-confirming philosophies that align with our emotional states. We adhere to them as justifications for our attitudes and excuses for our behaviours. Confirmation bias is one hell of a drug.

And it wasn’t as if these experiences were just making me become desensitised, numb, or apathetic. On the contrary, I was actually becoming more caring and less resentful towards the animals and their natures, and more open to experiencing a full spectrum of feelings, rather than being lost in a haze of melancholy and negative rumination. Life became abundantly self-evident that it was worth living, and that not all life had a net-negative value.

It also became clear just how removed from the natural order of life and death many of us are who grow up in cities, and how detrimental that is to formulating beliefs about such matters without the complete picture, as I had done. Shedding a tear over shooting a ewe in the head and then laughing with joy at having pulled two living lambs from her belly is an eye-opening contrast that lets you understand and appreciate the balance.

Being thrown into the deep end was a blessing in disguise. Although it was traumatic at the time, we’re able to look back fondly of how far we’ve come. The experience slapped me in the face with cold hard reality, but in so doing it woke me from a fever-dream of believing in the grim pointlessness of existence. I realised that to be capable of a daunting and sometimes gruesome task has less to do with one’s inbuilt constitution and emotional rigour, and more to do with a simple decision to stare fear and doubt in the face and say “I can do this.” Moreover, with that attitude adopted, one might come away from any traumatic experience with the perspective of having grown stronger from it, rather than that of becoming a victim of life.

And yeah, I know life is f-ing hard sometimes, for almost everyone. There are days where no-one wants to contend with their lot, regardless of how privileged their life may appear. But I’ve come to realise through these harsh lessons that the corny old advice to “focus on the positive” deserves more merit. Negative events in life somehow feel weightier, but they can be vastly outnumbered by the positive with a little modification to perspective. Not only that, but even the negative can be viewed in a positive light. Our struggles can be our enemies, or our teachers. There is nothing more transformative than a forced change in perspective. For me, those early years on the farm did just that. The stoic philosopher Epictetus wrote in the Enchiridion: “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.”

Of course, deep-seated automatic modes of thinking and ingrained behaviours don’t change overnight. Every day I continue to have to make a conscious effort to rein in that screechy little monkey mind. But I’m lucky – the harshness and ruggedness of a life closer to nature seems to create more tangible experiences to reflect on. I think this is in part why so many people are yearning to go back to the land, to be moved more deeply by real life. Wisdom is tied to the senses here, hidden in contrast; between the stink of shit or rot, and the sweet aroma of hay or dew; between the wracking cold wind or rain, and the relief of a warm sun emerging from storm clouds; between the weight of the dead, and the lightness of the living. Here, reality is solid, graspable, relevant.

Like any situation or circumstance in life, the farm can be a forlorn place, such as on a freezing blustery night when newborn lambs might die from exposure. Although harrowing, that period of uncertainty is brief, and enormously outweighed by the ensuing joviality of two-dozen healthy spring lambs gleefully bounding after one another on many warm and colourful afternoons. None of it possible without the blood, sweat, and tears for which I was once resentful, but am now appreciative and even grateful.

Grateful because there really is so much about life to be loved if you go looking for it, even in the shadows. And the more we love, the brighter the world becomes (not just for ourselves, but also those around us). In the years following that initial crisis, I came to realise that a life saturated with beauty and wonder is waiting to be embraced by any of us, waiting for us to let down those dark-tinted visors of victim-hood so we might define our own capabilities. As Einstein said, “once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.”

This is a throwback to a couple of years ago when we tore out the old ramp to our workshop door and replaced it with a step. Here it is in all its glory before we took a crowbar to it:

We had recently built a new door for the workshop, but the old ramp just didn’t match, especially with its stylish (read: haphazard) “tread” someone had created by dancing a drill bit back and forth across the boards. It doesn’t show in the photos, but the angle of the ramp was quite steep, which always made you feel a little uneasy carrying an armful of powertools down it. It also came out a little too far into the carport, making it that much more difficult to store things behind it. Goodbye.

Once the boards had been pried off, we were confronted with a problem: The space under the workshop was lower than the gravel floor of the carport, and whoever built this place had used iron sheets to retain the gravel, which as you might expect, had long since corroded and collapsed under the weight. We needed to first retain the area where our new step would go. If we didn’t, the gravel beneath would continue to sink, especially since the step would be right on top of the problem area (which is maybe one of the reasons someone chose to put a ramp in, avoiding the issue).

With a hefty sigh, we began digging out the large stones from beneath the door, which was an effort done by hand – you can’t use a shovel on aggregate of that size.

I then had to crawl under the workshop to make measurements for some timber so we could reinforce the collapsed section under the door.

I tried to pull the old iron away as much as possible, but it was corrugated long-run, which ran along the length of the carport, so was buried by the gravel.

With the help of a drill driver in an awkward crawlspace, I attached some lengths of timber to retain the area by screwing them onto the wooden piles beneath the workshop. It wasn’t pretty, but it would all be back-filled and covered by the new step anyway. Most importantly, it would do the job.

We filled the hole back in and screwed the old buried tin onto the reinforcing timber, to stop it from slipping.

Now that that was done, it was time for the fun part!

We chose to use pocket-holes for a tidy look (no screw heads visible on top of the step).

We attached it from underneath directly onto the wall of the workshop, so it wouldn’t move under the forces of repeated stomping.

Then we attached the face-plate, and viola!

Much better, yes? Looked more suited to our new door, too:

Most importantly it didn’t budge, and took up far less space.

Since we’re on the topic of steps, another one we needed to build for the workshop was inside. Strangely, the workshop had been built with two levels (we’re unsure why). The height difference between the levels was awkward (about forty centimetres), and there wasn’t a step to join them.

We decided to make quite a deep step, so stepping out felt natural. Eager as ever to put our tools to use and get familiar with them, we got to work.

A corner clamp is very handy for these sorts of builds, especially with mitred corners:

We attached the frame of the step to the floor, once again employing our favourite method of attachment, hidden pocket-holes!

We put a support at the centre of the step, too, for added robustness and so the step wouldn’t bow in the middle over time.

All that was left to do was cap it, and then boom, we’d made our lives a little easier.

Retrofitting is always tricky with wonky floors and whatnot, so such projects require a lot of behind-the-scenes forethought and take more time. We try to see projects like this as lessons for when it comes time to renovate our cottage, which will demand a higher standard of quality from us. Good thing there’s no shortage of projects like this around the old farm to hone our skills with!