Basement Tiling Update

A quick update on our tiling project in the basement. We got a lot more square footage covered yesterday. We’re working towards a goal of being done by next Saturday, so it’s starting to get a bit worrisome as to whether we’ll meet our goal.

All the wood trim is ordered and should be delivered today along with the doors, hopefully.

We’ll start trimming out the basement and install the bathroom vanity this weekend. The plumber comes on Monday to make all the bath connections, and lower the shower head.

I tried my hand at cutting tile yesterday with a grinder. It wasn’t to hard to do. Just wear gloves, ear and eye protection. My hearing is shot so I always wear ear protection. A piece of the grinding wheel broke off and hit my hand, so thanks to my gloves for buffering that a bit. It still smarted pretty good though. And it goes without saying that eye protection is important to block from dust, tile chips and grinder wheel bits.

After about 24 hours the tile can be walked on. We’ve got about a 100 sq. feet more to complete and then I have to grout it all.  The office area will be tiled and trimmed at a later date. We just need to get the bathroom and living area done for a party next Saturday.

The ceiling will happen sometime this winter once we recover from financing the other basement finishing.

Tiling the hallway

Cutting tile with a grinder.

Basement room is tiled

Basement Progress

We started tiling the basement floor. And today the electrician started to finish up the electrical work. All of the switches and outlets are installed in the main room and bathroom. As well as a couple of light fixtures and a bathroom fan.

It’s impossible to take good photos of lights with my phone, but you can generally see what they look like in today’s photos.

The tile is going to take a long time install. This is most of a day’s worth of labor.

The bathroom light we bought at Home Depot.

The caged wall sconce we bought from Restoration Hardware.

Summer Honey

I spent the weekend extracting summer honey. This is the first year we’ve extracted honey two times. The amazing thing is how dark this honey is compared to the lighter spring honey we extracted in July. I’m not exactly sure why it is so much darker, other than I know that the nectar that the bees collect determines the color. That is to say, different flowers produce different color honey. Our land has a variety of flowering trees, bushes and plants that blossom throughout the year, so I suppose it’s not too surprising that summer honey differs from spring honey. But I’ve never seen it this dark before. It’s basically black for all intents and purposes.

(Here is a good article from ErinNudi.com on the benefits of dark honey.)

Basically darker honey has more vitamins, anti-oxidents, and nutrients than light honey. Dark honey is preferred in Europe, and light in America. Dark is better with your oatmeal, whereas light is better with your tea.

Like wine I suppose, honey has a variety of flavor profiles, and there are even honey tasting events. We did our own impromptu honey tasting, and they do smell and taste different. You could definitely smell the difference while I was extracting the honey, as the dark honey has a stronger smell than light. We bottle our honey similar to wine, in that I mark the season, year, type and hive number or numbers on each bottle. Honey never spoils, so we plan on saving at least a bottle or two from every extraction we do, so we’ll have a “library” or catalog of our honey throughout our lives as beekeepers.

We pulled three frames from Hive No. 3, and eleven frames from Hive No. 1, for a total of 14 frames in this batch. I combined them all into one “vintage”. Right now I’m naming the honey ‘3/11 Summer 2015 Wildflower’, but it’s so dark and we’re close to Halloween, I may name it something different. The “3/11” part indicates the number of frames in this “blend”. It’s not always going to be convenient to separate extractions by hive, in which case we’ll have blended varieties.

Hive No. 1 is a real overachiever this year. A typical new hive won’t usually produce any harvestable honey its first year. Hive No. 1, the angry bee hive, has given us over 85 lbs. of honey in year one. And it still has plenty for itself over winter; nearly an entire mid sized super or more.

One last note before we get to the totals and pics. The yellow jackets are out in full force again this fall. We’ve been filling traps with them, and we’ve put our entrance reducers on both hives. A smaller entrance is easier to defend. And we’ve dropped both lids flat to keep the yellow jackets out of the top of the hive as well. When I was cleaning the equipment today, there were a lot of yellow jackets out. We were killing them one at a time when possible. So fingers crossed that both hives survive until the first frosts show up and the yellow jackets die off.

Totals – Summer 2015 3/11 Wildflower honey

Frames: 14 (3 hive 3, 11 hive 1)

47 pounds of honey

(2) 4 oz. jars

(56) 8 oz. jars

(5) 16 oz. jars

Light and dark honey on the same Hive No. 3 frame.

Look at how dark it is, uncapped on the frame.

Wax cappings piled up in the capping tank.

An extracted frame of honeycomb

The inside of the extractor.

Pouring from the extractor into a 5 gallon bucket.

Pouring the honey from bucket to glass jar.

The finished bottled product.

Compare the light Spring honey vs. the dark Summer honey.