Build Weird

06/03/2026

Fun with Lasers. I wanna put a fancy set of steps up to the greenhouse from the restaurant, and we figured out that we have over 12 feet of drop and 65 feet of run. One of the things you may not know about Ruby is math is one of his superpowers. He can figure out how many steps we need in his head before I can enter it into the calculator. He does that when calculating cubic yards of concrete too…. Crazy.

06/03/2026

Fit check! All the sparkle courtesy of Pete Lien & Sons, Inc.

06/02/2026

New tool Tuesday! We saw this new tool that Milwaukee came out with at the world of concrete this winter. Is a dedicated rebar cutter, they will cut up to #10 rebar. I got the demo it in the booth and it worked super slick. I finally had a reason to get one, working on our Solar carport. The engineer inspected out all #6 rebar. Cut it like a champ.

05/29/2026

https://youtu.be/vYO5Thd3XkM

Cappie goes on an extended tour of the greenhouse at Shortgrass. Built and featured in the second season of his show, this greenhouse can withstand the harsh...

05/28/2026

Sprout has a plan! We’re putting together our furniture at Shortgrass today, and Sprout, came to work, dressed, ready to swim! We’re working inside the garage today out of the sun, but she’s going swimming at lunch

05/23/2026

I love a good sale! Got me a bag of earplugs on sale today! 100 pair baby!

05/22/2026

Ruby got a Rattle Stick! We met Frank and his crew from at the World of Concrete Show this year. Ruby has always wanted one, so we decided it was time. This is a very cool invention if you do any kind of concrete. It’s basically a vibrating head unit for your concrete tools. Here we used it, to screed off a footer that we poured for our trench drain. It was super slick, totally worked as advertised. We’ve got a lot of projects we want to use it on this summer, excited to have it in the toolbox.

05/22/2026

It’s Sprouts first official day back at work after the school year! She has no idea. She has to put a few hundred screws into our form boxes. Her and are going to be good friends by the time the day is done. 😂

05/21/2026

It’s not junk! I get made fun of a lot for collecting “ junk” but it’s not junk, it just hasn’t found its purpose yet. We’re getting ready to pour some concrete columns. And all of our form boxes need to be reinforced. We do that with something called Whalers. Basically it’s just a band of structural lumber wrapped around the plywood box to add strength, and keep the boxes from deforming. Lumber doesn’t have to be pretty. It just has to be strong. And these form boxes will only get used one other time, so investing, a new lumber to the tune of $500+ send ridiculous when we had all of this in the boneyard. This is why you keep all the treasurers people. This is why you keep all the treasures.