Homesteading Aspect Oddball Thread

I needed to put a crown on a chimney 20 feet in the air.  
I used portland cement and concrete sand with concrete wire cut to size.  

 I have an old wooden Radio Flyer wagon that is useful on the homestead. It finally died and needed to be brought back.  I replaced the rotted bed with thicker plywood, added longer bolts, bigger washers, and painted it.  All the materials (plywood, bolts, washers, screws, and what was left of 3 cans of paint) were salvaged from the trash.
 It took me 4 hours to take it apart, cut and router the bed to fit, install the bed and beef up with screws, drill holes, paint, and put it back together.  

 My dad is renovating his smoke house and asked me to fix the chimney.  I used type-n cement and bar sand to replace a brick, relay a few, and point it.  

Hey PEP-folks,
At the beginning of this summer (before the brutal heat set in), I wanted to do something for my roof solar heat gain. I also didn't want to spend money, and had a lot of materials left over from my construction business, including a single bucket of roof-white elastomer, a single bucket of drywall primer, and a number of bags of natural hydraulic lime (Saint-Astier, the classy kind). So I thought back a gentleman I met long ago in central Phoenix, who had built his own adobe house in the '40s, and lived out his life as a school district cooling-plant engineer. He told me his secret sauce for his roof coating, which involved silver nitrate for better performance, but was basically a modified whitewash. (We considered, but didn't end up buying his house back then, he was 5'6", I am 6'7" - he built the house for him.)

So, I decided I'd give it a go to cut the elastomer fraction to about 20%, and make up the rest with lime and water to a whitewash recipe proportion, calling it a "polymer-modified whitewash". This is consistent with how I have done rammed earth, where a fraction of acrylic admix is put into the pile (Akkro 6T in that case) and then the wall is weatherproof.  All told, 10gal of acrylics, 100lbs of lime, making about 50gal of mix. The roof was black asphalt shingles (thanks Clayton Homes), about 1800sqft.

Side reactions abounded when the lime was added to the acrylics. There was a sort of "smoothie" on top of the liquid, which did eventually mix in, but it was an interesting exothermic reaction. I rolled it down and for a couple of days left about 20% of the roof undone.... for science... but also because work, and life, and so on. But it meant that I could get thermography of the different regions of the roof in full sun. There's about a 20degC difference between the coated and uncoated roofing. This was encouraging.  

The final test was surviving monsoons, which an ordinary whitewash would likely not have. There was no loss of coating during heavy rain, so the acrylic did its job (at least this year).

All told, this project took about 6-8hrs. Lugging full 5gal buckets up ladders is not my favorite thing, but all went well.

(PS - the last IR image is of a bare galvanized steel flue hat from our propane heater. It is included as an object lesson in knowing the emissivity of the object you're pointing your FLIR at - it's plenty hot, likely 65-70degC, but because bare metal emits infrared photons poorly, it "looks cool" to the IR camera. Shingles, the human body, plastics, all tend to act nearly like black bodies, with an emissivity near the max of 1, so they can be accurately compared in a basic IR camera shot. Metals, not so much. Ceramics, too, can be pretty different. Fun with physics!)
Happy homesteading!
Mark