Installing the tankless water heater gas vent was a bit of a challenge. I had to measure the outside wall and match it up with the measurements of the inside wall. I used a window to base the measurements to make sure that I would place the hole in between the studs correctly, which I couldn’t see or figure out on the outside of the house. The reason I decided to work from outside in was, I wanted the top of the wall thimble on the outside of the house to tuck under the siding.
The gas vent install worked out a lot smoother than I thought it would. I am not one who likes to cut 6 inch holes into a perfectly solid wall. One mistake and the patch job could be horrendous. I have not installed a vent hole since the build of the home when I installed a vent for our battery bank to vent the off gassing of the batteries during charging and equalizing, and the necessary vent for the plumbing on the roof.
It’s the initial cut that finally gets me moving in a steady course. Once the main hole from the 10” x 1/4” drill bit was made. Everything fell into line smoothly after that. I did much of the work during a slight drizzle that day, which was a few weeks back. We haven’t had much rain since.
I created another video about organizing the closet, which needed to happen to start the tankless water heater install, but I decided to wait on posting it, and post it out of order. I felt that I needed to show the progress on this project since a few people who know me and watch our YouTube channel commented to me that they were surprise that I had hot water since I hadn’t posted the finished project yet.
When creating videos, there is a process of editing, and I space out the posts to once a week. Our videos are about 3 weeks behind real time. I enjoy blogging and writing articles about what we do, but I also like to read others posts as well. One thing my wife and I agreed on was to post at least once a week, maybe one midweek for special events or to catch up on video releases. I once followed bloggers that would post every day, and to be honest seeing bloggers post up to 6 times a day gets frustrating. One, I don’t have that much time to spend on one blog reading 6 different articles. Two, other bloggers I follow get buried, and I can’t find their posts within the post dumps some bloggers do. I know that they’re following some prescribed rule of mass posting to get more hits on their websites, but for a subscriber or follower, it creates more digital clutter.
Personally, I don’t have the time or interest to post every day. Projects take time, filming, photographing, and writing about each moment takes time and bogs the process of each project down. During our initial build, I didn’t even have a blog. It wasn’t until all our necessities were in that I finally was able to take a breath and reflect. Blogging has helped me do that.
If you are a blogger, and a do-it-yourself-er, you probably understand what I am talking about. During the past 2 years of blogging, many of the blogs I used to follow have cease to post or even exist. Living a Sustainable Dream is perhaps the slowest growing blog and YouTube channel out there. Why, because we pace ourselves. We blog once a week and create a list of posts that may be interesting to others to read or watch. We schedule filming, editing, and posting times. We’re sustaining our blog and YouTube channel by being realistic about what we can do with our time.
If you are blogger who hasn’t posted in a while, don’t feel guilty. In the beginning when I started blogging, I took two or three days and created several posts, usually during a vacation or extra-long weekend. I then set each post to release on a specific date and time about a week a part. I then went back to work or continued with my projects knowing each post would release at the predetermined time. YouTube, however, does not have this option, which has bogged me down somewhat, but I am talking to mainly bloggers here.
How are you bloggers sustaining your blogs? Please share how you maintain an active blog and encourage others who are seeking to do the same thing.
Living a Sustainable Dream 