Progress

Chickens using the "Chicken Jungle Gym"
as well as shading themselves under Jim's chicken pergola.

We have had lots of progress this week. The footers are dug and poured and the basement is entirely cleaned out. The mason has finished his fixes and tuck pointing. We narrowed down our stone choices to one color and the brick color is down to two choices. We made some changes to the garage layout which have necessitated a new building permit so we are waiting on that to come through. We ordered exterior doors and windows this week as well. With all the progress it is hard to not get overly excited. The boys are talking about how to decorate their rooms and I even got a paint chip deck from the paint store.

Hard to read but the bright orange sign says
"Grandma and Grandpa's place."

We also had a nice visit from Julie's parents. Boy did they accomplish lots while they were here. Jim cut vines and trees along the driveway, the property front and in the woods. We are lucky he can wield a chainsaw. Jim and Marie cleaned the future movie room in the house, that was a chore we have been avoiding for weeks. The chickens needed a spot for shade so Jim and Marie also repurposed a pallet into a chicken pergola. Those are just some of the highlights. The chores they helped us with are just too numerous to mention. We tried to get them to stay longer in the lush accommodations of the barn, but the call of a hot bath and actual beds won out over the port-a-potty and camping cots.

Chris installed 3 new bee colonies this week. They seem to be doing fine and settling in to their new homes nicely. Julie had to pick up the bee packages in her car (not the open bed truck). Ask Jim and Marie about their ride with 10,000 bees, some of whom were not in their nice bee packages. I am sure you will get a good story out of them!

The garden is just waiting for life. While the asparagus had several spears it is lacking the quantity to feed the family. So we will wait another year and hopefully next year will be a bumper crop. The blossoms on the strawberries look so promising, they are both large and numerous. The broccoli is looking good, and the parsnips, fennel, squash, lettuce and cabbage have all germinated. This weekend I hope to put in lots more to really get things going.

I give this week 5 shovels

shovels and some other things we found

That is how many shovels we found this week.  We worked on cleaning out the basement and we finished cleaning out the little shed.  We still have not found the box of money that must be here somewhere,  but we keep trying.  We all found some treasures this weekend. Chris plans to salvage the little shed to repurpose as a wood shed and I have been saving some random wood to make some sort of a wall hanging.  Jackson found a whole box of switches to which he said "These are exactly what I need!"  He also salvaged several spools of wire which he plans to put to good use.  Cooper would have found treasure as well,  but every time we came across a dead snake, snake skin or animal skull, we swiftly tossed them out of sight.

I installed the automatic solar chicken door this week and Chris is still working on the nesting box, otherwise the coop and run are looking good.  We moved the chickens into the coop yesterday.  I am sure it was a comical sight to see Cooper and I trying to catch them all,  transfer them to a pet carrier then walk them to the new coop.The chickens are very wary to leave the coop and explore their new surroundings so the chicken run remains unused as of yet.  We have clearly identified one rooster and possibly a second,  which means we will probably need to have fresh chicken for dinner soon.

This week we had enough material to write our own country song.  The bees are all dead,  the pipes froze, turkeys ate all our newly planted grass seed and the toilet overflowed.  However we are lucky enough to get on the list and we have 3 packages of bees arriving April 7th,  warmer weather is coming and I have 100 lbs of grass seed waiting to be planted.  As always,  life is good!

Bringing down the house

If you were to see Chris or I this week,  we have huge grins we can't get rid of.  They took down the old house this week,  it was a huge milestone for this project.  It took two days to get the house down and I think a lot simpler than anyone had anticipated. 

Telehandler getting ready to knock down the fireplace.

I have been keeping myself busy planting grass.  I hate planting and growing grass,  but it is a necessary evil and I only do so much each day.  Then I spend the rest of my day on more fun things like getting the chicken coop ready.  They are ready to move,  but we have no fence up for them.  I dug a trench to bury the fence and buried hardware mesh around the coop structure 4in deep and 12 inches out. Hopefully this will keep the digging predators out.  I dug two of four post holes for the fence,  we should be able to get the fence up lickety split this weekend.

I have also been trying to work in the garden sporadically.  I am doing an experiment with the potatoes this year.  I have some growing in grow pots (black bags)  in straw and some growing in a bed covered with straw.  I am curious to see which method produces the nicest and the most potatoes.  This week I got our "orchard" planted.  We have 6 trees including peach, apple, pear and cherries.  The pies will be wonderful!

Another monumental event happened today when the Steves (scrap metal guys) came to the door and said they were finished.  Hard to believe that that job ended as there was more metal here than Wrigley's has gum (thanks JT for that analogy).

Things are looking good these days.  We are giddy with the progress we have made and Chris is happy that I have stopped looking at finished houses for sale.

Busy, Busy Busy

Now we have tractor envy.

I has been a busy couple of weeks!  Our guy Ron,  has been busy clearing away junk from what we affectionately call Junk Yard Alley.  He also cleaned up the brush and little trees behind the house.  They worked about 3 days and it looks like a whole new place.  I will refrain from commenting on what we did with a lot of the cylinders,  but they will forever be close by. 

Ron also came by one evening and moved the shed.  I painted it red and have some minor modifications to make then we will have a bonafide chicken coop.  Not a moment to soon either,  the chickens are ready for their outdoor home this weekend.  We did loose one chicken so we have 11 now ready for the cozy new home.

Steve and Steve came back to collect scrap metal after almost a year long break.  Today they are going to take the copper wire out of the old house and a few misc scraps.  I am always amazed by the little scraps they will go to great pains to collect.

I have been selling bricks from the piles.  So far we have three different people taking bricks and you still can't tell where they took them from.  We have decided to use one pile ourselves to brick the house to grade in the back.  Something tells me that we will still have extra when the project is complete.

We are still working with the county to get our building permit.  Health, engineering and zoning have all signed off and tomorrow I meet with land development for the grading plan and final sign off...hopefully. 

We have had so many people stopping by this week.  Several people to look at bricks and cylinders,  one neighbor stopped by and took me to her house for advice on fruit trees and moving a Japanese maple,  another neighbor and his daughter hiked thru the woods just to say hi,  but the most interesting was the soils testing guy who stopped by.  He had done a soils test for us back in 2009 before we bought the property.  He happened to be in the area and wanted to see how we were fairing.  We chatted about the progress and he asked about our plans for the old doors and windows in the house.  Apparently he is building a log cabin and is going to take the old doors and windows for his own project.  It just caught us by surprise but we are so happy to reduce the amount of waste from this project.

It was just time.

I changed my ring tone to green acres today. I figured it was just time.

Chickens!

Chick on left is an austrolorp.  the one posing is an americana.

The chickens arrived!!  We are super excited to have them.  Our americana birds come in an array of colors.  we have yellow ones, brown ones and grey ones.  They are 9 days old now and have grown tremendously in the week we've had them.  They are starting to get their wing feathers and their tail feathers. Right now they are in the barn under the heat lamp and should be ready to move to their coop in early March.  I guess that means we should start building the coop?  Yesterday i staked out the chicken yard and I think I have Chris convinced that he does not have enough time to build the coop himself and we can have someone else build it for us.  Otherwise,  one of the boys may have to give up their room.

Chris worked all weekend organizing the barn to get a space ready for the water to come in and a place for the pressure tank.  This kids an I mostly played with the chickens.  Yoda loves the chickens and will sit and watch them for ages.

We are enjoying mild weather,  upper 50's to 60's.  We sure hope that will eliminate typical spring backlog for the construction industry.  We have our fingers crossed that we will not have to spend another winter in the RV.  As fun as camping is,  we all will enjoy having a house again!

Cold, Hot, Cold, Hot

The past couple of weeks have been all about temperature. We had some really mild weather and the daffodils are up about 2 inches.
We took advantage of the warm weather and worked in the chilly barn and hung foam board on the ceiling and walls of the workshop area. Now we have a nice insulated spot we can heat and spend some time there.
Now that we finally have a heated space in the barn, our 12 volt system in the RV broke. That means no lights, and the electric starter on the hot water and furnace do not work. We spent four days using lanterns and space heaters, but Thursday the mobile rv repair man(our new best friend) came by and we are all fixed up.
We had a big win this week, in that we closed on our construction loan. It was pretty funny to see our names listed as general contractor for the project. Last week we got our initial building permit applied for and the health department gave us the go ahead. We are now on the list with our ccontractor to get the septic to the barn installed and initial grading started. The cement guy has us on his radar to do the foundation and we are accepting the final bids for frameing.

It is hard to believe that we are actually ready to start construction! 9 months after we moved out here. Yippeee!