More Homestead Progress!

Despite a fair amount of needed rain this past week, there has been good progress out at our future homestead!

This week the outside foundation for the house was completed. I aspect next week will involve filling in some of the inside area of the house and digging the support wall footings. If we are lucky, maybe some of the plumbing. There is more rain in the forecast for Wed and Thurs. The house will be on a slab for the passive solar thermal mass, but I convinced our builder to raise it up off the ground some. It will still be close to the ground, but at least not right at ground level.

This is a preview of our view from our kitchen window, and pretty much every room at the front of the house. Of course the front yard needs some work.

This weekend's project was spreading 6 cubic yards of gravel in our future garage. Good-bye dusty dirt floor. An upcoming project will be re-doing those stairs, but we need to wait until we have some electricity.

The kids and Karen did a great job loading the gravel, I just stood around taking pictures!

The reward for our hard days work....

Sunday was mostly a day of rest. We built a small fire and had a bunch of friends and some of our future neighbors over for a big weiner roast. The weather was perfect, and it was nice to sit back and relax out there for a change.

Homestead Progress!!

It has been an eventful week on the farm ! I had the previous week off from work and decided to attack the repairing of our "vintage" barn. Unfortunately the previous owners did not keep the roof in a good state of repair and several obviously long term leaks resulted in the rotting through of the whole loft section of the right "lean to" side of the barn. My hopes were to repair the leaking sections to preserve the otherwise generally good structural wood below the leaking roof. After "conquering " my fear of heights and some makeshift safety ropes I spent the good part of 5 days tearing off rusted through metal sections and replacing them with shiny new ones! Let's just say that I do not think I want to be a metal roofer! We now hopefully have a leak free roof for the winter. I still have some work to do on the roof, but will not be able to get to it until the lower structures are repaired.

Without a doubt tearing off the old sections was the worse part of the job!

Some of my finished handy work!




The next big event was getting our first animals on the farm!!! We decided we had had enough of cat hair, daily cat puke, cat litter, cat urine, and fleas!!! We moved the cats to the land and they seem to be adapting quite well . They have stayed around their new house, the tractor shed, and seem quite content. I think we are all much happier!! Now if we could just get rid of these damn fleas!!


First farm animals!



Our animal friends across the road

Our animal friends...., oh wait , those are the kids!!

We recently had the big oaks trimmed, a couple dead trees, and a couple trees in the new house sight taken down. This is a shot of our new back yard. The row of trees in the back of picture come down this week to open up the view of the cows in the field above.

We also had a bunch of scrubby cedars and gum ball trees taken out of the field out back to make the area easier to mow and a more useful space. It actually looks like a farm field now! And luckily the tractor held in there for another round of mowing!!

And finally we got a start on stacking some of the firewood for our future wood stove from some of the trees that were taken down in the yard. This is probably half of the wood they left behind for us. The kids just love stacking wood! Right Ethan!???