B-r-r-r!

Wah, wah, wah, ... all I seem to be doing lately is complaining about the cold weather down here. I know it could be worse, it just is not supposed to be this cold in NC! And what is with all of this snow!?

Not a lot going on down here lately. Karen and the kids have hopped int he Explorer and drove all the way to Tulsa, OK. She reports an uneventful trip, and said it was really not that bad of a drive. They will spend a week there with her family over Christmas before they head back.

I am holding the fort down, working over the holiday and keeping an eye on our house building project. Even though things are probably going well overall , I think I am going to end up with an ulcer as I fret over every little detail. This is absolutely the last time we will do this!! ( H-m-m-m, I recall uttering those same words about seven years ago!)

We do have our roof shingled now, windows were installed last Saturday. Plumbing going in this week. GT heat pump supposed to go in next week. Probably electrical the following week. Siding in the next week or two. I think we may be on track for a March move in?

Here is a recent photo after windows installed. Hope everyone has a great Christmas!!

Baby, It's Cold Outside!

Journal Log: 12/06/2010 It has been about six months in the rental property. We survived the long hot summer and the crops were good. We were bracing for a cold winter and it has finally arrived. The pantry stores are good, but we are not sure if we are going to survive the freezing temperatures at night. We find ourselves sneaking into bed earlier each night to protect us from the nighttime temperatures as the old furnace seems to have trouble keeping the farmhouse anything close to warm. The temperature in the kids rooms upstairs was 49 degrees this morning, but they don't really complain, they are snuggled under many layers of blankets. Tonight with lows predicted in the teens we may need to move them downstairs and close off the upstairs which is really only passively heated by the downstairs. I hate getting out of bed at night to use the bathroom, as I have found that getting out of bed at night in your skivvies to urinate leaves my toes with frost bite and takes 30 minutes under the blankets to recover my core body temperature. Though it has been better after I started wearing sweat pants and sweat shirt to bed. We had to chip ice off the toilet this morning before we could flush.... well, not really but I won't be surprised if that happens by the end of winter!

We received our first snowfall this past Saturday with about two inches of accumulation. It was beautiful. We were raking leaves at the farm when it started and the kids were quite excited about it. So were Karen and I, as it got so wet it became unbearable to continue raking and hauling leaves that we had to just quit and sit back and enjoy looking at it.

Despite the cold, we are going to hunker down and suck it up. Hopefully next winter we will either be basking in the warmth of the sun indoors, or sitting by our fireplace keeping all warm and toasty! The house is coming right along and we absolutely are loving the way it is starting to look. It is hard to convey the open inside with the camera as the depth of field is so short with my lenses. But here is a peek at the outside.

We are hoping to have the roof shingled this week, and the windows should arrive late next week. I am crossing my fingers they do not botch up the special windows for the South side(front) as they are a key component of the passive solar design. The geothermal heat pump is supposed to be installed next week. It will not be operational until the house is wired and insulated. That is all the news from down here, right now I need to get my sweats on and go to bed!

Thanksgiving Day Update...

We hope everyone had a great TG ! We spent the morning delivering TG dinners through our church and the Durham Rescue Mission to some families in need in Durham. The rest of the day we spent preparing our own dinner, and later enjoying it with some of our friends.

Today I am home with the kids on a rainy day, so thought it would be a good time to update our homestead progresss. A lot has happend on the house over the past week or so. It is mostly framed up at this point. The second level proved to be a bit challanging to the framing crew and slowed them down a bit. I am hopeful we will have the roof up by the end of next week.

Below is most of the first floor framed up. This is looking at the front South side, it will have a lot of big windows which you can barely make out the roughed in frames of.

This is a shot of Aki coming up the stairs to second level. That area behind him will be a BF nook.

This is a shot looking down into the kitchen, dining, and living room from front to back. This area will be mostly open with a cathedral ceiling. The narrow area to the left will be a balcony overlooking this area. Some of those lateral beams will be visible, they will be drywalled.

This is the most recent shot I have of the framing. Some of the windows are covered with OSB for now. You can see part of the chimney chase framing just beyond the front entry. The beginning of the clerestory is framed in at the top of the roof.

And the following are just a couple shots trying out the new camera. There was a beautiful sunset on my last drive to our rental from the land. I had to pullover to capture this old tractor silhouetted against the sky.

And last weekend another sunset against our old barn caught my eye!

Slab Happy!!

Things have really been moving along with the new house construction. Most of the drainage plumbing has been stubbed in for under the slab. Almost all of the water supply "pipes" (actually tubing) will run through the walls or first floor ceiling. Next they had to fill in the interior of the house with gravel and dig out the interior footings for the support walls, fireplace. Then 2 inches of foam board insulation was fit over the gravel. Next a plastic vapor barrier was applied over that. Finally a four inch thickness of concrete was poured this Friday morning.








Tamping the gravel and applying foam board insulation (R-10)

The first of many concrete trucks, a truck was scheduled for every thirty minutes, I can't remember how many cubic yards of concrete, I think 36 ???

The next day we had our first floor completed, the framers started some work, but the studs were not delivered so they were limited in what they could do. They did mark off all the inside walls so we could get a feel for the layout and size of the rooms. This house feels "just right"!!

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!???

Beach Trip!

We returned Monday from a whirl wind trip to Harkers Island, NC...an island just off the coast. An old friend from work met us down there at her beach house and we spent a few days catching up, and relaxing ,...as much as one can with three energetic kids. We had a nice time visiting, fishing, and hanging out on the beach.

We had some rain, but overall good weather. The rain was really a blessing as we were in a drought with no rain for about a month. As of this Thursday morning 5"!! . The following pictures are from our recent trip.

Good thing we have a year lease!

No pictures today, just an update on our current state of affairs. There has not been a lot of action down here. Kids are nearing the end of there first quarter of school already. Ethan has a 2 day field trip to the beach next Thursday and Friday. Karen is going to chaperone. Hopefully no hurricanes! The following week we are all going to go to a friend's beach house for a long weekend with the whole family.

I am not sure we are ever going to break ground on the new house. Right now all that is breaking is our budget! Our builder seriously underestimated the cost of the windows, not entirely his fault as he went based on his experience, and our windows ended up being somewhat special ordered. They turned out to be TWICE what he had allowed. Ouch! This week I submitted our well permit application and authorization to construct permit. Only to find out that since I moved the house back on the lot about 60 more feet that it messed up the "replacement" septic area, not to mention I tried to place our well in the replacement septic area as well! Needless to say, now I am going to need to have the perk redone based on the new house location. Ouch again. I am hopeful that everything will miraculously fall into place and our construction loan, the above septic situation/permits, building permit, and construction insurance will all be ready by the end of the month! Which means we could finally get started.
That is likely expecting a bit much.

Meanwhile we are hanging in there in the rental house! A story in itself....I am bracing for a long cold winter.

BURGLERY.....Check!!!!

Well, if you notice no picture at the top of this post, that would be because someone stole our digital camera, ... and our PC computer, laptop computer, video camera, 35mm camera, satellite radio, IPOD, suitcase, my gym bag, and even my broken watch with a dead battery this past Wednesday afternoon while Karen and I were at work and the kids in school. I suppose it was just a matter of time, but it still leaves you feeling somewhat like you were raped, I suppose.

I guess that is the big news here for the week, still recovering from the shock of that. We are hopeful our rental insurance will cover most things. It is just stuff, and a big inconvenience.
House plans are near completed, tying up a few loose ends there. My tractor is disabled until I can get an oil seal replaced... not so easy I am finding out to get parts for a 50 yo tractor. I ordered one, but it currently is looking like it is not going to fit... perhaps with a big hammer?!?

Otherwise all is well !

HOT!!!!

This has been one of those weeks of summer in North Carolina where you just really need to "suck it up" and bear the heat. I tell myself this is the price we pay for the otherwise mild year round climate. But it ain't easy when the heat index is 105 degrees and the window AC units in the rental house just can't keep up. When the kids go up to bed it is so hot upstairs it reminds me of summers growing up in "the little gray house on the corner" without AC. Mom use to call us down after an hour or two for a cool glass of Kool Aid! Course I can't give our kids Kool Aid, but we do bring them some ice water. They don't seem to complain, ... I suspect partly because they were used to the heat in Africa. The AC unit happens to only plug in, in an outlet in Ethan's room... so it all works out.

Because of the heat we have been laying low this week. However we did get out to our land early each morning this weekend to do some work before the day got too hot. We got a bunch of old wood and some heavy and large bedraggled piece of antique farm equipment drug out of our future garage. Shalo knocked all the old mud wasps nests down from the ceiling joists. We will level of the dirt floor and perhaps later in August haul in some crush and run for the floor. It is looking much better in there now that it is cleaned out.

Our "new "farm truck" being put to use

Sunday morning Karen and I got out our respective tractors and mowed again. Hot, Hot , Hot!!! The kids find things to play around in while we are working.

Mike on his toy tractor!

Because of the heat the garden is winding down for the summer. Tomatoes are petering out, cantaloupes are ripening. Then we should have a few weeks off until time to plant fall garden crops.

We are hoping to make final changes to house plans this week. Then we can apply for building permits and get the new house under construction... hopefully in about 5 weeks? I wish I took more pictures, need to get better at that. When I am working I forget about it. Our pet vultures are out of the barn and flying regularly overhead ! Will try to get a photo.

Signs of the end of summer !?

It has been a busy week down here in NC. The kids start back in their year round school. Two in first grade and one in fourth. They all were actually pretty eager to get back to school. The first week went well. Karen is a bit exhausted after spending most of her free time getting together school supplies, meeting all three teachers at a meet in greet, filling out three sets of information papers that seem to come home with the start of each new year. You'd think they could save it from one year to the next?! One week down, and they all are happy with their teachers. Shalo only came home with a "treasure" once, Aki only had "yellow" once... it doesn't get any better then that!

Can you say "Holy Tomatoes!" ....We spent two whole nights tackling this pile of tomatoes: first washing them, cutting stems out, then blanching them, then into ice water to help skins slide off, then in strainers to drain over night in the fridge. The next night cutting alot of peppers, onions, garlic, basil, and adding spices and cooking the whole lot about one hour, putting it in quart jars, and boiling in a water bath for 40 minutes, then going to bed exhausted at 11:15pm....I figure about an hour per jar of labor if you count the time picking them.






I have to keep reminding myself how good this will be inthe middle of winter! ....

And it better be, because I picked all of these Thursday night, after Karen and her Dad just picked them Monday morning!!!! Guess what we will be doing this weekend!

Tomatos!!

The welcoming comittee at Steph's house.

I went to Steph's house to see if there were any tomatos to pick this morning. I was surprised with a bountiful harverst. A welcome treat after having gone months refusing to buy those store bought red things they call "tomatos" but don't really taste like tomatos. Of course with Karen and the kids gone I am not sure what I am going to do with them all. I reck'on I will try to keep most of them well to completely ripen and then make some salsa or spaghetti sauce to can. Both were a big hit this past winter. Something you have to remember when you go through all the work to can them.

Burpee's Early Opener

The Bounty!

As I remember from last year, July is a busy month of putting up the harvest for the winter months to come. Freezing zuchinni, corn. Canning salsa, spahghetti sauce, pickles. Picking and freezing blueberries and blackberries.

Yesterdays work,... freezing 5 dozen ears of "Silver Queen" sweet corn.

But today I am going to enjoy fresh tomatos on my sandwich and with dinner tonight!