Inside the homestead...

With the hot weather I have been cooped up inside more, so finally took a few pictures inside the house to share, though it is really hard to do justice to things. With the camera I have, I really can't fit much into a picture inside the house. I'll share some random snippets so you can get a general idea of how the inside of house finished out. No particular order.

Well, this is not exactly inside, but it was the view from the BF nook window last evening...


Kitchen in the morning...

From up on the balcony, looking over kitchen and into the BF nook...

Karen's favorite room, ... in full production it appears...

View from the reading loft upstairs....

Upstairs balcony,...

Downstairs looking down hallway west to east....

Dining room,....pass through in the upper right corner, fireplace to the left....

Living room....east end of house..

Fireplace between living room and dining room...

Sun room doors which lead into the West entry area screened in porch...


View from sun room out to front yard....

Barn Razing!!

I know there has not been anything new here lately, but we have not been sitting around watching the sunset every day! This barn needed some serious TLC. As you will see below the right hand lean too section was in a serious state of disrepair. Our goal was to salvage the main left side structure which seems pretty solid. We decided to add a support beam down the center to give it a little more support. That could have been a separate BLOG entry in itself. It took four adults and a couple kids manning hydraulic jacks to get our beam up against the ceiling and add the posts underneath it. Overall it worked out well... and no one had any posts fall on their head..almost but not ....

This is a look at what we were dealing with on that right hand side...

Although none of us really took down a barn before, I think we had an excellent crew, we were constantly deliberating how to do it without killing anyone. We decided to start with the roof removal and salvaged the newer pieces of metal previously installed with good intentions...

Next we started stripping off the siding, again trying to salvage as much wood as possible.

We noticed some interesting building techniques with cedar support posts notched out for supporting true 2 x4 framing pieces. I have plans for using two of these for either clothe line poles or hammock supports. I would guess they are at least 75-10 years old.

After the siding was removed we decided we would need to take the roof rafters and floor joists out one at a time, and one end at a time, .. which worked out well... we all took turns using the new SAWZALL that we sent Karen to Home Depot to get... she did well, and I think it paid for itself in one day!

And this is Brenda, who showed up in a long summer dress, obviously to assure we would not make her get her hands dirty!! She did play an important role cheering the guys on every time another rafter crashed to the ground....

She particularly like the view in the " Patrick Swayze Room" !!

Finally the last wall came tumbling down to the ground.... about 9 hours later.. not bad for a days work!!

This is the exhausted, but proud demolition team. From left to right: Curtis, Andrew, Anthony, myself , and Karen' s dad. I can't thank them all enough!

And last but not least the nail pulling team!!! ...

A previous weekend project, the nest box for future chicken coop. In case they start laying before it is completed.

And another weekend project, replacing the termite ridden, delapitated stairs in the garage building!

And last but not least,... a little photographic update of the turkey progress...

The Outdoor Shower

As I continue to whittle away at my "To Do" list I have gotten the outdoor shower enclosure finished last week. I am very pleased with how it turned out. Per my brother Mark's advice I made it a free standing structure. Attaching it to our new house was making me nervous. I think it weighs at least a ton, and won't be moving anywhere. This is the progress after day one. I think that included getting the lumber.

By the end of the next day I had the Trek like decking installed, and finished framing it up


I had to special order the cedar 1x6's, so that took an extra day. But I am very pleased with the finished product.

I took Ethan for an evening of fishing at the pond just up the road after the project was completed. He was pretty successful!

Finally, house completed!!...mostly...

We are relieved and very happy to say that the house is pretty much done, at least enough that we can move in this weekend. We think it turned out very nice. Will take some more pictures after we get moved in. But here is a quick peek at the outside. It has been hot already, it will be interesting to see how easy it is to keep cool. The extended eaves have been doing a good job keeping the direct sun out.

Things have been very busy here with the house nearing completion, and critters growing. Below is my Memorial Day weekend project,... the new turkey shelter. We had them in the meaty tractor which meant they had to sleep on the ground. The turks are turning out to be pretty high output in regards to manure... which meant every two days it had to be moved. Since it is so hot, it needs to be mostly in shade. Shade was limited. So now they go in this structure at night to roost, and they get to forage in a pretty big electric fenced in area during the day. It is built on skids so I can move it once a month or so. Hope it is sturdy enough for that!

Our field was getting overgrown as we waited for some tractor parts to fix some minor leaks, the parts finally came, didn't fit, so we tightened things up for now and bush hogged the field. If I had known the neighbors behind us better I would have asked them if they wanted to make hay out it like they did with thiers shortly before. maybe next time. This is our friend Curtis, who lucky for us, loves tractors!

Chicken Harvest Time!

We were blessed with cooperative weather and an enthusiastic and quick learning crew of friends for our first annual spring chicken harvest at our new farm. We started the process at about 08:30 AM and were completed with all 49 birds just before noon.

One of our meatie roosters trying to seek cover from our catching crew....

The killing station

The scalding pot and plucker in the background, which we rented from a wonderful lady again this year from Rougemount, NC.

The eviscerating station....

Terry was our chief chicken catcher, an important job which keeps the overall flow of the process going. This keeps the eviscerating station supplied, but not over supplied with plucked chickens...he did have some occasional help...

Curtis is a friend from work who joined us and helped out pretty much at all stations of the process...

Ethan would help fetch one when he wasn't busy warding off predators with his "Airsoft' rifle!..

Terry developed a calmer, gentler way of transporting the chickens to the killing cones...

This is Andrew who quickly caught on to the killing station and did an awesome job, it is not for the faint of heart, though he had the patience of a saint all day, and even helped our seven year old son do the deed...

Aki, Andrew, and Curtis at the scalding station...

The plucker is perhaps the biggest neccessity for doing this many chickens as quickly as we did, it can pluck up to four chickens at a time in less then one minute!!!

Beautiful,..... no muss, no fuss!!

Karen, Tracy, and I worked the eviscerating table.

Our friend Tracy claims she never gutted a chicken before, we are not so sure, as she seemed all to effiicient at it for a rookie. With a little experience one can gut a chicken in about 5 minutes or so.

The following day Mike gave them all a quick final going over and rinse. We bagged them up in shrink wrap bags that gave them a nice compact professional look.



Next we will try turkeys, which we moved out to the land the following day. I was worried they were too young and might not be able to handle the night time temps, but so far so good! They are now just about 3 weeks old, but quite fiesty! Not sure how we will handle them in October when they weigh 20-30 pounds! But we have some time to figure that out.