Progress!

The large spruce is down. It really looks and feels different around the existing house. Bill also felled the remaining black walnuts (sad, but had to be done) and I finished taking down the fence between the pasture and the house. Compliments of the spruce, we have some amazing logs that we are going to have milled and use for stair treads, cabinets, etc in the new house. Bill counted the rings and estimates that the tree was about 105 years old. We also cleared the downed black walnuts into a staging area in piles of “future firewood” and “ReAdapted project material” as well as getting all of the brush stacked in a burn pile. (Although now that Bill is reading about Rob's delightful endeavors over at One Straw I bet we chip it instead of burning it! I envision our next purchase will be a chipper that goes on the tractor PTO.)

Big tree behind the house is gone!

Note the stump - it feels so open now

Black Walnuts are down at the future home site

Some of the Black Walnut logs - future ReAdapted projects?

Additionally, we met with a local electrical contractor who is going to take down all of our overhead electrical lines and bury them. The timing works well since soon (hopefully) next week, the excavator is coming to excavate around the house, excavate the new home site, berm up areas to direct watershed from the back hill and install another culvert to direct water away from the homesite. Although we don’t envision starting construction for another two years, we need to know and understand how this watershed re-direction is going to work before we build a new house.

Bury those overhead lines - some of them are bare wire

close up of the spruce stump



Spruce tops



13 ft lengths; one is 38" and clear



with the chain saw for scale (obviously, this chain saw wasn't used to cut them down!)

We also got a pallet full of framing materials delivered for the barn while we were there. We are moving ahead full-steam to try to frame and pour concrete footings and reinforcements before it gets too cold this fall. Bill built about ½ of the frames needed for the buttresses and the back wall framing.

Pile of the frames

We hope to go back either the 1st or 2nd week of Nov for an extended period. The clock is ticking on the weather and our concrete pour window is getting smaller every day.