Progress

Still a work in progress but the shop (almost) has full sides and a full roof!

The windows are from Rebuilding Exchange in Chicago and the doors are repurposed from the farmhouse.

This is the view from the back. The large white covering on the right will eventually be a garage door (it's a tarp for the moment).

Progress on the farmhouse too. Both upstairs and downstairs are almost fully demo'd. We also have a building permit and Bill has done a first pass on the plans on CADD and we are in conversations with a passive house engineer and architect.

Oh, and the week of 3/12? We will become WI residents....!

Shop walls (aka Shipping Containers) in place

We rented a telescoping forklift last week and manipulated the two shipping containers into place on their concrete footings.

Towing chains hooked around the forks and the container

We have to drag it onto the stone area and rest it on the concrete edge







Bill used the forklift to lift up the corner and I slid a telephone pole underneath allowing the container to roll

The first one is in place

End of day 1 of the machine rental - they are both in place

The shop will be constructed between the two containers

The next day we used the forklift to fill up the 20 yard dumpster with the kitchen demolition of last summer.

In this photo, you can see the shute out of the upstairs window. This is what I use to scoop the lath, plaster and rubble by the shovelful easily into the dumpster.

Quick connects & farmhouse demo begins!

We weighed the pros and cons of quick connects for Sparky and came down on the safety side. Bill was spending lots of time trying to line each implement up correctly in order to attach and unattach. After reading an article in Growing for Market about the number of back and hand injuries that can be avoided by quick connects, we were convinced.


Several of our new implements have the quick on/off. We had to retro-fit the bucket and several of the older implements.

Bill had to cut and grind the old connections off - here he is using the concrete saw

Then welded on the new frame and it quickly connects to Sparky


During our last concrete pour, we made a counterweight

During the Labor Day week, I also started demo on the 2nd floor of the farmhouse.

Pre-demo

We ordered a 20 yard dumpster and built a chute from the 2nd floor down to the dumpster. I spent all week in gloves, safety glasses and a dust face mask. The 2nd floor is a combination of drywall and lath and plaster. It is a dirty job.

It begins for real

Bill has turned his steely-eyed attention to the farm with a vengeance!

Last week our little farm saw the excavator who prepared the new home site and trucked the soil to the new workshop area as well as trenching the driveway.

We also had an electrician remove our overhead lines and bury them in the driveway trench. New 220 service to the barn. New panel in the small house. The rural electric coop also came out to reconnect our service.

Additionally, a concrete truck with 4 yards of concrete. Got the footings poured, reinforced the culvert and the hoghouse. We did not get the buttresses done.

As we pulled out of the driveway on Friday afternoon at 4:00 p.m. - it started to snow. We finished with no time to spare.

We have a future home site!

Small house with cleared future home site on the right

New homesite tucks into the bluff - we hit stone

Excavating the driveway to bury the electrical lines

Concrete truck

Poured excess concrete on the high side of the culvert to control some erosion

Additional extra concrete was poured around the stone foundation of the hoghouse - this area occasionally has high water (isn't it funny that I have never noticed that bad paint job until I looked at this photo?)

Trenching the driveway

Trench for the electric

Scenic Rivers arrives (our electric co-op). They reconnected our electric service to our new box and panel

New service

No more overhead lines!

The next morning it looked like this -

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.

Future Farmhouse

A drawing Bill did of our future home.

The smaller building on the left is the current house which we are repurposing into a studio, office, commercial kitchen and garage.

The building on the right is the newer one. They are connected by a breezeway. Passive solar and solar heated radiant floors are in the house, the breezeway and the commercial kitchen.

The new building is 24' x 30'.

Jobs and finances

Well... Bill gave notice at his job on Monday. He will be there through the end of February. We joke that he is now going from 4 jobs to 3. He has been working getting a new business up and running for over a year now and doing projects on the weekends. He specializes in garden design and does sculptures and furniture out of reclaimed and recycled materials. check out his website here www.readapted.com He is also busy with our landlord duties. We have 6 rental apartments in Chicago (we live in one). We recently had a tenant move out so we are going to take this opportunity to fix it up by gutting and remodeling the kitchen and bath and installing a new energy efficient furnace. He has also been working hard to design and timeline our farm rehab and construction - he has been doing architectural drawings and plans and continually revising them. We feel pretty confident that we are close to a final design. (We are including a commercial kitchen! yea!) We want to order our solar panels and some of our solar water heater components to take advantage of the tax credit on our 2009 return. It has been an exciting week - we feel like we are taking a really big step towards our dream of living on our farm.

In other news, our farm class focused on a $10,000 farm start up last week. It was sobering. In the study we did (egg layers - which are of course not really a money maker) showed how little money the farmer made.

I'm also reading a case study published by Center for Integrated Agriculture Systems and the finances are just astoundingly poor, to be frank. Market gardeners with less than 3 acres in vegetable production (not including cover crops) make on average $4.96 per hour. This report is from late 2005 so maybe money has gotten better...? Here is a link to the study: Grower to Grower: Creating a livelihood on a fresh market vegetable farm. I haven't read the whole study yet, but I look forward to delving into it further. I need to really do some self-reflection to determine whether I can mentally be OK with working that hard for less than minimum wage. Lots to consider.

Storm and melt water management

We were at the farm this past weekend. If you follow the white fence on the right - see the part that is partially fallen down? It is now totally down. Grant County received 2" of rain in one hour and we had a pretty severe water backup. You can see across the driveway from the part of the fence that is falling down there is a culvert. It is too small, partially crushed on both sides and leads to water backup. The water collects on the right into a big pond which flows over the driveway and then has lots of momentum and force. It isn't in this picture but there was a footbridge over this seasonal creek further to the left. The planks were rotten and we were planning on taking it down anyway - it washed away it is further down the creek near the house.

It was great to see because we need to engineer our way out of this. We also had water flow down the hill behind the house. The grass near the house is all flattened and there was silt at the front door. Water in the cellar too. Bad sign. We are actually rethinking our original plans for the house - as much as I hate to admit it. We are considering turning the house into a garage/summer kitchen/art studio (upstairs) and building a new house connected to the old house (which will now be the garage) by a breezeway.

I have been struggling with this. Bill and I always rehab old buildings. We had done three of them to date - and this one was supposed to be our grande finale! I have been dreaming of rehabbing an old farmhouse for years and giving new life, energy efficiency and another 100 years to an old house.

However, by building new... we could build a small 2 bedroom home that could perhaps be passive solar. Lots to consider.

Saturday work

I have a feeling many of my posts might be titled 'Saturday work'.

Bathroom pre-Saturday.

Bathroom on Saturday afternoon.

The folks showed up to claim the free bathroom. This was quite a feelgood endeavor. They were a young couple and excited to have the appliances (which once removed turned out to be in excellent condition). They were very respectful, carried out the garbage that was created during the tearout, and then offered to help us with additional tasks. It was a nice offer, but we thanked them and let them leave with their new bathroom. It was a satisfying feeling to help out such nice folks. A friend asked me why I wasn't selling them - she said, you could probably have gotten at least $100+ for them. That wasn't the point - it was to help someone out. All in all, a good experience.

This is what was once a summer kitchen - that was used as a henhouse and a junk building by the previous owner. You can't see it in this picture, but the backside of this building is falling in. It is built into a hill and the watershed has washed away the back foundation. This is also the site that we plan to build the garage/summer kitchen/art studio. So while Bill worked in the main barn, I started taking this one down. It is clearly an old building and I did feel bad taking it down, but I was removing each board individually so that we can reuse them. Beautiful boards and oak timbers in this building! It was hard work - those old timbers are hard and it takes a lot of prying to get the nails out.

You can see that I only got a little part of two sides done. Not a bad start though!

It was wonderful to be working at the farm. The weather was beautiful. We went back to our little cottage (the old church - I'll do some posts on it soon) and we were tired but felt a good sense of accomplishment. We are definitely on our way now.

The gent selling the truck had a conflict this morning so we didn't check it out this morning as planned. We are going back next weekend - we hope to see it then.

House planning

We are beginning the farmhouse rehab planning.

Wish list: photovoltaic hot water and radiant floor heat

lots of windows