Making Progress!

Since last I wrote many encouraging things have happened.

Eloise has run like a champ, keeping the grassy areas looking neat and trim. Her sharp turning radius has been a nice surprise and I really haven't had to do much trimming around trees and bushes because she can get in so close. That is especially interesting because she's well over 50 years old!

The ol' gal has also done wonderful service as a skidder. I've unlimbered my chain saw and gone to work on a grove of sumac trees on the north end of the property. My neighbor on that side is delighted. She said the smell of those often was overpowering in her house. I lost count of how many major trees I took down, probably in the neighborhood of two dozen. Many were close to 50 feet tall and made a good thump when they hit the ground. Some were in very awkward places but Eloise, with a 20 foot logging chain and a come-along, has been able to drag all of them out. It's a grand feeling to chain up an entire tree to her and have her just walk away up the hill with it.

The sumac trunks and limbs have been stacked into two piles, each about ten feet in diameter and more than ten feet high. One is up the hill by the chicken shed. The other is north west of the barn, near the property line. I plan to let them dry out through the fall months, then try to burn them sometime in the winter when the air is still and everyone is indoors. Hopefully the hot air will rise so high no one will notice the stink. Should be quite a set of bonfires! :)

The Stihl chain saw I bought off eBay last summer has done marvelously. It just eats through those trunks and limbs like they were overcooked spaghetti. The only problem was with the operator. He didn't have a manual and didn't know that there was a "parking brake" on the the chain so it wouldn't turn. I took it to the local Stihl dealer and felt about two inches high when he just went "click" and the chain moved freely. Nice safety feature. Need to buy and read the manual someday... :) If I had the time to haunt some farm sales and buy a peavy it would make this job easier, but we muddle through.

So I've got three pretty good sized wood piles. Two of sumac, one of walnut and other non-sumac wood. At some point I'll start taking down limbs on the trees along the road. They have grown up into the phone and cable TV wires there. Once we tear into them we'll have even larger piles, I'm sure. Much of the larger stuff we'll stack for burning in the fireplace in days to come, but there is a LOT of little stuff that'll have to go. Weenie roast, anyone? :)

I've also gotten the best of the hedges thanks to my friend Justin. Only one set along the driveway needs to be done on the back of one side. The others are all hacked down to manageable proportions. It'll be spring before they begin to green up again and recover from the surgery I put them through, but that's ok. There's a massive pile of privet clippings just NW of the house that'll be a big blaze when we touch it off. (Can you tell I like burning brush? :)

The two apple trees on the place have produced a fair number of apples. Most are very gnarly (in the old sense of the term) and not worth much. I think with proper pruning and some judicious dormant oil spraying they can be made to produce more though. I'd like to plant a bunch of fruit trees over where the sumacs were, with some nice bushes or vines to screen the neighbor's yard off and provide cover for birds. There are tons of birds here and I don't want to remove their habitat.

The house water still isn't on. I know, I know... But it seems there's always something either more fun or more pressing and I never get into the basement to get that up and running. Since freezing weather will soon be upon us, we may only be able to get it up and running, test it out, then winterize it... We'll get that back porch washed out one of these days! The good news is that the smell in the house is less noticable due to the cooler weather.

The really big news on the house itself is that we have preliminary plans! We should be able to sit down in the next couple of weeks and make the changes we want. Then the draftsmen will incorporate those into the plans and eventually generate some construction drawings for us by late winter. I'm so excited I can hardly stand it.

We've lots of decisions to make in the next few months, but it's so energizing to see something on paper that's to scale so we can play around with it.

I've got a line on a guy that does concrete so we can get the floor poured in the barn for the workshop. I'm hoping we can do that before winter weather sets in, but I've a few things to tear out before we get there. Old rotted wooden flooring, an old workbench, some odds and ends that looked too good to throw in the dumpster, etc. all have to be removed before we redo the floor.

It would be nice to rebuild the barn loft floor before doing the ground level floor but it gets into a Gordian knot, recursive causality thing after a while. At some point you have to just toss a dart at the dartboard and say, "We're doing this first."

I've a ton of pictures to upload but can't get that done tonight.

May all your mudpuddles be small ones,

Doug