December 31. 2019 Looking Back . . .. Going Forward

One of the negative aspects of being intentionally mindful of every day, rather than just letting time slip by un-noticed, is that time itself stretches out. Years (themselves) look like they did when I was eight years old. Will it ever be Summer? I can't wait for Fall! Etcetera . . . That sort of thing. One of other drawbacks is the thought that we're not getting enough accomplished to get the project of Creekside Farm done in any sort of reasonable time frame. We don't want to run out of energy, time, or money, before we get to where we are going.

Whenever I think we're moving too slowly, or at least taking too long, I look back at this journal and see what was happening on the same date in previous year's journal entries. I usually come away much more satisfied with our progress.

In January of 2014 we had just made our plans to buy a farm. We had no money, but part of the plan, (the dog business) was in the start-up process and we had just bought Clarke Bar Griswald.  We ended the year with delivery of our first litter of Basset pups. Money was on the way.

In January of 2015 we found the Farm (by accident), but still had no significant money. We bought it on contract in April. We bought it right and with great effort. Nothing was getting done on the property, but a great deal was accomplished just the same.Without money, progress was glacially slow. I was finished at Pacific and the basic plans for the property were in place. Much of the middle of 2015 was spent ferociously working our conventional jobs, trying to get the money to pay off the tax lean. Things were happening and we spent some cash on clean-up. I started keeping this journal the day we paid of the tax lean and the property was bought out of tax foreclosure.

By January 2016. we were birthing our third litter of pups and some money was available for the Farm.  We'd have two litters in 2016, and time to spend the money. We both still had our conventional jobs so time for the Farm usually was weekend work, but we spent whatever days we had, clearing, cutting, cleaning things up. We did little in the way of moving the project forward in 2016. Most of our time was tied up in birthing puppies and on our working jobs. But what money we got we spent of tractor rentals and dumping fees. At the end of the year we had figured out that we would need to "roll the dice" and gamble on our future. We began to build our tiny home. We spent the latter weeks of 2016 giving most of our things away and building the trailer. The Cabin moved to the Farm in the early days of Winter. We tilled our first soil in late 2016 as a side benefit of moving the tiny home cabin to the farm on a rainy Sunday morning. We needed a tractor rental to pull the Cabin into place and we opted for a roto-tiller attachment.

When January 2017 arrived we were moving to "Camp Creekside" and eating some of our cooked meals there. The place was looking good, in spots. We built a greenhouse in early Spring and began learning to plan food. The soils were weak, there was no watering system. But we ate good from the crops we planted that produced for us. After building a second tiny home to compliment the first, we found our Farm comfortable for living there by the early Summer. We put in a lot of fencing in 2017 and by the end of the year I was ready to leave my old business behind and go full time farmer.

2018 was very good for us. We had to put the Basset business on hold for a house build, but the paperwork for the farmhouse was on the way and our monthly bills were decreased greatly by moving to Camp Creekside and paying off everything that made sense. Ann's mother had passed on and she left behind a large chunk of money to Ann, which we got in the Spring. Things got a bit easier after this because we had money to make money with. We bought our tractor in the late Spring and things started getting big things done all around the place. By August we had renovated and sold our house in town for another large chunk of working capital. The future looked very bright and Camp Creekside turned into Creekside Farm.

We all know what happened in 2019. One thing after another happened which made our project a bit less shiny. Ann retired from her job in January and, since we had cleared up much of the place in 2018, we planned for a much more "farm-y" 2019. We tilled, toiled, and ultimately failed at vegetable farming, mostly due to a cold Summer and a rodent infestation which we ultimately resolved. In June a falling tree nearly killed us both. I spent the entire Summer out of commission but this catastrophe brought out the farmer in Ann and she blossomed (even if nothing else did). She was able to call in some very nice volunteer help and, undaunted by all of this, the last quarter of 2019 saw some very healthy progress. We began the building phase of Creekside Farm.

Last year the Farm nearly killed us, but not our spirit. We have been working at this since 2013, so it seems like we're moving slowly. But the Farm itself didn't really get started until 2017 and the money to actually build our plans didn't arrive until mid-2018. Washington County held us up for two years as well. but we are happy enough with the little we have achieved in the two years that things have really been moving along.  And we are building today. These thing take time.

The curve of our growth is as expected.
Even if it looks slow.

December 30, 2019 Our New Years Plan

Things have crawled along for about a month, but have picked up recently for a few good reasons. The first is that the weather has let up a bit. No major rain events, no winds either (and that's weird). The second reason we've been more active is that the eight week cold virus has finally gone away. It was horrible.

Since our last post we have finished our stem wall forms and got approved by the inspector. We'll be pouring it next Monday. We have also spent a good bit of time out working the fields. Our Market Garden is in pretty good shape, but it looks a bit weedy. We have also continued to have luck in getting things we need. This week we found a great guy with a lot of stuff we need. We picked up the handrail assist bars for the new house and a really nice Kerosun heater for the greenhouse. Both of these things were on the big list of stuff we need and we saved a bundle buy shopping used on Craig's List.

We have just agreed on a building plan for the coming year, so our New Year's resolution is to build the image below. The farmhouse build will go as quickly as we can, so there won't be very many big changes to the Farm. The stuff we'll have time for is small, but filled with small things that sound very big.

The New Year Plan

This is the layout we want to have built by May.
You can click on the picture to see it larger.

In the new plan we're going to restrict the Chickens to about a fifty by two-hundred foot fenced yard on our western end and move the Ducks in there with them. The birds spend much of their time in these same spaces, so the move won't be traumatic.

We're going to move some fences to create a very large Market Garden. Before tilling we'll take out four to seven large trees to let the sun shine in. The currently planted Flower Patch will move into the Kitchen Garden at the other end of the Farm as soon as we figure out a schedule.We have done a lot of improvement to the Kitchen Garden area this past year, but there's still much to do. We hope to take advantage of the newly opened space of the Kitchen Garden by planting many rows of corn and potatoes in newly tilled full sun areas. We'll begin laying out the decorative parts of the Kitchen Garden as time permits. And planting isn't for months.

We're only trying one significant experimental thing this year. We're trying a Ruth Stout potato patch. This is a no-dig method where you simply put in a large layer of straw directly on the ground in Winter, plant in the mid-Spring sprouting rush by pulling back some straw and throwing a baby spud in. After planting you put down a fresh layer of hay. There's no digging, no weeding, no watering, and no fertilizing. They say that the patch gets better every planting because it deepens every year and the nutrient release is better every year.

There are a few little things we need to build as time becomes available. We need a small greenhouse for sprouting seeds, a potting gazebo in the Kitchen Garden, and a Kennel complex is needed to house our only profitable business, the Rocketdog Bassets and Boarding business.  The Kennel complex will have a large fenced front yard and a fully covered back yard for puppies and rainy days. Inside the Kennel will be an open living room setting with very robust dog resistant furniture. We will also have grooming and whelping space. This will be the first thing we build after the house.

While we wait for next Monday and the concrete it will bring, we'll dive right into fence and Greenhouse projects. These are quick projects and all of the other projects can wait for free time.

December 22, 2019 Rainy Christmas Everybody!

It has rained most days since my last progress update. The past five days dropped nearly five inches on the Farm, but there's no threat of any sort of flooding. The rains took a break yesterday, allowing us outside to get some minor stuff done, but there were a few more things that got done when dodging rain storms.

Just as Laffee Taffee finished up with her pups The Cinnamon Bear went into season, so we are hosting her inside the house this week and next. We really have no time for another accidental litter and The Bear gives us eleven of the poopy little treasures every time. Cinnamon will finish up this week and go back to the temporary kennel with the others.

We have nearly finished the concrete forms for stem wall part of the foundation. This is heavy work with a bunch of parts involved, most of which were prepared prior to our last journal entry. The wood we are using is 2x12 fir, most of it is sixteen feet long so each board weighs in at about one-hundred pound dry, quite a bit more wet. Carrying these things around is tough. We got the bottom course down easily and with the help of our son Jackson we put the top course in last Tuesday. There are a lot of parts that go into the top course and we took until the very last light of day to get them all wired in. There are still a few more parts to put in before calling the County inspector and concrete people, but with luck we can get the forms poured before New Years.

A poor picture of an expensive door.
Click on it for a larger view.

This past week we bought a few things for the house once it is built. We found four interior doors on a Craig's list listing in Pacific City (on the coast south of Tillamook). The doors were reclaimed from a really nice house being remodeled there and they were once "French" door sets. This works out very well since we needed two hinged doors (with knobs) and two pocket doors (without holes or hinges). The doors are wonderfully warm hemlock with "full lights", meaning they are mostly glass. Each glass panel is etched with a beautiful wheat motif and we expect they will allow light to flow through the house. The second thing we bought was a 36" Jenn Aire range hood which we found on Craig's list in Tigard. It came in brand new (but un-boxed) condition for a very small fraction of local retail price and will go perfectly with our slightly used 36" Jenn Aire professional gas range.

Buying used or reclaimed parts is part of our global philosophy designed to get us what we want with the money we have. So, while these two kitchen items alone have cut the purchase cost of the same appliances by about eighty percent, the amount we paid is also about half of the $1000 we had initially budgeted for stove and hood. We are actually stepping up in quality while reducing budgeted costs by nearly 50%.

We are using an economic theory called the 85% rule in buying parts for the house. The rule states that: if perfection is 100% of all desired outcomes,  then  85%  of the perfect project can be achieved using only 50% of the total cash resource. This rule doesn't work for things where costs are nearly fixed, like groceries, or lumber, or where there is no aftermarket, or inventory turnover is high.

The concrete forms for the foundation
will be reused as floor joists/

Some cost savings can be won by simply using things responsibly. For example we will also save on lumber costs by re-using the wood now being used as forms for the foundation. We will nail this wood in as floor joists in the house and save a thousand dollars on lumber right away. So far we have saved a great deal on lighting fixtures, a large chunk on siding, sinks, underfloor heating, and a few other things.

We will buy resold parts where it makes sense. Many parts can be bought better simply by calling around for the best price or by finding promotional discounts. We usually wait for a somewhat regular percentage discount to arrive with our Home Depot credit card bill before making large wood purchases. We also found a resource for new windows, a big ticket extra where we buy twenty-four mostly decorative windows that we otherwise might have simply left out to save $2400 of the budgeted $5500. Shopping around for these windows cut our costs by almost 50% without sacrificing the aesthetics of the house, or any of the quality or features we desired.

There are some things found in our wildest dreams that can be cut out entirely without being missed. Like a dutch door we wanted at the back which serves no purpose we can't do without. This back door decision saves $1000 and we are still buying a very nice door (not actually going cheap). But this change also forced us to re-think the front door decision as well. So the nearly four thousand dollar front and back door budget items will come in at around eight-hundred and also match the interior doors in design as the re-claimed doors we bought this week. Total savings on doors: about one thousand dollars (85% off the budget and we still got nice doors).

All of this will save pennies and every penny will be need to be pinched (and some will be pinched more than once).

We expect Christmas this year will be the very last Christmas spent living in a tiny home. I promised Ann that we'd have room for a tree next year, and to make candy, and cookies, as we have in nearly all previous years. But I have been made a liar by circumstances in the recent past so . . .  We shall see.

December 16 , 2019 Our Christmas Letter

Click to read the full sized letter.

December 11, 2019 Keeping time

The cold virus still rules at Creekside Farm three weeks after digging its heels into us, so there isn't much progress to report. But a few things happened despite our lack of will to do much out in the rain.

The rains have fallen in inches, much of which has piled up on our home site. Walking around is slippery and displaces clay into deep mud, so we have to wait a day or so after a heavy rain before going back to work on the house. We did get the forms stripped from the foundation footing and it looks great. Since then we have laid down the first twelve inch layer of the stem-wall form.

Working on a flat and level surface is easier, but things are heavy enough to make the work difficult. The first course is really simple to put down, just a big empty box thing. Once we had it all together we rigged up the batter board strings once more and made sure everything was square. Having st these batter boards really helps to keep the measurements accurate, but we did a 3-4-5 measurement on the wall form just to make sure.

A 3-4-5 square measurement is simply measuring from a corner some multiple of three (say 18 feet) then measuring out the wall we're checking for square a multiple of four (24 feet), the measurement between these two point should be a multiple of five (30 feet). If these numbers agree then the walls are relatively square. We were at thirty feet and one-eight inch, probably a measuring error but close enough. We are mostly ready to add another layer to the stem wall forms.

There are a lot of elements to the second course of stem wall form. There are a bunch of half-inch foundation bolts to hold the house to the concrete, four larger earthquake tie-downs straps to hold the corners down in if things get shaky, some rebar tied to the rebar already in the footing  to tie the foundation together, and eight foundation vents that get built into the top form which vent the air out from under the house. All of these elements are already bought, or made from scraps we have laying around. Most of it is already laid out where it will eventually go, but we have to bring in the top boards and tinker toy the stuff together. This step is on hold for drier weather.

Stanley says goodbye

The animals are all doing well. Egg production is very good and people are once more receiving their orders. Our Rocketdog Basset Pups are all sold, the last one will be picked up this Friday. We will miss them all, but the five we already have are enough and Ann says I can't have another no matter how I beg for it.

We took the first trip to town for a sit down lunch since moving to the Farm well over a year ago. We have gone to town for shopping, but never for recreation. We wound up at Kornblatt's deli for soup and sandwich. The soup was good for our colds. Not much else is.

Christmas is coming. Let's hope the colds go away by then.

November 28, 2019 Thanksgiving

We have some seriously bad colds today, the price of having people over. Neither of us have had anything like a cold for well over a year, but we also weren't exposed to people either. The bugs are holding on pretty well for nearly two weeks and keeping out productivity pretty low, but some stuff is still getting done.

We reduced the old shop hoop house to parts and built a new storage hoop house right next to the Summer Supper shelter, which is near the new home site. We took all of the storage stuff out of the  and put the workshop stuff in. Now we have better storage and the re-designed structures might survive some snow. It only too four days, but between rain storms and our virus load it took a bit longer than it should have.

Moving the shop space opened up a huge new area of planting space near the Kitchen Garden we are beginning to lay out. We have some interesting ideas, but the upshot of it all is food for eating will be planted along side of flowering plants, trees, and herbs, in a more decorative way. This new garden will be twice the size of the Market Garden, but the Market Garden will also get a fairly large expansion this Winter. All dependent on the house build of course.

The footing for the new house foundation was poured and has properly set up, ready for the next stage. We hope to put in the Stem Wall forms this coming week and get it poured soon after. The process should take less time, but there is more need for making sure things are properly laid out and square. Not really a major problem. Weather is going to become a problem this year. It has been very cold and wet so far this Fall, Winter will likely be a cooler version of Fall.

It's been cold enough that we needed to get our dogs winter coats out. We have been thinking seriously about making coats for them since buying something which does the job, and has longevity, has been a problem. Ann sewed the coats we had to modify them to work better, but the repairs and changes probably won't last, so we are looking around for a used sewing machine. We have an idea for a new pattern and have most of the parts once we find the machine to do the needle work.

Four of the five puppies went out to Critter Cabana this past week. We miss them, but one of their number is still here awaiting Christmas delivery. Stanley, his forever name, is a great little boy. He has taken over at meals and nap time in our heated doghouse. We will certainly miss him when he goes. All of our dogs seem happy and have adjusted well to the combination of new kennel mates and a litter of puppies.

The chickens slacked off in egg production once the weather got cold. We figured out the cold and dark days were the problem and put a heat lamp in the coop. Egg production rebounded. The ducks aren't laying right now.

Despite the viruses floating around and making us feel poorly Ann made a very nice little Thanksgiving Feast. But for us Thanksgiving is a daily thing, something we do.

November 15, 2019 Success!

This biggest step in nearly any process is the one you take in beginning the work of whatever you planned to do. Our farmhouse permits and plans took over three years to complete; but this isn't the first step of building the farmhouse. Building a firm foundation of the house is the first firm step and there were many more elements to this than I had thought. The bottom of the house is where building begins, at the footing. But a whole lot of preparation started once the permits were in hand before the very first actual building can happen.

We had a siting plan but actually finding the place where reality of the Farm and the drawings we bought agreed was a bit of a problem. The front of the house runs exactly parallel to the road running in front of the property. We did this, and quite a lot of other things, to play with scale a bit. Showing the front of the house, full-on to the road, will make the house seem larger than it is. But finding a line which runs exactly parallel to the front fence took nearly an entire afternoon.

Once we knew where the house would go, we had to clear all of the topsoil away using our miraculous little tractor. I scraped down carefully, moving to good earth to other places where gardens and planting will be done later. Once we were down to relatively flat clay, we began marking out the lines of the footprint for the foundation. Since all of the is trial and error, it took a while to find the true size of the place and then make our marks square against each other. We put stakes out everywhere, then connected the stakes with string so that we could check it for square, then we painted lines on the dirt under the string so that we could work the dirt.

Eventually we found the foot-print of the house.

We rented an excavator to dig out our twenty-four inch wide trenches. I knew, from building our septic system last Summer, that it would be better if we didn't dig too deeply and disturb the soil under the foundation, so we bought a builder's laser level tool and carefully dug down a little at a time until we were within a few inches of our goal depth. We had to go back and finish the work by hand and shovel, but eventually we got the trenches looking good.

Next we staked up some semi-permanent boards around key points of the site so that we could put careful measurements on them and string lines over every vital place we needed to build foundation elements. This led us to make some adjustments which caused a bit more digging, but eventually we got it all figured out.

We built about two-hundred feet of somewhat simple wooden footing forms at the bottom of our trenches. and then carefully dug twenty-six square holes to support twenty-six posts, all of this exacting work.

Then the final step was to steel re-enforce everything with rebar and make sure everything remained exactly level. Everything we did, or bought, took time to figure out. Much of it had to be learned from the beginning. All of it took a lot of time, some of it dodging rainy days, but it all had to be done right.

Eventually we got the job done.

This morning the County Building Inspector came and approved our preparation work on the first pass. For us this was a bit of a nail biter, since we never did any of it before and were guessing a lot.

So today we  have finally arrived at the place in time where actual building of the house can take place. Early next week we will pump concrete into each hole and fill all of the forms, smooth everything out carefully, and make the base of our new house as flat as we can. From there all of the next steps should all become a bit easier.

October 30th, 2019 Ready to begin building.

Things have been busy this month. This is a bit surprising since October is usually only good for clean-up projects (like clearing out the Summer annual plants). We had quite a bit of dog business: we had a litter of pups and bought two new breeding stock girls. But the most of what we have been doing involved getting dirty.

Since the 9th (my last post) we have been working on the trenches for the new Farmhouse foundation. It has been slow and heavy going. It took five days to prepare the site for digging, then two days to dig everything out using a rented excavator. We had things laid out pretty well, but the newness of using the tools added a bit of time to the project. All in all I spent nine hours digging, but we got the trenches started and dug a long slit trench for the PGE power lines. Then things slowed to a temporary stop.

We had rain, lots of rain, for a week! Things got muddy, slippery, and everything got sticky. We did get the PGE trench inspected and buried on the first day of the rains, but that's about all the happened for a few days. The home site had to sit for a while so as not to destroy all of the work we had done.  But we got back to it eventually, clearing out some extra dirt and shopping concrete providers and such.

We had Jack over to help level the floor in the home site trenches. We rented a plate compactor to level out the dirt after carefully clearing and re-measuring the trenches. We had to add some rock to get the compactor moving properly because the mud is very sticky. but they looked really good at the end. This week we have used three days to put up "batter boards" to keep our string line measurements straight. Batter boards are 2x4s on fence posts, elevated to the floor height of the house, each one is situated to allow us to make and adjust measurements. They  keep the dimensions of the foundation constant so that when we stretch a string between any two points, we can check for accuracy while building concrete forms. Building a square house begins at the bottom and it's hard to build a square house on a crooked foundation, so preparations is key to getting this all right.

After we put up the batter boards we could finally check everything we had done well, and make adjustments. We had to finish cut the walls of quite a few of the trenches and clean it all up and make it work, but today we clean and square.

Finally ready to begin building the forms for the concrete foundation.

October 9th, 2019 Tomorrow. . . We dig!

It took a few years, but tomorrow we will break ground on the new Farmhouse.

The building of the house itself is not a very large project. Ann and I have marked out the rooms, discussed the style points, and estimated the costs. Most of the rooms will be thought of as small(ish), but this is intentional. Ours will be a small(ish) house, very little of which is space intended only on increasing the real estate value of the property. We will put the money we save on building larger into building a very tight, highly sustainable, inexpensive home. 

And it all starts tomorrow with a rental backhoe and some hard work. 

There will be many obstacles, and some miscalculations to contend with, but we will get it done. The weather might get in the way, but we will put on wet foot in front of the next until the weather relents or Summer arrives. The plan is to dig it out, pour it, hammer it, and finish it. The goal is six months from tomorrow.

The lines are the outline of the footing for supporting the foundation of our new house.
I have removed the topsoil completely, leaving only the clay.
We will dig out nine inches of the clay.

The porch space is nearly as large as the interior space.
It only wraps three sides, the back side is for kennel space.

The entire house will be an apartment sized 1026 square feet. 

• One bedroom, merely large enough to hold the bed, a clothing dresser, and a few side tables. 
• There is a small office, only large enough to do the business of the Farm. 
• A large walk in closet. 
• The bathroom has a detached water closet so the space will hold a good sized shower, an interesting old sink vanity, and a two person hot tub. 
• The laundry room is only large enough to hold the laundry machines, and one six foot folding counter top over storage. 
• The "living room is only enough to hold one new couch, a table, and a television. 

Where we put the space where it will do us the most good, in the kitchen and pantry (a lot of pantry). 

The Farm is all about food.

October 8, 2019 Fall color comes to Apple Valley

It is not at all clear that the Valley where Creekside Farm is located is actually called "Apple Valley", but a fellow over in Buxton has a sign up which says it is and that's good enough for us. Apple Valley is a great name for the area and beats the heck out of "Buxton Bottoms" or "Manning Marshes". These may be more accurate, but Apple Valley sounds better so it gets our vote.

Cell-phone pictures don't give the colors their proper due.

The light down in the valley is pretty great most times of the day when the sun shines through. In the early mornings it usually lights the surrounding hillsides long before it reaches the Valley floor where the Farm sits. This morning we got a bit of a light show as the sun peaked through clouds. Between the Farm's magnificently colored flowers and the emerging fall colored trees all around us, it was quite a nice look.

October 5, 2019 A New Google Maps Picture

Every once in a while Google Maps updates their satellite maps, they do this about once every fourteen months. We love it when they do, it takes quite a lot of work to do what's been done, and the satellite picture shows the work. Once of the things we learn from these is how the work we have done aligns with the Farm. Things look properly laid out and square when standing on the dirt, but from above we can see the mistakes.

This Satellite image must have been taken early last May. The new Strawberry field and last our hoop house workshop are there, but the Greenhouse got crushed in June. Also, the Produce Stand  pop-up(the red square) sits where we put it up. I posted about this on May 3rd, and we moved it on May 30th, so it was in May late in the evening when this picture was taken. The greenhouse was collapsed by the tree in June.

To see why we like to see these new images, look at where the Farm was in 2015 when the whole thing began.

October 1, 2019 I found an interesting picture

I was looking around the Internet and found a real estate listing for the Farm which had been made a while before we found the place. It had a picture worth re-posting.

This was the picture I found. It looks like late Spring
The electrical pole is the brown stick looking thing near the middle.
You couldn't get near the pole.

By the time we found it, the pole had become well grown in.
This picture is from a different angle and in late winter.

It took a while to find the dirt.

But eventually this area became the site of our first Farm home.
We have done so much more since then. . .

October 1, 2019 Taffee's first litter

I think the word litter does not adequately describe the concept of having a bunch of puppies, but we'll stick to it and avoid a losing grammatical fight.

Grizelda Laffee Taffee gave birth to five wonderfully healthy little Basset Babies last night and we couldn't be happier about it. For those coming to this page to find out about adopting a long eared fur baby, look at the top of the page for our Rocketdog blog, there is plenty of information to find there.

Taffee finally got everyone bedded down the morning following all of the hubbub.

Not for nothing

Not for nothing, but I was scanning YouTube videos and noticed the number of hits on this link, so I screen-captured the thing for posterity.

Once upon a time I drove past a crematorium with an opening soon sign and a gas bar-b-que sitting out front. I always regretted not taking a picture of it. This post is about avoiding regret.

September 29th, 2019 The Build-up to Building

This is how the house will appear from the front of the Farm.
The house is designed to allow visual access to
the entire Farm from the front room.

Since last Thursday we have had permits in hand to build our new house. This early process took about three years to do, the building of the entire house won't take nearly as long. But taking the correct first step will take a little bit longer. Since we got our permits fairly late in the year, deciding to dig our foundation footings now might run us into early rains. So, for now, we will prepare carefully to dig our footings, then wait for the right time to actually break the ground.

From the back the house isn't as interesting. But since the house is fairly close to the back
of the Farm, and there is a large kennel behind the house made from half of our current
tiny house, it doesn't need to be very interesting. 

We are doing the entire build ourselves. Not just general contracting, where we hire people to come do parts of the project, our hands will do all of the work. Some might way this is a daunting task. They would be right. We have much to learn. Luckily for us, most of the skills we will need we have already been learned from twenty years of business in building related trades. Still and all though, it will be difficult and there will be much more to learn.

This is the side where the bedroom and bath will be located.
The bedroom is located at the farthest point away from the road.
The windows above the porch in this area are there to light the attic.

The first part of the project will be laying in a square and level foundation. Past this, the project is decidedly easier. The framing, plumbing, electrical, siding, insulation, and roofing are all pretty straight forward. Each part has a definite start, middle, and end. Each part has a definite cost and parts requirement. Each part comes in a specific order. So, barring unforeseen circumstances, once the foundation is laid the rest of the build will be done in about six months. We will continue to work the Farm and build the kennel during the house build, but there is time for everything.

You can click on this to see a bigger picture.
The house is simple and relatively small.

This is the site plan with elevations. The blue parts are access.
The red parts are things that used to  be on the Farm
This image isn't really true to the actual scale
but it seemed to make the County happy.

September 27th, 2019 Catching Up

I usually do these things weekly, but last week was particularly taxing and busy.

We started off the week building a new shelter for the Summer Supper, which came Saturday evening. We have built three of these "Hoop House" styled shelters. The first was built two years ago and used for a greenhouse until this Summer's tree took the thing down for the last time. In its short life its film cover had been torn many times by animals and mistakes, the roof completely collapsed by snow and rebuilt. We used many part from this first shelter in building the new one. We also used the experience to make some changes to the design. The second one we built was the shelter for the first Summer Supper last Summer. I had some new ideas, built it larger, and gave it a fabric floor early on. I also tried out a new way of anchoring the thing to the ground by pouring heavy gravel over the margin of plastic film. This scheme worked for the most part, but the older style of using minimal steel tubing and a low pitched roof failed in the show just the same night as did the greenhouse roof. Cheap as these things were, they wore out a bit quickly. This latest shelter is built a bit heavier, using about a third more steel tubing spaced about a foot closer. I also changed the roof pitch to forty-five degrees, much higher than the previous sixty degrees which collapsed easily in the snow. I put a cloth floor in it and put the shade cloth cover on before adding the plastic sheeting. With a bit of luck, this shelter should perform a bit better than the previous versions.

The Summer Supper was a bit of a flop because none of the local neighbors came this time around. They all showed up last time, none of them RSVPd last year either, so the lack of notice didn't give us enough information to cut back. But we did have a good sized party none the less. We made food for seventy-five and fed about twenty-five. The biggest problem was in finding homes to all of the left-overs. We will be eating very good chili-dogs and chili-burgers all Winter long. No complaints from us.

Following the Summer Supper we re-purposed the new shelter we re-purposed the shelter to become a convenient place to store building materials for the upcoming house build. THE BIG NEWS is that we were able to pick up the permits for the new house build! We will begin building as soon as we are sure that the weather will cooperate, but buying parts and tools began right away.  We needed a new compressor to push the bigger tools and spray drywall texture once the house is mostly put together. We also got a lazer level to help insure the thing is square and plumb. We will begin laying the new house out this week.

As if there were some spare time last week, on Friday we arranged my driving to LaGrande to pick up our two new Basset Hound females. At the time of purchase, we figured we wouldn't pick them up in the same week as the Summer Supper. We never dreamed we would also get permits in the same week. And the breeder gave us a date which made Friday the only day to get the new girls.

The new girls were a bit skittish at first, but the Summer Supper guests held them sufficiently to break the fear of people. Both of the new girls are very pretty, Abba Zabba is especially so. Her stance is perfect, her coloring is wonderful. Her sister Bit-o-Honey is turning out to have very light brown fur. This is unique in a tri-color, but very nice to look at. Follow the girls progress on out Rocketdog  Blog, the link is at the top of the page.

Laffee Taffee is coming near to her due date. We expect she will deliver five or six pups within the next week. So it appears we will stay busy until at least mid-December. But this week has been quite busy already.

We spent yesterday moving about half of what is being stored in the Shipping Container into the new shelter. With the space we gained by putting stuff that is not easily damaged out in the new shelter we can now move all of the stuff we have in dry storage in town into the Shipping Container. The move will not only save money every month, it will allow us to use some things we have been missing since moving here. The time it took to get the permits means we will be living in our very temporary tiny home for two full Winters. The missing stuff we had in offsite storage will allow us to make waffles, replace dishes, and wear different clothing than that we brought here or bought once here.

Today Ann and her good friend Beth spent the morning harvesting potatoes for Winter eating. We got a good crop, quite a bit more than last year, and one more variety. I was able to help them dig the dirt for some of the time, but I had to get the new back porch and laundry room set up to have Taffee's litter.

This week started out as busy as every day last week, and it doesn't look like things will slow down for a very long while.

September 17, 2019 Permitted at Long Last

It has always been my habit of recounting the history of Creekside Farm every time we hit a new milestone. Today they approved the permits for building our farmhouse. This approval came at a tremendous cost,  monetarily, physically, and emotionally. Every step we've  taken has been a part of a much larger plan, also part of the gamble as well.

The whole project has been a gamble from the very beginning, one which we entered into with eyes wide open.  I wrote the story about how all this began in October of 2015, about two years after we actually began the project, about the time we actually gave a name to the property which would become our farm. Anyone wanting to read this account can find it in the archive menu to the right of this article. What happened was an extraordinary chain of events.

We found the property by accident, then tracked down a woman who could lay claim to it, who died soon after, leaving a brother behind to take our payments. We bought quite a few hound dogs and went headlong into the breeding business, all in order to find some money to move the project forward. We sold our house in North Plains to get the money to build too. The money we got, along with an inheritance and hound dog profits, has brought us this far. Things started off easily enough, mostly because it was all a big dream. But things did not always go as planned.

I was in my third year at Pacific University, headed for law school, when we found the property. We found the lady who could help reclaim the property from tax foreclosure soon after that. We began cleaning the place up  as our dogs began producing enough money to pay for tractor rentals and back tax bills. In December I got word that my sore throat was a cancerous thing and our dreams of Creekside Farm kept me going through the pain and loss of my law school dreams. We spent a bunch of money cleaning the place up so that we could actually see the ground below our feet. School, and a lack of sufficient funds, slowed the project, but we did what we could in the early running.

When we first approached the County Land Use and Development desk we had no idea of how to go about securing permissions to build. They seemed helpful enough and pointed out the first step to take. The Farm (we were growing food by then, so it was a farm) was included in the FEMA 100 year flood plain boundary and needed some special attention. We got a flood plain engineer and got going.

We had initially planned to borrow the money to build using conventional bank financing, but this fell through despite massive home equity and long job histories. Rather than get stopped we decided to build a tiny home, sell the house, and use the proceeds to build in October of 2015. I had recently graduated from the University, built the first tiny home, raised two more litters of puppies, moved us to the Farm, built a second tiny home, and sold the house, all in the span of nine months following the throat surgery. Ann's parents had left her a tidy sum at about the same time, so project money was no longer the problem. The problem became finding the way to get a permit to build.

With cash in hand to buy permits and build a house we rejoined the permit process with the County. The flood plain thing turned out to be a major holdup. Siting the house proved very tricky because we could only build a house if we could prove that our home would be sited above the flood plain boundary. We had some proof that led us to believe this wouldn't be a problem, but the County insisted on professionally stamped paperwork proving our assertions. It took nearly a year to get the County to approve the home site and allow us to proceed to the next step: hiring an architect to make professionally stamped drawings of a design I had already drawn. The Architect did some good work and we moved on to getting a structural engineer to once more provide professionally engineered stamped drawings to prove that the house we had drawn up would not fall or blow over. All of this drawing was expensive and time consuming. We spent the months clearing the land and making new fields to plant. Our cash was beginning to dwindle a bit by the time we finally got all of the paperwork  together. It was early Spring of 2019 when we finally made our application.

The application immediately became a problem. The flood plain people still had misgivings which were unexpressed and many other things happened to slow the process. There is no need to worry over these things here, just mention them as the most stressful portion of the project to date. The process was nearing completion when a large tree fell on me and ruined the Summer. Fortunately for us, the end product of the permit process waited until I was back on my feet and ready to build. Today we have the go ahead. We know there are still many hurdles to jump, fires to put out or start, and challenges yet un-noticed. But as of today we are moving forward once more.

Today we raked about one ton of gravel from one of the last genuinely trashy places left to clean up and this week we built a new hoop house shelter to house our second Summer Supper party. In addition to all of this we are picking up two move females to continue our breeding program on Friday and one of our girl hounds is having an unexpected litter of puppies in the first days of October. Needless to say it, things are wildly busy, but we like it that way.

As of today we still have the money to build, but not much more than that. The plan we began in 2013, the gamble we entered into in 2015, and all of the ups and downs since the beginning, have all brought us to this place and this time. The next few months will either be wildly busy as we begin to build, or merely fairly busy if the weather doesn't cooperate with building plans. No matter which, we look forward to the experience.

Sept. 8, 2018 An easy week

It seemed that the past week proved itself to be of little difficulty. The crops came in well. The weather a bit cool, but nice right up until Saturday in the late afternoon.

With the cooler weather, Ann had little trouble weeding the Gardens and put out a bunch of Chrysanthemums to begin propagating the multitudes we will need. I had spent some time looking at the Japanese people's love of  'mums and thought we needed to start adding them to our future Fall planting plans. We have quite a lot of Spring and late Winter flowers, and a fair amount of Early and mid-Summer plantings as well. But the Fall color is still needed so we began with planting 'Mums for division in the Spring.

The Market Garden put out a fair amount of produce.this week. Ann sold quite a bit of it and gave a bunch to people who have helped us out during my my healing weeks. We also ate a whole lot of it and prepared a bunch for freezing to eat in the Winter months. We haven't got the space for canning or we would have done it this week. There is still plenty of season left for harvesting and we are looking forward to it all. 

I spent the week on my feet without any trouble at all. I saw the foot doctor on Monday and he told me that my foot is pretty far advanced in the healing process. I'm guessing this is because I take my own counsel over his and work the bone harder than he would have me do. All of my other injuries are nearly insignificant now as well. 

Since we are expecting puppies in early October I spent the week building an eight by eight foot addition to our tiny home. This involved putting up a deck and some short walls, then putting a hoop house styled roof on it to keep the rains out. I got it finished just as the rains came in. We moved all of our door hanging coat racks out there and this opened up quite a bit of space in the tiny home. We will eventually move the chest freezer out there when Laffee Taffee moves into the house for whelping. The space will become puppy play-land after a few weeks of growth and the Hounds Winter home after the puppies leave us in December.

We spent Saturday moving things around to get ready to build the Summer Supper shelter. I had already leveled the space last week, but the surrounding area had a lot of parts on it that made the place look disorganized. I tilled the area in front of the new shelter to knock any rocks or trash to the surface and we will rake all of it up this week. 

The Summer Supper plans are going forward with two weeks left to go. Make sure to RSVP using the form at the top of this page to let us know you are coming. As was last year, there will be plenty of everything. The menu is simple Burgers and Dogs this year, but also Ann's Camp Creekside Chili, which is delicious and not at all too spicy, so don't miss it. We're really looking forward to the Supper and hope everyone comes that can.

Next week is mostly taken up building the Summer Supper shelter. This will will eventually become dry space where we can begin accumulating parts for the new house. We may get the County's go ahead this month, but the rains will come too quickly for us to start building this year. Buying parts is going to take a while and we need to save as much money on parts as we can by shopping sales and closeout places.

The statistics tell me that quite a few people are reading these posts. I would do them even if nobody was reading, but I appreciate the time people take in keeping up with our progress. Thanks to all. 

Sept. 2, 2019 A nice week

The Farm started throwing us nice days this week. Every one of them a winner. Warm in the daytime, cool at night. A wonderful week. To be honest, since the tree fall a few months ago, my love for the place had started to wain just a bit.  This week brought all the love and enthusiasm for it back to me.

The Market Garden started to produce some really nice vegetables this week. Peppers, Beans, and Cucumbers all started producing as they should. There are twenty-two Sugar Baby Watermelons growing on the fifteen feet of row-space that made it through the rodent wars. The Corn is giving us six to eight nice ears daily too, and we even got a few zucchinis this week, so we know there will be way too many of both of these things in another week or so. Tomatoes are everywhere, particularly the yellow pears, which are bit sized and wonderfully sweet. Ann made Camp Creekside Pico de Gallo using fresh produce and a ton of fresh cilantro and we are eating it on everything. Plus we are either selling or giving away a whole lot of good food. Ann started fermenting pickles. Looks like hell, but this is how our great grand-mothers did it, and they were smart, so we'll have to see the result. Fermenting pickle means they can live on the counter instead of our way too small refrigerator.

My first effort.

I began a new craft project this week, carving Feather-stone into landscape decor. So far I have done one good rustic pagoda, and one little frog house which came out nicely.

Feather-stone is a volcanic glass, something a bit lighter than pumice. It carves very easily and looks great without much finish work. We had always planned for the Farm to produce craft items and this one is the first of many we hope to someday make for people to buy.

This first one was quick and fun to make. the picture on the left shows what an unplanned hour can do with very few tools. I have since bought a few new tools and taken the time to finish it. Afterward we plan to "paint" it with a moss and yogurt solution so that it has a sense of age to it.

We started in building the shelter for the Summer Supper on the twenty-first. Make sure to sign up using the form at the top of this page. It will be a good time and everything is provided.

On Friday morning we got the revised engineering drawings for the new house delivered to the County. The counter girl said this is the last hurdle, but we're not celebrating until we have the approvals in hand. There's a good chance that we will get our permits too late in the year to start building. Rains come in less than two months and the mud keeps large equipment from moving on the Farm. Perhaps we'll get the foundations in before the rains come. . .  If so we might get the framing done before Winter sets in. . . And if the stars all align and the Winter is dry we might even get the roof on it so that we can begin making a house.  But the Summer weather has been cool this year, so we'll look hard at things before deciding.

Friday after noon brought the final word on Laffee Taffe. She is going to have at least five puppies in early October. It is not entirely good news, but we have made peace with the idea and are getting ready for their coming. We started to build an eight by eight foot addition to the back of the tiny home to give the babies somewhere to play during the day. It should be done this week. In mid-September our two new females will arrive from Idaho, so things will be a bit "poopy" around here until December when the babies go to their new homes. Christmas Basset Hound Pups are always the perfect gift for anyone eight to eighty. We had our little hot tub put back together last week and spent nearly every evening soaking the pains of life away since then. But we had to empty it this morning to begin building the puppy room extension, so we'll be sad for a few days before it heats back up.

All said and done, this has been a good productive week and it looks like there will be another following after it.

August 24th, 2019 The New Normal

Last year on this date we were anticipating our very first Summer Supper. We had built a special place, bought way too much food, wine, and beer, and had invited everyone on Sell Road. Eventually about fifty-three people came for dinner and we served them as well as we could considering that the entire thing was cooked in our tiny home. That party was a success, the next one ought to be as good, or better, if all goes well. The 2019 Summer Supper will be on September 21st at about four o'clock in the afternoon. We'll be doing a fairly straight forward burgers and dogs meal with Camp Creekside Chili on the side, over the top, or left out altogether. We will also be serving enough vegetarian and vegetable stuff to keep the vegans satisfied and enough iced tea, pop, beer, wine, and ice as well.

RSVP using the form at the top of this page to let us know who is coming.

We are hoping for seventy-five this year so you coming is important to us.

As for the past week, things are pretty much back to a new normal. Ann's helpers have continued to come (and it is really appreciated). This week Ann spent the entire week working the Gardens. Produce is coming fairly regularly, and increasing weekly, but we still haven't come to the point that we can open the produce stand. Instead we are taking our excess produce down to St. Vincent DePaul's Food Bank. We are still delivering produce and eggs once a week to our longer standing friends too.  She also began the learning prcess for fermented pickles. This is a good thing. So farming is coming along. 

I have returned to working the Farm full time, even if a bit restricted as to what I can do somewhat. The first few days of the week I spent quite a bit of time working through some cleanup projects in anticipation of building the new Summer Supper shelter. We will put the new shelter at the back corner where it is a bit better shaded from the Sun. The shelter will become the place where we put building materials once the permits come through. (We made zero progress on the permits this week.) 

From Wednesday onward I sent my time cleaning up the shop space. The past few months had left it a shambles. Tools and hardware were wildly mixed up and left everywhere, the materials and tables were covered in dust, trash, what-have-you. SO the whole thing needed cleaned up and re-organized. This morning I got the final touches finished and began cleaning up around the outside of the shop. Eventually we may get the place cleared away, time will tell. 

This afternoon we took the e-bikes up the hill to Stub Stewart park on the Trail. The weather here has been unseasonably cool, but sunny and really nice. 

This new girl will be named Abba Zabba

We also finalized the purchase of two new puppies for our Rocketdog Kennel. No only if we could build the kennel . . . The new girls will come to us from Idaho in Mid-September and we're wondering how we will get through it. But plans still have to be kept if we're ever going to make a living on this place.

This little cutey will be named Bit-o-honey

Another thing worth noting is that: somehow, without showing any of the normal warning signs, Laffee Taffee may just be pregnant for the first time. She is too young to have to go through this, so we are hoping she doesn't have to. It may be that she is merely going through a false pregnancy, only an ultrasound will tell us. We have the appointment scheduled for the coming week. This is not entirely bad news, even if we didn't intend for this to happen. I'll keep you posted.

August 16th, 2019 Back to Work

The Summer Supper is happening!
Come one, come all!

After nearly nine weeks of laying around I returned to work. Not just this, I also returned to driving a car, wearing regular shoes, and thinking ahead toward a better future. Not everything is as it once was, but a bunch of stuff is.

On Tuesday I noticed that I could move my toes without much effort. This may not sound like much, but it signaled that the swelling in my foot was beginning to go away. On Wednesday morning I was able to bend my ankle enough to pull on a pair of jeans. The work of the farm doesn't really match wearing shorts, so work pants are better. By Wednesday night I could feel the tendon flexing along the inside of my arch. Thursday morning I could begin to make out an ankle bone, and that was about it. I strapped on my ski-boot styled foot support and went to work on Thursday morning and did nearly an entire day's work for the first time. Just after lunch I took the boot off and replaced it with a pair of matching runners. In normal shoes I can drive a car, but I still need to use a crutch on one side to keep some of the pressure off of the foot as insurance. All of this might give my foot doctor a headache, but I really needed to go back to work despite his anxieties.

The Farm is looking good, things are happening.

We are getting about a quart of large strawberries out of our patch every day. Most of these go straight into the freezer, some go on our plates. Lettuces, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, onions, and corn are all present in at least one of our meals every day. Soon the zucchini, melons, and beans will begin to show up on our plates too. There still isn't enough being picked to open the produce stand, but we are selling produce to Ann's circle of friends and we donated enough lettuce to St.Vincent food bank to make a bunch of people happy. Giving food away was always part of our plan, so at least something is going according to some plan. This  doesn't happen much.

Most of the damage from the tree fall in mid- June has been either cleaned up, or waiting the lifting of the burn ban. We will start putting up a replacement greenhouse soon enough and the irrigation stuff as well.

We will also need to build a shelter for the Summer Supper Party in September. Make sure to RSVP on the form above this article if you plan on coming. We will announce the menu soon, but the food will be good and the drinks cold. Last year we fed fifty or so people, this year we are hoping for another twenty-five more to come.

Click for a bigger picture

Our young hens began giving eggs this week. The eggs are good, but will be a bit small for a few more weeks. Orpington chickens are very large and their eggs are large as well, so the little eggs are sort of comical, but tasty. Ann delivers large eggs to our loyal customers, the little eggs stay here for personal use. Our duck eggs are selling well and our two new hens gave their first eggs this week. As it turned out only two of the five new Runner Ducks turned out to be hens so we are in the process of finding homes for the three young drakes we do not need. These drakes are very pretty so it shouldn't take long to find places to re-home them to.

The rodent problems have gone away for the time being. Hunting the squirrels and rabbits with a rifle has worked, but we are not at all happy to have shot those who were eating our crops. We haven't seen any more for a few days so maybe the new plan worked.

We got a message from the County that they needed a few engineering questions answered, so the permit is being worked and we might be able to build some day. I got our structural engineer on the job and we should have the questions answered pretty soon, but I'm ever more skeptical about the building phase of our project happening this year. Not building this year puts our whole project at risk since making money really depends on having a house and kennel. The timing is getting uncomfortably close but we are not panicky about it just yet.

All in all, this was a really good week. The weather has been great, nothing bad happened, and we are somehow beginning to look forward to a brighter future. All seem as it ought to be once more and we are very grateful for it.

August 10, 2019 Moving around now

The doctor took the cast off of my leg, put me into one of those boot things, and then told me not to use it. Funny thing this. . .  I have been walking around for a few weeks now, the thought of me giving all of that up is pretty small, but I appreciate the sentiment. The fact is that I really got hurt when the tree fell.  The broken bones and tree anxiety took a whole lot more out of me that I realized or was willing to admit. Moving around takes about four times the effort since there is no leverage in my legs and lifting anything more than about twenty pounds fairly stops me moving around. I can still move if my hands are pretty empty and I can stand up straight for a few hours at a time. But otherwise I am pretty useless for work.  It isn't that I can go running around, pulling heavy weights and roto-tilling new fields. But I can do some stuff.

We were having a real big problem with rodents. Mice, rats, rabbits, squirrels, moles, and gophers have all taken quite a toll on the gardens. Last year it was about moles and gophers. These didn't eat too much, but they tore the ground up a lot. During the Winter, after trying every bait, trap, and every bit of internet advice we could find, we finally heard about using road flares. So any new opening is now opened up immediately and a fifteen minute flare put into the tunnel. The gophers all moved, some of them not too far away so they stage come backs every once in a while. The moles have given up for the most part. The mice and rats are an ongoing puzzle, but the rabbits and squirrels have given  us a real problem.

The squirrels started off early in the Spring by invading the Greenhouse (before it was destroyed by the tree). The ate a great many of the seeds planting for sprouting, ate the heads off of a bunch of the sprouts, and when the plants started going into the ground the came soon after and destroyed the lot. They ate all of the early lettuces and all of the cantaloupe sprouts. They also started emtying the chicken feeder, an expensive thing to allow to continue.  We started making screen protectors and looking for other solutions.

The rabbits live next door and usually eat their new flowers, but occasionally they came by and weren't nearly the problem the squirrels have been. But since the Greenhouse has been torn down they have been coming over to take advantage of the many varieties of rabbit bait we have planted. They aren't nearly as big a problem as the squirrels, but they eat a lot more and take bigger bites.

We thought about snares and traps, but the farming forums online told us the only solution would be some sort of gun. Eventually we decided to do the dirty deed and bought a .22 caliber rifle with a scope. Since then we have been taking the critters out and hating it. The fact is that the little varmints just keep on coming. The rabbits are pretty hard to get, they are quick but not impossible. The squirrels are more numerous and a bit slower moving, so their numbers will eventually start falling.

The rows in the Market Garden is mostly filled with plants under some sort of wire protection, but so much that these furry critters stay out of it. We have three of four opportunities to take a squirrel out most days, the rabbits not nearly so much. Some days we don't see any.

The Gardens started producing food this past few weeks and things are looking pretty good. We now have onions, potatoes, tomatoes, strawberries, and lettuces to eat. Last night's supper was mostly grown here an it was delicious.  The plants are growing faster than the rodents can eat them and soon we will have produce worthy of selling.

Since I can't work much it falls to me to do the hunting, but gardening is out. I have spent some time driving the tractor and moving stuff around. I have also spent some time using the field burner to try and help out with weeds. And I can sit for a few hours and look for opportunities to do some stuff and it gives me something to do which isn't surfing YouTube or playing some game when I find something. But it will sure be nice to be able to get back to work.  We are planning our next moves, waiting for permits to come through, and thinking about our Second Annual Summer Supper. None of this is nothing, so I'll have to be content.

I've had quite a bit of time to think about things while laying around for nearly eight weeks. It took a few weeks to stop feeling useless, and few more to stop trying to force myself back to work. But since there isn't much anyone can do to knit bones it seems more right to think that there isn't much I can do about it either. So I spend about half my days laying around, the other half I get to do what little I can. The new boot will give me a bit more flexibility in doing some things, but time is the only thing that will fix what has been broken.  But things are going pretty well on the Farm and it looks good for the near future. Ann and her crew have done an amazing job of keep up on things too, so once I do get back to work we will be right back on top of it.