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.