February 21, 2021 Lightening up

 The snows of the past few weeks have come and gone. The damage wasn't too bad and not a lot of time was wasted by the weather. We got a bit over ten inches of snow in the second storm. Nothing bad happened, but we did need to spent a day removing snow from the low pitched roof of the tiny home cabin. We never built the cabin for snow, so it really isn't built to hold the enormous weight of ten inches of snow. The first  four inch snow storm took out the Shop hoop house and there wasn't enough time to rebuild before the second storm rolled in and dumped ten more inches. So we'll still need to rebuild the Shop pretty soon. We had planned on moving our Greenhouse out into the Market Garden a few weeks back. So this will happen before the end of the month.

The house project has come far despite that we are both getting a bit worn down by the weight of it all. We have a little over half of the interior drywall hung. The bedroom suite is only eight feet tall so the ceilings are all in. The walls the office, bathroom, water closet, and bedroom, are all in except where the doors have to be installed. So we started hanging doors on Friday. 

There are only five interior doors. Two are sliding "pocket" doors, three of them swinging. We bought these really beautiful glass doors months ago from a bluff house remodel in Pacific City. We had found them on Craigslist and the builder delivered them to our shipping container. They have sat for nearly a year now.

The picture to the left is the Laundry room pocket door we have installed. We put the lighting inside the Landry room so that it backlights the glass door super well. The door frames are clear hemlock and the glass panel is beautifully etched with a wheat motif that is as farm-y as we could have hoped for. Eventually we will be painting all of the woodwork in the house but we haven't decided on a color yet. I never put in a pocket door and it turned out to be much easier than it looked because they sell a kit down at the Home Depot. We put the two pocket doors in on Friday and I began mortising out the hinges on the door jambs. It is an exacting project, much more difficult than putting in pocket doors.

We'll need to make a run into town to purchase another large load of drywall this coming week. The most we can put on our little truck is thirty-fours sheets. Buying this amount lowers the price of each sheet by about two dollars, so it is well worth moving this much at a single time, but the weight is serious enough to drive the truck slower. 

It doesn't take long to put the drywall up, but fitting around doors, windows, outlets, and switches takes some careful measuring. So far it has all gone very well. We have all of the lights and bathroom fans in and working now. We also have one of the small electric heaters in so the entire space is heated as well as lit.

The ceiling of the main room is fourteen feet from the floor and, since we have to use a much heavier sheet of drywall, we have to hoist ieach of the eighty pound sheets up on a lift to get it secured. I have to do much of the climbing, so things are going more slowly in the big room. We hope to have the main room ceiling up this next week so that we can begin insulating the main room. Right now the room is open to the roof and any heat goes straight up and out the roof vents. Once we have the ceiling and upper walls of the big room in the house ought to be easily heated. We designed the place to be heated using under floor heating, so it should be comfortable throughout using the one heater we already have installed.

The Farm itself has been pretty busy. Dairy Creek was at flood stage two weeks back and this brought one of the large Creek trees down. The tree fell toward the new house but wound up coming to rest just before it would have damaged the house. Ann and I made quick work of chopping it all up and burning to branches. We had to repair the fence where the tree hit it but we had already collected the parts so it only took two partial days to put everything right again. Between the weeks of heavy rains and snow this past Winter has been challenging. We were very lucky over all. 

Much of Northwestern Oregon had is far worse. We only lost electricity for a few minutes, some people nearby have lost power for weeks. We had more snow than ice while, just to the south of us, ice became one inch thick and tore the place up. We have a generator to power everything but haven't had to use it yet.

We spent a bit of time putting down some straw to cover the mud on our walking paths. Our chickens simply love hunting the grain out of it. We also pruned all of the fruit trees around the Farm on the one day between storms. I think the Winter is mostly over. There will still be more rain, but the worst is probably over. 

Our chickens and ducks are doing very well and the dogs are all vying to see who can get pregnant first. Our male hound, ClarkBar, is a nervous wreck  trying to find one of our girls receptive. He keeps trying, we stay hopeful. Our plan is to breed in April. Until then we have to feed ClarkeBar a bit more heavily since he won't eat his normal diet during times like these. 

All in all, despite the weather and a few minor set-backs, things are still moving forward pretty well here.

February 6, 2021 New Areal Map

 Every now and again the Google map gets updated satellite imagery. It's always a big deal because we get to see things as they really are and not as we have them in our imagination.  Today we found a new picture and it is a good time to take stock of what our progress looks like. 

This new image must have been taken in early June because the new Farmhouse has the roof sheathing and front gable is on, but the tar paper cover is not. Also, the Produce pop-up tent is out front, but the potato plants haven't really taken off yet. So this is somewhere about five months ago. A lot has happened since then, but this post is about a longer time frame. At the time this picture was taken, our house looked like the image to the left of this. Since then we have added windows, doors, roof felt paper, and a moisture barrier to keep the rains out.

At the beginning of last year we laid out a new design for the Farm, and the new satellite picture shows that we actually did it. Because of the house building there wasn't much farming going on.  But we did move the fences, partitioning the Farm into three parcels: the right section is the Kitchen Garden where food and flowers grow under the watchful eye of our Runner Ducks; the center section is the House and Kennel where our tiny home cabin is now in its third year; the left section is MacGreggor's Market Garden and the Chickens. When I made this plan last January, the house wasn't even a hole in the ground, but we were headed toward it.

The image on the right is where we began in 2015. Though you can't really see it, the place was covered in things that needed to be cut down, burned, cleared, or dumped in the landfill. It took nearly two years to find the fence on every side, three years to get the trash cleared up.  The image next to this one doesn't really do proper justice to the scope of the work we had ahead of us.

We still find trash every once in a while, but the place is cleared edge to edge and side to side. What little trash we do find fits into our weekly trash container. Our Basset Hounds are the ones who bring this stuff to us every once in a while. 

We still need to remove quite a few trees. This just may be the year we get to it. But from the look of this new image we are getting there.

In the coming year we hope to finish the house, plant a proper crop and sell it, and begin the hard work of laying out the Farm as it should become.

But today it is a Winter mud pit. Walking around the place, anywhere that isn't somehow raised above the mud, is a real problem. Driving the tractor only makes things worse. What we need is a dry month to begin cleaning it all up.  

Things are going real well at Creekside Farm. Lots getting done, more needing done. The Creek did rise but it isn't a real worry.