March 4, 2018 Random notes about a day off (Late Post)

This morning is the beginning of a day off from work. We don't get many of these this year as we make the move to the Farm full time and the day for the move draws near.

I made a cup of tea yesterday afternoon with the last tea bag and thought about buying more. But I also keep tea bags in the Cabin, and this makes purchasing more unnecessary. If I bring fifteen tea bags from the Farm I will have enough to finish the project. Leaving me just about twenty days or so that we live in what was once our house. Our first house, though not our first home.

Wow.

By the end of the month we will have to kick the legs out. We will either hang or we'll learn to fly. A real make it or break it moment in time. We are making plans to do as close to nothing today as we can today.  The thought of learning to fly using these aging bodies is a bit daunting.

We are doing things which would have been difficult for out thirty years old selves, not that it would have stopped us.  At our age there is a special sort of pain that come from physical work, so a day off is sometimes necessary. And if there is work at hand that needs done, we might do it, so

May 20, 2018 Building a New Farm House

This was one of our first preliminary Farm plans.
The Farmhouse goes in the upper right-hand corner.
It is shown in Fuschia.

We have arrived on the Farm, even if it resembles (somewhat) the scene from the 60s television show Green Acres. We have built a greenhouse and also the second half of the Cabin. We have planted a crop and have been clearing the land. And if the stars align we will have sold our old house by the end of June. Everything according to a plan which we made but that works on a schedule all of its own. Our next major step is building a new Farmhouse for us to live in.

We have been thinking about this new house for many months. I even came up with a preliminary design for where the House would go. Of course the drawing (at the left) was done long before we could actually see the Farm property. There was much to do.

As we cleared the land,over time, the Farm layout maintained much of its layout, and this included the placement of the house. But was always knew that we would have to be flexible in our desires.

The dark, shaded, area was the projected placement
of MacGregors Garden. Our first Market Garden.
It was actually built one-hundred feet to the left.

 In the interim we also spent time dreaming up the perfect dream Farmhouse.  (Above is a rendering of our dream Farmhouse.) A tight little house which amounted to a large bathroom and a kitchen, with no second bathroom and no extra bedrooms.

And as the time for building grew near we began finding a builder to.

At first my own plan was to find a builder willing to let me do much of the work of putting the thing together. This all seems so long ago. Calling builders led to us finding our first obstacle: price.

The Portland area is experiencing a booming market for new home construction. The few builders willing to return phone calls all said roughly the same thing: "Your custom house will cost about three hundred dollars a square foot to build". And this was an unexpected thing to hear. We were thinking that our one-thousand foot home ought to cost about $100,000 to put up. We weren't expecting much. This news pushed us into finding an option. 

We thought about buying a "mover", a house that a developer might want to get rid of so that they might build ten new homes in its place. Back in the early 2000s these houses might cost as little as a dollar, but seventy thousand to set up on a lot. A good value, but in the contemporary market these homes no longer exist. So we began to think that maybe, no matter our desires, we ought to look at a manufactured home. 

I won't bore you with the saga of the search. We drove to every manufacturer, looking for something resembling our dream house. We found one in McMinnville that was about the right thing. We sat down with a guy and found that we could get it for about $75.00 a square foot, customized. But we would have to buy four hundred more feet of floor-space than we had planned. 

Even with the unnecessary space it sounded good enough. But we are never people to jump at the first thing we see, and finding a contractor to set the house up was proving to be a problem. So we continued the search a bit longer. Eventually we found another manufacturer in Albany. 

The first view we had.

Entering the place from the side door (which we will not have in ours), this was the view (to the right). 

I immediately knew that this was the winner and Ann fell for it like a ton of bricks. The kitchen was large, long, and had a spectacular number of cabinets and counter-tops. The windows we large and the view through these would cover the entire Farm.

Ann fell immediately in love with the kitchen.
(You can click on any image to see the bigger picture.)

A bit of "curb appeal".
From the front room we will
be able to see the entire Farm.

Living room view.
We won't have the door.

We are about to order the house, paying cash once the old house sells. We still have to find someone to do the preparation of the home site on the Farm But all of this seems less daunting than building the thing entirely from scratch and they can have it up by mid-November. 

Even with the development costs, extra bedrooms, extra bathroom, and with customizations, we will still hit out $100 per square foot goal. Hopefully leaving us without a mortgage so that we can spend our lives in comfortable retirement from the world of workers and living our lives as farmers.

This is roughly the same layout as the plan we desired at the onset.
Ours will be about four feet narrower.
Making the place smaller, but better.

May 15, 2018 Our New Rooster.

Our new rooster is the beautiful golden boy to the left.

Things have been so busy since my last update there simply has been no time to keep up with all of the changes. This is a small(ish) change which is interesting all on its own. I will write the longer update soon, I promise. . .

We moved the chickens to the Farm a few weeks ago and they could not be happier about the move.

We had always thought that we would leave them at the old house with the new homeowners, but getting the house to completion meant leaving them there alone and this was as inconvenient as doing all of the laundry there. So we decided to move the coop and chickens out one nice Sunday morning, on the spur of the moment. The girls immediately went about tearing down piles of composting debris and laying very tasty eggs for us.

The hounds all thought the Hens would make good toys to play with and we thought that perhaps we had made a mistake. But the girls soon got tired of being stalked and chased. Rhoda, our Rhode Island Red, took on the roll of the dominant chicken and began fighting back. The dogs lost interest about the second time the Hen charged at them, with wings out-stretched and beak ready for battle. Things simmered down after that and the chickens became something more fun to look at than chase.

But three chickens was not our original plan and we were getting impatient even as the animals all settled into the farm routine. We wanted to have at least twenty-five hens a-laying, and a few roosters to make new chicks. Part of our plan was to buy a clutch of chicks at the feed store and wait for a rooster to show up accidentally, but this was going to take more time than we wanted and Summer was coming on quickly despite our wishes, so I started looking for a rooster. The one I found was unexpectedly good.

The picture doesn't show it,
but he's really quite large.
About double Rhoda,
One and a half times the others.

As I have written before, I do a great deal of searching for things on Craig's List. (Mostly in the free section.) The choices of free roosters is larger than you might expect, but I am not the only one wanting them. I answered every ad for a few weeks, only to find the bird already taken. So I moved on to searching the Farm stuff for sale section, mostly to the same effect. In this search most of the young roosters were either bred for sale, therefore expensive, or accidentally purchased through the feed store, therefore too young. But one ad showed a perfectly respectable Buff Orpington rooster for fifteen dollars and I got to the ad about fifteen minutes after it was posted. Bottom line, I bought a really nice young rooster for fifteen dollars from a nice woman with a farm on the top of Bald Peak.

Biff crows a softer than we expected. There is a loud rooster up the road who crows all day and is very loud. He struts around and, at first, took the same guff from the dogs. For a few days he had to contend with Rhoda for the top position in the flock, but he's was easily double the size of the hen  and in a few days he figured the whole thing out. Now he leads his girls around to the best places to eat and, if a dog gets too close, he chases the threat away. Yesterday I thought I saw him trying to bully the Cinnamon Bear.

Biff, the Buff Orpington immediately
took the hens's hearts and began taking
them all over the farm.

Part of his job, as Rooster and Chief, is to encourage the making of chicks. He likes this part of the job and goes at whenever he can sneak up on a hen. We expect one of the hens will "go broody" at sometime, making us a clutch of chicks to increase our flock, but our plans need to happen more quickly that that. So last night we got impatient and bought ten new chicks to speed the plan along. Five Rhode Island Reds, five Buff Orpingtons (because the season has ended and they were out of Reds).

I'll try to make the time to catch you up on our new tractor, and all of the other progress we are making, or not making, at a later date. (When there's is more time.)

April 21, 2018 We bought a new tractor.

Without going into too much detail, we bought our new micro-tractor today.

March 11, 2018 Our first night on Creekside Farm.

We crossed another milestone yesterday, we stayed the night in the Cabin after putting in a workday on our Creekside Farm. (Since we now have plants in dirt we shall dispense with the Camp Creekside name until we begin building the Camping facilities.)

This was always a big goal line to cross, one which we eventually put off for as long as we could because giving up our creature comforts, like a comfortable bed. The pull our sofa we bought has something of a thin mattress and the placement of the sofa, while opened up for sleeping, makes it hard to get around. There is also the limited amount of hot water as well. We do love a hot shower. The six gallon water heater is good for a five minute shower if you are careful. The creature comforts of home are an aside to the comforts of our dogs.

We have done our best to give them a comfortable place to be at night. We built an especially designed bed, with a heated floor, and have an auxiliary heater for the coldest part of the night as well. They get the same food as they do at home, but in larger quantities because they are so much more active out there. Each hound has his or her own insulated coat, some have two, to keep them warm. There is even a good supply of dog biscuits because our hounds would die without them. We took every precaution to insure they would sleep comfortably. But it remained that we would not know how they would do until they were put in the position of sleeping over.

As it turned out they did well for the most part. There was some grumping at first, a bit of wandering around in and under the work bench, knocking over whatever wasn't steady. The sleep we got was in direct proportion to the amount of grumping in the work bench area, but we slept pretty well. I think the dogs will come to tucking into their bed, once the lights go out, and then everyone will get a bit more sleep. But all in all, the place is at least livable, with more to do.

From this point in time onward we will likely be spending one or two nights a week out there, working the bugs out of our ideas and getting a great deal more work done. As it was we got some big stuff done yesterday before bed time.

We were able to move almost all of what looks like scrap (but is actually stuff to build with) behind the newly built greenhouse. The stuff was organized, but a bit of an eyesore when seen from the road. Now it has been re-organized and placed out of sight. We also took the time to re-shuffle the contents of the shipping container we use for safe storage.

During the year we acquired a great deal of stuff and all of it went into the container as it arrived in our hands. We moved all of the prepper food (about three tons of carefully preserved grains and foodstuff) to the back of the Container and carefully stacked it to be used as needed. This foodstuff cache, enough to feed a small army for a week or two, was something we acquired for free. Some of it is sufficient for human consumption, but only in an emergency, so having it out of the way makes the container more useful. We also moved greenhouse stuff to the greenhouse and weather resistant stuff outside. So we did some big-time shifting, sorting, and stacking.

I lit the burn barrel as the sun set and the chill of an early spring night came down on us all and after dinner everyone took a medium short walk down the Banks-Vernonia Trail as the light of day failed entirely. The dogs were happy to take a walk off of the Farm at first, but it wasn't long before they were wore out and had to be dragged back to the Farm bodily. We put the hounds up in their living quarters and headed inside. We had accomplished a lot before finally deciding that this would be our first real night on the Farm.  We made it into pajamas and blankets only after asking if "tonight would be the night" four or five times.

The night was a bit longer than some, but certainly not the worst night we have experienced. This morning we woke up at six thirty, made our coffee, watched some television, and most of the usual Sunday morning stuff. We used the shower, cooked a hot breakfast, and made the bed. All of the usual morning routine, and then spent a few hours doing Farm chores before loading everyone up for transport back to civilization.

I had no trouble getting the dogs to agree to leaving the Farm. This is usually not the case.