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.