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. 

January 24, 2021 Lights!!

Not much has happened since my last post, but we did get all the framing, electrical and plumbing rough-in inspections, and two-third of the insulation inspection all approved. So we began installing the interior drywall.  

I had found a drywall lift jack on Craig's List a few weeks back for $100 and I had put it up on a single level of scaffolding with the intention of doing the main room ceiling last week. But we took the thing down and decided to learn how to use it in the Bedroom section of the house. The process is laborious and hard on the lower back since the screws have to be done over-head. The drywall jack takes a whole lot of the work out of the job. 

We started off in the Office since this is where our Son Jack has been camped out. He had to take his place down entirely whenever the Inspectors come visit, because living in the house is technically out of bounds, so the room was empty for the day. We got as far as getting the ceiling, and two of the interior walls, covered before it began to get dark. 

As we put the ceiling up I installed the two L.E.D. lighting fixtures for that room. Cutting through the wires leading to the room from the electrical panel, where the circuit breaker was definitely off, brought the revelation that there must be a wire crossed somewhere, so I'll need to find the wire and buy some new wire cutters. The crossed wire also needs to be found the get the lights working. 

Jack came home from work at Supper time and put up the Window wall in the Office to allow him to move back into the room. Now the space is easy to heat and what little light there is bounces around, so it isn't so much like camping as it had been for the past few months. 

Tuesday, we did the wall which separates the Main room from the Bedroom section to make heating the Bedroom section easier. Now the entire Bedroom section is insulated and walled off. Until the Main room ceiling is up and insulated, that end of the house is impossible to heat and the difference between the two halves of the house is easily felt. The walls are much easier to do, but the whole thing weighs a ton.  The next day brought muscle and joint pain, so we  took the day off to rest up. 

On Friday we put up the Bedroom ceiling. This is a bigger room so the drywall jack does the job much easier. Even though the walls aren't covered it feels like a space we will be very comfortable in. I put the lights in the ceiling, as I had in the Office, but we still needed to put a few outlets in before putting power to the room. Saturday we had errands to run so all I got done was putting in the last two electrical outlets in the Bedroom. The lights came on with the flick of the switch. Real electric lights too, like the kind people in town have! Very satisfying. 

In non-Farmhouse news . . . The weather at the Farm was dry all week. Can't say it was ever warm, but not windy and wet passes for a nice day in the north-western Oregon Winter.  The mud subsided  a bit. The ducks dried out a the Chickens started producing eggs in a big way. Saturday we got thirty-one eggs, a new record. 

We are rapidly approaching breeding season for our hounds and we will soon re-enter the breeding business. I have been accumulating a Waiting List of people wanting a puppy, so most of the first litter is likely already taken even though we have nothing to take. We will do at least two litters this year, a good thing since were beginning to see the bottom of the money bucket. We will have to do the first litter in the Farmhouse since we are still living in what will become the new kennel once the house is done. A necessary sacrifice, but the pups will have a safe dry space with a floor, walls, heat, and lights. 

Lastly, the County was doing some tree trimming work on the electrical wires on Sell Road and our neighbor, Jay, had talked the crew into dropping all of the ground up trimmings onto his place. But he hadn't many places to put the stuff so on Saturday morning I warmed up Rosie the tractor and brought all that woody stuff in to make a six inch thick path from the Driveway to the Back door of the new house. The trimmings are not neat and tidy, but the mud will never get through it. Projects everywhere getting done, progress abounding at Creekside Farm. 

January 15th, 2021

The world has been very strange of late. Politics, insurrections, and so it goes.

But here at Creekside Farm it has mostly just been wet. Buckets of wet, wet, wet, wet.  Two days ago the West Fork of Dairy Creek came over its banks down the road a bit. Flood stage is 225.6 feet at the back of the property and we got at least that high, but the back of the Farm is really 231 feet so -no problem for us. It has rained nearly every day since my last post. Perhaps two sunny days since Christmas. Wet, wet, wet. The Farm has become its customary mud pit. Walking around requires a bit of care. Luckily for us we have a nice dry house to work on. 

The Farmhouse project was stuck at the framing inspection stage for the past few months and that broke free around mid-December. We also had the rough plumbing and electrical inspections at the same time. All three inspections happened about the same time as main power was hooked up to the house. The inspections had just a few fixes necessary and let a few other things go ahead. 

One was the insulation. We had a bit of a worry getting insulation but it turned out easier than it sounded at first. Another was a slight framing problem which was solved by adding a few boards. The third was replacing one of the Bedroom windows with something that would let a fireman in with a full pack. All of this took a bit of time and money, but it got done. We also needed to bring in some OSB board to finish the framing of the inside of the end walls, and boxes to finish the electrical stuff. Wood prices have continued to rise so a sheet of Oriented Strand Board, which cost twelve dollars in the Summer, is now thirty-two dollars. We only need a few so we were a bit luck anyway. 

Following on the fixes we had the Inspector out again and he gave us the go ahead to insulate the place. This is good since our son Jack is living in the office room of the new house and it was like a refrigerator in there most of the time. We did the insulation in just a few days and invited the Inspector out once more to approve it so that we could finish the sheer walls and start drywall. I did some of the outlet and switches so that we could use the power and disconnect the house from our tiny house cabin. There's less circuit breaker tripping now. and fewer power cords lying around in the mud too. The house is much warmer and once we have drywall up in the main room we ought to be able to heat it with a hair dryer. Improvements abounding at Creekside Farm.

We started carting the drywall out this past week. My little truck can carry about fifteen hundred pounds, so it will take three or four trips to get it all. With that much weight it is also a problem of driving over mud. The truck sinks in a few more inches with every pass. So far, so good.

We built a section of scaffold and put our new panel jack on it so that we can put the drywall ceiling in the great room. The ceiling is fourteen feet high so pushing an eighty pound sheet up and nailing it down is a problem that needed solved. We think we will be able to do the job now but won't start the work until next Monday. The lower ceilings of the Bedroom side won't need scaffolding at all. Note to self: build the next house with eight foot ceilings. 

With the house coming along quickly now we will soon be moving one of our hoop houses out into MacGreggor's Market Garden so that we can begin growing plants for Spring. There is much to do before Spring. A few trees must come down too. 

Our Chickens are laying eggs at a rate above one dozen a day, so egg sales are good. If you need some, and you do, just get in touch. Between egg sales, puppy sales, and stimulus checks, we ought to do okay in 2021. 

December 26th, 2020 The last week of 2020

 For the World, if not for us, 2020 was a horrible year. Fire, Flood, Protest, Pandemic, and a political system being stretched to the limits. But we made it through with little trouble. Our only New Years resolution for 2020 was to build a house and this actually happened. 

We began 2020 with the wooden forms for the concrete foundations in place. In January we poured concrete, stripped to forms off, and bolted down the "mud plate". By May we had the first floor nailed down and the underfloor plumbing installed. By September the walls and roof were all framed in and sometime in October we had the sheathing and roof paper installed. October and November were spent roughing in the plumbing and electrical, including building the new utility shed to house the water and electrical services. In December we got the house "dried in" by adding windows, doors, and Tyvek sheeting to the outside. The final framing, electrical, and plumbing rough in inspections done in late December and so begins the comparatively easier process of finishing the house in 2021.

The finishing projects are much easier simply because we have done all of it before at a professional level. In our last business we spent quite a bit of time doing insulation and drywall, put in copious electrical components and lighting as well. We also did weeks and weeks of painting, so this isn't a problem. Finishing the house should go pretty fast when compared to the hard job of putting the basic house up from the dirt to  ridge. We began buying and installing electrical components right away, once we got the inspections done, but finding the necessary parts might prove a slight problem. 

Wood prices have gone up significantly in the past few months, owing to the pandemic, unnecessary trade wars, and increased local building activity. Insulation products are also getting hard to find and prices are rising there as well. I ordered insulation from one source who said he couldn't find much of my list but the next guy I talked to sounded a bit more optimistic. We haven't received the stuff yet but we are hopeful to start insulating next week.  

Our main power wire installation is running a bit behind too. We were supposed to have PGE power to the new house on the 23rd of December. Now we are looking at mid-January, before they come, providing there isn't any major storm to deal with.

But the house is up, dry, and the wind doesn't run through it anymore, so we're pretty sure we'll have a house to live in in 2021.

We decided to restart our Basset breeding program in the Spring of 2021. This is a good idea as our bank account has begun to become a minor worry and we want to get ahead of it. We have  much to do and not a whole lot of money laying around to get it done, so we are considering whelping pups in our new bedroom while we do the finishing. Whelping takes about twelve weeks from start to finish and we will do much of the finishing in the bedroom before we get pups. Eventually we will move into the house and repurpose half of our tiny house into kennel space, but this won't happen soon enough  so we'll use the new house temporarily since it will be safe, warm, and dry. We have two females available for breeding this coming Spring, and four girls of breeding age by late Fall, so there's a good chance we'll do at least two litters in 2021. We're also hoping for some COVID relief bucks to come in sometime in late Winter, but every dollar not spent or dollars coming in will help insure we get where we are going in 2021. 

Our land is pretty well prepared for farming in the coming year. We spent quite a bit of time clearing and tilling, fertilizing and tending, and we have some good experience in planting and sowing seed in the past few years, so we are looking forward to a good year for growing and selling crops. Our chicken flock is producing very well and we will add some hens to the mix in late Spring. Most of our farming practices are all well known to us now, and we have sold enough of it to know how to do this too. We have our produce stand ready for when the crops show up and 2021 looks to be a great strawberry year this Spring and we are well prepared and ready for.

All things considered we did pretty well last year. And as the New Year arrives we have vaccines on the way. The World is looking forward to shaking off the virus and the strange politics of the last few years. So we are hoping for a substantial bounce in the worldwide happiness quotient in the coming year and hope everyone reading this is as hopeful and ready to smile as we are. The past year has been one big nasty surprise after another, few of them we would wish to see again, so let's not.