It's been a hectic week here on our mini farm

Lots going on, but doesn't seem like anything really got done. My middle son finishes up his job this week, his last day is Wednesday. Thank God! No more driving him into town at 7am! yuck! It also means he'll be home way more to be able to help on the house building. My mother-in-law and father-in-law are moving closer to us, so we've been helping them pack up their home. I've been hitting yard sales to find bargains, not only for my own home, but also for the flea market booth I set up earlier this month (which has thankfully sold enough to cover October's booth rent! Whew!). I am hoping my enterprise really pays off closer to Christmas, when we need the money the most. Here's a picture:

My oldest has been busy with college work and helping his grandparents. He has always been the hardest worker of all my kids! He's also spent the weekend helping Jason work on the house building. It seems we've spent so much time getting ready to get ready to do things on it. We had bought off craigslist some very nice solid wood doors with full windows for a very reasonable price. The only problem (the biggest problem) is that they don't fit a typical door frame. So while we had built everything for normal sized doors, we ended up having to jimmy the front door opening, and the back door opening is still up for debate on whether we'll use these same doors back there and jimmy the opening, or if we'll just resell them and buy prehung doors. While the doors are BEAUTIFUL, being NOT perfectly standard doors, and being that we're not construction workers with all the tools available at our disposal, it may not be the best idea to try to do the back ourselves. On top of the doors not being typical, they are also extremely heavy! We used the 3 hinges typical of doors this size, and have realized we're going to have to go with 5 hinges or purchase super expensive hinges to hold their weight or we'll have problems in the not-so-distant future. It does look wonderful, though.

Jason also purchased one of those storm doors that has a built in, hidden screen. The screen comes out of hiding as you push the window down. As often as we will use it, it was worth the extra money. :) Now that the front door & frame is all in the guys can work on trimming it and then get back to siding the house on that wall. We also heard from Menards that our foundation coating will be in on Monday or Tuesday this next week. Yay! We can finally finish THAT part of the house and begin working on the front and back porches. View of our new doors from the outside (I still need to wash them).

This week was also homecoming week for our local high school, so my daughter was busy with that. She has turned into an excellent photographer and was tapped to take the pictures for her FFA chapter. She did a tremendous job on the float, too. :) And my middle son took his girlfriend (who is still in high school) to the Homecoming dance last night, so that was more running around. They looked great, though.

Let's see, what else has been going on around here, I've been trying to get back in the swing of food storage. It seems I'm using a LOT of our food storage lately, first because all our extra money is going into my flea market booth right now (you have to spend money to make money) and because I don't really have the time to go to the grocery store to shop. Seems odd, I know, but with all the running around I've been doing lately, the last thing I want to do is drive an hour round trip to grocery shop. So it's been pizzas and tacos, and I think today just may be chicken on the grill. :) Oh, and eggs, we've been eating a lot of eggs lately. Our hens have slowed down their laying, but we still have far too many, so thankfully I have some faithful friends & neighbors who keep purchasing our extras. Have I mentioned lately that duck eggs make the BEST baking eggs?

I suppose I should stop chit-chatting and get busy with other things, like laundry and giving the animals fresh water. Enjoy the pictures!
And here's a photo of the pony...still at our house:

Here are some better pictures of the front door. :)

When all the stars are in alignment...

or maybe more accurately...when all the kids are home and have no other plans (this seems to be a rare occasion here lately, since the kids are all over 17 now), we get a lot accomplished.

Thursday we had another load of gravel dropped off, we'll keep plugging away at the French drain area, and whatever rock is leftover (we should have a small pile at least) will go on the driveway to fill in where the rain has washed it away. We had quite a rain this past week...3 inches!

Friday my husband took the day off work and got things organized, parts lined up, and the first row of siding started. That was a little trial and error on his part, since this is the first time he's worked with Hardy Board, a fiber cement siding...should last the rest of our life-time, though. Once he had everything figured out he and the kids really got some work done. Here are some pictures of the siding going up on Saturday:

And the last photo is of the last window finally installed on the front of the house. YAY! After the siding gets finished on the current side they're working on I think they have decided to tackle installing the door frames. This is also a first for my husband, as he couldn't find the correct sized door frames for our house (honestly, WHY do stores locally not sell six inch door frames...everyone these days are framing their homes in 2 x 6 studs! ugh!) So he's making his own. He's going to start with the small door on the front first, as that will be his practice run. The french doors on the back will be tough, as we want BOTH doors to be able to open, and open OUT onto the back porch, so we can fit BIG stuff through without killing ourselves trying to get it through a small opening. The back porch will be screened, so no worries about having to put a screen door on a six foot doorway.

In other news around our little farmstead, our chickens are molting and the ducks are backing off on laying for the winter, so the egg production has gone from about 14 a day down to six. My daughter and I spent the early morning yesterday cleaning the fence row out, seems some vines decided to climb our electric fence and ground it out. Thankfully our horses won't go through it, even when it's not on. It's been off for about two months. Yep, two months and the horses have stayed right where they're supposed to be.

Then we got busy cleaning up the north side of the house, construction mess is unsightly. After about six hours we had it pretty cleaned up, all that's left is a big pile of tarp pieces. The south side is going to take longer than that...that's where we have our tub & shower stall sitting for now, and they're on top of a big mess. I don't even want to talk about the mess behind our tool shed. Yuck!

Speaking of horses, we had a stray show up a few days ago. First it got through into our neighbor's calf pasture. When they couldn't chase it back through to its own side they chased it out of the pasture and it headed up here. I can't stand to see an animal just running loose, so it went in with our horses, after a day of introductions (ever heard horses get to know each other? It's NOISY!) they all seem to be settling down. Turns out it's a miniature horse...and it's a stud at that. Sigh...at least it's too small to breed with our mares. I'm not up to dealing with pregnant horses...not that our old girl even needs that added burden, being 29 in people years. Poor old girl, she may not make it another winter.

Anyway, we know where the little horse belongs, but it's not overly friendly to people and the owners just pasture a bunch of animals and don't even live around here. And of course no one around here knows their name...just say hi to them when they see them in the neighborhood. I guess we'll be leaving a note on their gate that their horse is up at our place. We wanted a cow or a goat, not another horse out in our pasture.

Well, that's about it around here. Hopefully I'll have pictures to post later of more progress on the house.

Sometimes we spend more time getting ready to get something done...

than we actually GET anything done. This weekend was one of those weekends. We are waiting for the stucco coating (tinted tan) to come in at Menards. We could go with gray from Lowes, but that wouldn't match our house, so we're waiting...and waiting...and waiting. Meanwhile we have the french drain needing another layer of rock, but can't get that in until the stucco goes up. We have a back deck that we could be working on, but we need to bring the level of the ground up back there, and yet we can't get it going until the stucco goes up. UGH!

Meanwhile we picked up the lumber needed for the covered back deck, removed the ramp (oh, this is SO not fun getting in and out of the house now!) and did a lot of clean up around the yard...lots of scrap lumber was burned this weekend. I think we had those two burn barrels blazing red hot for at least 10 hours! Thankfully the weather cooperated and it wasn't blazing hot out, as well.

We moved the ramp over and made it a deck in front of the tool shed...Jason's plans in the future are to put a little roof over it and dress it up like a boat house or an old cabin in the woods. Either way it's going to look CUTE! At least we were able to repurpose the materials. So really, it doesn't look like we got much done this weekend, and that last window still needs to go in, but when you consider that we are READY to get the foundation stucco on whenever it finally gets here, the flooring for the interior is ordered and on it's way here, and we have everything READY to begin the back deck, and the yard is looking a LOT better...I guess we were pretty productive. Oh, and I made lasagne yesterday for dinner...a family favorite and a special treat. Yep, it was a good weekend.

Upstairs windows are going in!

As of today we have three installed of the four. The last one is going to be a doozey because it's going above our staircase, so we have to make a scaffolding inside to get that one in. I thought we'd be tackling it this weekend, but so far the guys have been working on the foundation. They have all of the flashing installed, which Jason made by hand. Everything he looked at in the stores (and even the few he purchased) just didn't hold up. They were flimsy and dented easily. Thankfully he works where he was able to use all of the tools to do the metal bending himself.

Here are pictures of the windows. The ones without mullions are going to be facing the barn, they were on clearance at Menards and an excellent price. The ones with mullions will be facing the driveway, so they match the rest of the house's windows and don't look weird to those driving up the driveway. The 3rd window was finished just as it got dark out. Boy it makes me nervous seeing my guys so high up ladders! Sorry for the poor quality of the last photo, it was really dark out.

The places where you see tarps still on the back of the house are where we plan on putting in french doors and a big covered back deck, so it's still a tad ugly to look at, but once we begin to tackle those tasks the tarps will come down and it will look pretty. For now we are using a generic exterior door (which will probably go on the chicken coop when we're done with it) so as not to damage our pretty and expensive doors. Although they didn't cost near what we might've paid for them new...they were left over from someone else's building project and never used and we paid about 1/4 of what they could've cost new! I love Craigslist!

The spray foam company will need to come back out and hit some low spots on the 2nd floor. They sprayed the insulation on one of the hottest days of summer and once the foam had cured we noticed spots that need to be deeper in foam. We told them to come out when the weather cools (and it has been doing that here this week).

Last night we started burning off the scraps of wood that have accumulated from building recently. We have a HUGE pile of wood and downed branches tarped over, just waiting for more rain to soak the ground so we can burn them, however what we've been burning is what has recently been added to our mess, and Jason decided burn barrels were the way to go last night. While the night air was quite chilly last night, we were pretty toasty warm about 10 feet from the burn barrels until they died down to a few inches of embers. We'll work on burning them off again today, too. We have quite the accumulation and our back yard is looking trashy. I'm not a total neat-nick, but I really don't like my yard to be trashy. We have so much to deal with! We also have an ash tree that didn't make it through last winter that will need to come down. It was really big, and we will miss its shade. I think the plan is to plant an autumn blaze maple in its place...eventually.

I'm not sure what the next step is going to be on the house. Maybe running electric upstairs? We did get our flooring ordered and we got it for an EXCELLENT price! The flooring is 2nds, so we ordered plenty of extra, just in case we have to cut a bunch off. The worst looking stuff will go upstairs. Flooring is really still a ways away, but it's always good to get what you can when you have the money and you find a great deal! (Literally saving thousands by purchasing this lot!). I guess I should get in gear and get some more laundry out on the line and get my dishes done. I'm making a lasagne for dinner tonight. I guess we'll see what the guys get accomplished today. :)

We've installed a French Drain around the crawlspace

After the crawlspace was all insulated we found we had a little leakage into it from rain. It wasn't bad, but over time that could cause mold and other problems, so the best option was a French Drain. This also solves our roof's rainwater runoff, as the gutters can be piped directly into the French drain and it can all be directed away from the house's foundation. We started by renting a track hoe, and it was a pretty cool little tool...although expensive to rent. About $200 for 24 hours. We got a LOT done with it though.

While we had it to dig out the French drain we decided it would be a good idea to dig up a small section of our septic that we thought MIGHT not be working right (when you have a nice green patch of grass and all the rest is dead around it from a summer with no rain...you might have a leak!). Yep, the septic line had been installed directly on top of a BIG rock, and over time that rock had broken the septic line in that spot...and I should also mention that this particular spot in the system runs UP hill (UGH!). While it will need to be addressed eventually, the best we could do right now, with the limited resources at hand, was to replace the broken section and we added a clean-out, so if the up-hill problem causes a clog, at least we can clean it quickly.

The next weekend we asked a neighbor (who had offered before) if we would borrow his tractor with a front-end loader to haul the gravel around and back-fill the French drain. We had it the whole weekend and got more done with it in 2 days than we could've gotten done in 2 WEEKS by hand (shovel & wheelbarrow). Here are pictures of the new drainage pipe going into the ditches dug for the French drain and the gravel fill used to help with drainage. We need one more load of gravel to go all the way around the foundation, but we'll have that delivered and spread AFTER we get the foundation covered with the stucco-like product we're using to seal it.