Measure Twice, Cut Once

Summer is gone and with it the warm weather, we have been keeping a fire in the stove pretty much every day that we are home. We are just finishing up some contract work in the city so we have been staying with Jennifer’s Grandparents. But we should soon have that done and can get back to work on the house, and get a water well dug, we did get the road all finished thanks to our good neighbor Al. We are now just gathering up things for the well and the house and will soon decide where to dig the well. I’m thinking of putting it in the greenhouse that I will be building on the South side of the house it will be and old cast hand pump. We have been working up the two garden spots, as we have been told that a sure way to kill quack grass it to freeze the roots, last night it got down to -8 Celsius. The cows are needing a bit of hay, the fall pasture is all but gone now, we really need to do some more fencing to get the cows in the bush around the North and East side of the yard to eat all the grass. I have made a list of all the post and wire needed now to put it into the budget and hopefully get a start on it in the spring.

Things are going slow but we are making sawdust and lots of noise, and a few things are starting to take shape. Here we have the new gable wall taking shape, we are going from the straw over to stick frame. Stick frame is very fast compared to the straw clay building method. As we go along you will begin to see the roof outline and notice that the South side of the house will have a very long slope. This is part of the passive solar collector part of the house. As we are buildingthe house to be a big solar collector that we just happen to live in, with the end goal to be a self heating  house.

A few days later and we have the panel board going up, we have scaffolding up to help makes things a  bit safer. We had to stop here and build a solar rack to move the panel to as they where on the other side of the new wall and mostly in the shade.

Busy as Beavers

Here on the homestead fall is in the air I saw a couple flocks of Canada geese go over the other day and that will get me into the fall work mind set. So I have decided to add a little more room on to our house, with a new baby and all it is time for an upgrade also on a few things.

One thing will be the drilling of a water well, I have found a little company in Texas that sells a do it yourself water well drilling kit. So that is in the mail and as soon as it get here we will be drilling or trying to drill. I will be posting on how that goes with lots of pictures.

The big change will be the house and I have some pictures of that project underway, I will keep the blog up to date on that project as well.

The other thing we did this fall is get a new bull for our growing herd of Dexter’s, he doesn’t have any papers but he is a full blood and we have named him Sampson.