July 2, 2020

It has been a while since we updated you on the status of our farm. This past month has been a wild ride, both ups and downs. We started the month with a major up! We finished one complete wall where almost all the studs either had water damage or had been eaten away by termites. We rebuilt the structural support of the kitchen and bathroom wall, and the opening from the mudroom to the kitchen. While we were working on that wall, a hammer fell from the ceiling joists. We wonder if the previous owner realized he lost it!

Our first down of the month was discovering a leak in the roof and a rotted ceiling over the bathroom. The rot went all the way into the mudroom. We had to remove more sheetrock to rebuild part of that wall, too.

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Another up – our garden is doing very well! The tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers are growing beautifully. We’ve even got baby peppers and tomatoes already. We had to replant the green beans because several did not germinate. A week after the second planting, every single seed came up! The apple trees are also growing well and we’ve begun training them to the trellises. The spring rains (that we complained about) were a huge benefit to the farm.

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We are still as adventurous as ever in our cooking and enjoy making things from scratch. We made braised bacon covered rabbit and vegetables in a dutch oven. Oh my, it was delicious. We also figured out that our pressure canner fits on our turkey fryer burner, so we were able to preserve some food. That’s a win, since we don’t have our stove installed yet. And, then we made yogurt. We’ve made yogurt for years using raw milk, but we were given a few gallons of store-bought milk, so we decided to try it. The yogurt from the store-bought milk was fine, but we had a much higher whey to yogurt ratio than we are used to with raw milk.

Another huge “up” for us was finishing the kitchen wall and installing a larger window. For most of our projects, we seem to have to do things twice or run into problems that make us change our plans. That didn’t happen with the wall and window. Everything went so smoothly and we finished it much quicker than we planned!

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Joshua found a visitor under one of the cars! Yikes. A few weeks later, the guy who brush hogged our pasture said he saw at least a dozen copperheads in the field. Our house is now for sale . . . .Just kidding.

Last month, we leveled our girders to get ready for the floor joists. The thought of completing the next major structural section made us feel like we could do anything. We were excited to install the joists. That’s when we were hit with a HUGE low. We found out, first of all, that the girders were not as level as we thought. Then, we found out our pillars were not built correctly. We had to bust up some concrete and totally rebuild all 12 pillars.

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Once they were re-built, we had to re-level the girders (which was a pain). But things quickly turned around and we got almost all the floor joists up! We left a few joists uninstalled so the plumbing will be easier to do. We were certainly doing a happy dance!

We added some temporary flooring so we could walk around, and even taped out where our master bathroom is going to be built. This was another HUGE success, and we really felt like we were making progress.

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Last weekend we visited with an old friend who we’ve not seen in a while. He said that he had been following the progress on our blog. He said he had no doubt we would be able to renovate this farm. He said there are 3 ways to do things, the EASY way, the HARD way, and the NEWTOWN way! That made us chuckle for quite a bit throughout the day.