2025 has been a pretty wild ride and sure did not start out well with that poison thang LOL. It has been crazy busy here in the home stretch of wrapping up all of the projects I wanted to get complete or at a stage of completed that I can finish up over the winter. The most important and most expensive was to get the new barn/garage up. I went with a all steel building. it is 24x50x8T Debated going 10' on the eaves but decided 8 was fine. I will do a 4" concrete floor in it next year around this time and give it a full year for the dirt work to settle. I like doing the concrete after a building is up LOL not much chance of it going anywhere with concrete over every perimeter rail. A 4 man crew of non English speakers had it up and well built in less than 12 hours. The old barn is in good shape other than it needs 4 rotted post replaced to fix one sides sagging issues. Simple matter of jacking the wall up and replacing the timbers or just sistering timbers to the existing ones and it will be good for another 100 years I have that old barn packed to gills with stuff I had to unload from trailers to fill them up again for more round trips. The old barn stuff is getting moved to the new barn and it will be used primarily for feed storage and for the Rabbits and Chickens. Another important project was building a add on to the back of the cabin and getting it leak proof and dry. Only had 2 ways that I could do it. Shorter and under the cabin roof or taller and attaching it to the cabin roof. I opted for the simplicity of going under and shorter. It is 6' 6" inside and I built it with the allegedly non toxic treated lumber. The back half once it is insulate, electrified and has interior wall covering will be the Dooms Day Food Pantry and the front half will be a washer and dryer, cabinets, counters and the big propane range I brought from the old cabin....... A summer and canning kitchen I get the Cabins second bedroom back LOL right now it is full of shelves and is the Dooms Day Pantry. Hey it is the Ozarks so we have got ROCKS A small mountains worth for the back yard and a creek full of them bordering the front yard. Every morning I take one of the tractors over to the creek and fill a bucket up with rocks. Its a good sunrise workout. Then I take them to Lorrie's rock project sites and dump them for her to do what she wants with them. Also keep a eye open for ones suitable for going up that ugly cinder block chimney I have downsized the STUFF A LOT and that still left me with a 8x24 and 8x16 pair of trailers stuffed with all of my tools and tool boxes. The new Barn let me get those two trailers unloaded. I decided a while back that once those trailers were empty that I was going to sell 4 of my remaining 7 trailers. I mean how many trailers does one retired guy on a small homestead kind of place really need hehe. So over the last week I sold the Corn Pro Livestock trailer, the Deck over PJ Tilt Deck, and the Chuck Wagon Food Trailer that has been a tool storage trailer. The New 8x24 Homesteader trailer I had always intended to sell since I bought it. And the dealership I bought it from is buying it back for $2,000 less than I paid them for it. Cheaper than renting a bigger trailer for the move and using a rental for storage for 6 Months. Driving it back to the dealership today and recovering a nice chunk of money. That leaves me a 16', 12' and a 8' trio of utility trailers and the 8' I just pull around the property behind the RTV. I have one building project left to get done before winter and that is a 12'x20' kit I bought a couple of years ago. It will make a real nice Chicken coop and will only take 3-4 days to get up and finished up with the mods to make it a chicken coop. The pace is finally slowing down and I can start enjoying instead of going like hell trying to get everything done.
Glad to see all the progress you have made and that things are coming together. You do know that you are supposed to watch soap operas, not live them? Well you have proved one thing, you are one h### of a survivor, couldn't even poison you and it sound like you had an experienced person try that. I very much like reading about all the things you do and plan for.
LOL I sleep at max 5 hours........ So I time when I go to bed with when I need or want to wake up. I needed to be up at 8am this morning. LOL I usually hit the sack around 11pm and up at 4am. Some weird internal sleep time from another life that I have never been able to shake.
I'd sure love to have your energy,, I've got a ton of projects that aren't getting done near as fast. I've got them sleep issues as well ,, I usually try to lay down between 10 pm and midnight,, I was still awake around 0430 this morning,, and was standing in front of the coffee pot about 0700 this morning.. Dragging ass a little,, but I know if I'd have laid back down,, I wouldn't be up till 10 or 11 am . I'm with Mr Duane ,, I love hearing ,, and seeing the progress of your projects .
Glad to hear that things are coming together on the homestead and y'all can take a breath. Fall will be coming soon, and it should be beautiful in the Ozarks. Y'all need to enjoy it, because when the snow starts flying outside projects are gonna cease.
Want to have all the shells built and sealed up with their wood stoves in and ready to burn before the snow and ice start flying. That makes a much more laid back and relaxed to do list over the winter. Plumbing, Electrical, and interior stuff. Also going to do some breaker and wire changing in the Cabin LOL whomever did the electrical really did not think things through very well like putting the entire Kitchen on a single 14/2 15amp circuit............ Gonna change that to a 10/2 30amp circuit and perhaps not blow the breaker every time the microwave hits 2 minutes 32 seconds LOL. The wiring is interesting to say the least in the cabin and I guess they had a super sale on cheap 14/2 in 1991 when it was done. Plenty do do over the winter just not as intense as getting things done before winter. Been so dry here for the last 3 Months the trees have been browning out and dropping leafs for the last Month. I was hoping for a spectacular fall display of foliage not sure there are going to be enough leafs left on the trees for that though.
Wow! As usual, I am dumbfounded by the amount of what you have done, plan to do, and especially that you know how to do much of it yourself. "Lorrie's rock project sites..." I must ask, what are some of her projects? In North Idaho here, we also have lots of rocks, so much so, one dreads trying to use a shovel. So, I am curious what she is doing with them. In Ireland, I saw over the generations, people partitioned their land with rock walls, rocks that came out of the ground they cleared for farming. So, just curious what ideas she has for these rocks...
It's certainly not to any code I'm aware of. Oh. Wait. I'm not an electrician, nor do I play one on TV (spit, ptui!), but it does violate all sorts of common sense (which is an oxymoron, as it's anything but common).
Your wearing us out with all this retired projects. Dam up the creek a bit and make a fish pond of hire some beavers?
Glad you finally left that lib la la land. You'll probably save a small fortune in taxes alone if you don't have to pay into Chicago's welfare system. And oh yeah, hopefully now you won't be such a stranger.
