Lee and I have been working on processing the wood scrap coming out of our house project. Most of the wood we are just cutting down to size so it will fit into our wood stove. It should burn very good as it has had over 70 years to dry. Lee cuts the wood to size in the cart so it will just fall into place.

Then once the cart is full I bring it back to the barn stall and stack, and stack, and stack. We still have so much more to do before being done. I plan on being warm this winter.

The last of the plywood ceiling in the living room was taken off. We managed to not get beamed on the head by four pieces of wood left up in the ceiling. There wasn’t as many mouse nests which was nice. But there was still droppings all over the floor by the time Lee finished.

I decided to call this room the boardroom. Lee hates this room with a passion. The reason being that every time he uncovers a wall it has boards then making a new wall. All of the plywood had been taken off the walls but Lee had never touched the ceiling. We thought it would be just like the ceiling out in the living room with plywood over the floor joists. Nope! It had plywood over boards attached to the floor joists. There was much groaning on Lee’s part.

The drywall was taken out at the end of the stairway.

Back in April we had two Port Orford cedar trees fallen in front of our house. Since that day we have just been walking over them to get to the front door. I jokingly referred to the fallen trees as our anti theft device for our house.

We didn’t want to split the logs up for firewood. The reason for that being is that Lee would like to have them milled and use some of that cedar for making closets in the house. He bought a drawbar and borrowed an old log rolling tool from my Uncle. Then Lee pulled them to the back of the house with his tractor and stacked them. I thought for sure he was going to take out the mail boxes or get one of the logs stuck in the middle of the road. I am ever so impressed. Not to mention I am not going to miss stepping over those logs while carrying groceries.

There was a small grove of wild Hazel nut trees in the future chicken pen. These wouldn’t normally be on the top of our list for cutting down, but they interfered with our planned chicken fence line and needed to be removed. Lee took out the chain saw that my dad kindly gave us, and made a pretty fast work of it. Jasper and I watched in the camp chair.

Before & after:

Before & after:

Lee doesn’t like being able to see our neighbors now that the area is opened up. On the other hand, the openness will let more sunlight in and the grass will grow better. It’s a catch 22. Now all that we need to do is mow the area, move and stack all the split firewood from the latest Cedar tree take down, and clean up some stray branches. After that we can get down to fence building.

We needed another tree taken out before we continued on the chicken fencing project. When we had the previous tree in that area removed we didn’t realize that there was a second tree dying. This particular tree had a split about 25 feet up the side of it. The core of the Cedar tree was dead with some rotting in the middle like the last tree.

I had fully envisioned that when this tree was taken down it was going to take out the well head, which was in its path. Lee went and put a log chunk by the pump house to act as a buffer in case the tree fell there. Luckily the tree didn’t land on it when it went down. BUT, after the tree fell down it then rolled over on it. Thankfully all the damage that happened was the roof came off the poorly built pump house.

Here is a picture of the tree line in question. The red lines show where the two trees came out. Removing this new tree seems to have made the whole area brighter still. The green lines show where the three remaining healthy trees are. I’m not sure why all the Cedar trees were planted so close originally, as it makes it harder on the trees. With all the new light it should make the remaining trees happier. The white building on the far left is the back corner of our house. The building in the middle in between the first green and red lines is the wood shack. So the tree was somewhat close to important things. Even better was that when it came down it didn’t take out the stacked wood piles that we had. It couldn’t have gone smoother.

In just a few hours between the tree being cut down to when Lee went out to start clearing up the limbs, we had spiders making webs every where. Here is one of them.

Lastly, I have to put in the action man shot. It’s kind of blurry as my battery was trying to die but oh well.

This last week we have been doing a lot of clean up around the house. Lee decided that he wanted to start working on the mess where the new fence is going in near the house. I kept telling him to stop making messes as we are supposed to be making the place look better not worse.

Lee had actually started to clean on this mess a while back. You can tell because the grass is still very green in this picture.

He got this Hazel nut tree most of the way out. Nether one of us really wanted to start working on the sticker bushes that were way over our heads. So we didn’t do anything more to the area and went on to putting up the garden fence.

So here we are over a month later and I still don’t want to work on it. However, Lee likes to procrastinate clean up chores by doing other unrelated clean up chores.

Out comes the machete that we inherited from the house clean up. This is another tool that men find exciting. I’m thinking that it has something to do with swinging a big knife around creating havoc as they picture themselves in a jungle action movie. The only thing probably tying Lee to reality is the safety glasses. (Lee: In my defense, it was a Middle Ages action movie.) You can see by the picture how high the sticker bushes are as they are way over Lee’s head. The sticker bushes were weighing down all the small trees in the area and had most of them bent over.

Back in the same general area there is an old broken boat. My niece had fun playing in it as I think it was used as a sand box at one time. Except I could only find the merest hint of sand even though there were a lot of left over broken sand toys in the boat. I would actually like to see if there was some way the boat could be made more sturdy so it could be reused as a sand box. I will have to have Lee look at it closer to see if it could be saved.

Near the boat was a big tangled mess of chicken wire. It had been left out and trees and brush had started to grow through it all. Lee was not happy and you could hear him muttering about the previous tenants that had lived here. After the big struggle of getting that out it looked as if it were a complete roll of chicken wire that was mostly unrolled. I’m not sure that I knew that the chicken wire was even back there. Lee saw it when he was removing the existing fencing so he could get back to the sticker bush mess.

So what does it look like now? Still a mess but at least it’s progress. Lee wants to put in a compost station back there when he gets everything cleaned up.

On the bright side he has almost broken through the sticker wall so you can see out into the back field. It will be very nice and different when it is all cleaned up and you can see through. It will probably make the yard seem bigger.

There was a grand ball deflating today. I managed not to stab myself accidentally which was amazing for me. Lee gets nervous when I use knives. After much slashing and stabbing the ball massacre was finished leaving me with a headache from ball fumes and 9 balls for the dogs.

When Lee and I bought this house it came with a ball graveyard. An odd thing to have but kind of funny. The owner said he tried to pile them all in one spot because of them being all over the place. After we started cleaning up the property we added a few more to the pile that we found, threw a few away, and Edgar has recycled a few.

Lee wanted to start clearing out a spot for a compost pile so the ball graveyard got displaced. We will save the ones in the best condition for Edgar to play with and just throw the other ones away. Edgar was a little overwhelmed with so many balls to choose from. Or maybe he was just a little nervous about it since they all seemed to come flying out at him as Lee was moving them.

This weekend Lee and I decided to tackle the fence line that ran down the middle of our property. This wasn’t a small challenge, as most the  fence line was covered in sticker vines. The first thing I did was to go down the line cutting the draped vines with clippers and making a pathway through so Lee could get in. After that was done, Lee could then take down all the barbed wires and fence posts. It went pretty fast until we hit the forest of sticker vines at the back of our property next to our neighbor. That required taking out trees and pulling tree-like branches of sticker vines out of trees. After that we cut down lots of small volunteer Hazel nut trees and trimmed back limbs so Lee could drive his tractor through with the mower. We made another huge burn pile after just getting rid of four last week. All our effort really made a difference in how nice it looks.

Before and after.

Before and after.

Burn season is coming to a close soon. That made us try to hurry up and burn the four piles we had around the property. With those piles burned that means we have had 12 burn piles so far this season. Wow! I knew we had a lot of brush to get rid of but I didn’t know it was going to end up that many. We have lots of trees that need taken out so I am expecting a lot more burn piles again next burn season. One thing I learned is that Hazel nut trees need some months to dry out because the wood won’t burn otherwise.

The first fire I did some days before. It was the scariest fire I have ever had that left me shaking. It had a bunch of cedar limbs in it that had been down for about a month or so and misc. other brush. I lighted the fire and about 5 minutes later it was a fire bomb. The wind started blowing and started grass fires but the flames were so high and hot I couldn’t get near enough to put them out. I ran back to get Lee to help and a shovel (because my rake wasn’t going to cut it) but by the time I got back we could get near it to get the grass fires out. I decided after that scary experience that I was going to wait until the weekend for Lee to help me with the other burn piles.

Saturday comes and we have the most enormous pile of Cedar limbs to burn from the two trees we had cut down in the front of our house. I was feeling nervous but this pile decided that it wasn’t going to go crazy, thank goodness. It did burn amazing fast though.

Since it was still early in the day I thought “why not try another fire”. I didn’t think it was going to burn but I used the last of my paper on it. It took off so I was feeling pretty happy to get a second pile out of the way for Saturday. Jessica came over for the day along with Skip and his kids. Lee and Skip had the fun job of tending this fire.

By now I am beat and ready to pack it in. Skip tells me I should start the third fire for the day. I have the excuse of not having any paper left but after he carries two shovel fulls of embers from the above fire they managed to get it started. This was a burn pile full of Hazel nut limbs that I had tried 7 or so times to start through out the burn season and could never get it to start. Grrrrr. Thank goodness that chore is gone for a few months. Now I just need to go make some more piles.