Living in a place where my nearest permanent neighbor is a mile away suits my preferences almost perfectly. The national psychotic spasm over the past year-and-a-half has pretty much passed us over, as our population density enables “social distancing” on any day ending in “Y.” Most days the only people Mrs. Barn and I encounter are each other.
But all is not perfect, in that while we have a clinic in town a visit to a specialist is an all day event requiring a trip over either three or four mountains, depending on which doctor is being visited. Ditto real shopping, we have a convenience store, a feed and seed co-op, and a Dollar General but the nearest grocery store is an hour away, most general shopping is a half hour further.
Trip to the DMV? Whole day. Trip to the lumber yard? All day.
Spring is always a hectic time around here with the gardens being planted, the grass needing mowing every third day, and this year we have had the calendar augmented with nuisance medical issues requiring a lot of back and forth trips out of the mountains. I for one am very much looking forward to getting the debris inside my creaky knee vacuumed out next month.
All that to say that things are hopping here and blogging just ain’t at the very top of the daily “To Do” list. That might make me a bad blogger, and I will give that concern all the attention it. deserves.
I often tell first-time homeowners that, “From this point on, one of your ‘hobbies’ better be working on the house.” It has always been that way for me, although I am finding the scope of the projects are getting smaller as my bones get creakier. Small things, okay. Large things like re-chinking the cabin and the upcoming new standing seam metal roof? Better leave those to younger and more nimble folks. The problem is exacerbated by the dearth of a labor pool in the hinterlands. To get skilled tradesmen to attend to a specific need you might have to wait up to a year or so once you “get on the list.” Any man available for hire as an hourly wage laborer is available for a reason. I’ve got leads for a couple of younguns to help out on the homestead on occasion but I have to wait for school to get out to firm up those connections. We’ve got Amish moving into the community which I hope will alleviate some of this shortage.
Recently I had a nice little project that was pretty important. Ironically it was on one of the newest pieces of wood on the cabin, on the rear side of the mud room built around 2008 or so. The beveled sill at the bottom of the board-and-batten siding had decayed to the point that it was literally falling off. unfortunately it was originally made from soft white pine so its life span was bound to be short.
With very little effort I was able to excavate the detritus and make the necessary measurements for a new one. My first inclination was to make the new sill out of PTSYP, but given the current price of lumber (~$14 locally for an eight foot PT 2×4) and my depleted stock of PTSYP I went in another direction, one that was actually more appropriate; I recycled some of the chestnut framing lumber from the old shack up on the hill.
I re-sawed a full 2″ x 4″ stud to the size and configuration of the piece being replaced. Given the “run of the mill” character of the chestnut I had to hand plane it a but to get it less curv-ey so that it would just slide into place. It did, and a handful on mondo finishing nails later it is in place looking like it was always there. Well, it will look that way after a few weeks of weathering.
This whole side of the cabin gets the brunt of the weather so I will certainly have to re-visit it at some point.
Last Spring while wandering around the woods above the barn I made a surprising discovery, the hook and tip from a logger’s cant hook, the tool used to turn and manipulate logs on the ground. I have no idea of the vintage nor heritage of these tool components, they were muddy and rusty but still beefy enough to be sound and perhaps reused. I’ve only been harvesting trees for less than a decade and these tool parts were certainly not mine; the previous log harvesting was four decades ago, long before I was on the scene.
I brought them back to the barn and stuck them in my “tool projects” box.
When I began setting-up to work firewood again a couple weeks ago in the aftermath of clearing the trees around the log barn, and not coincidentally opening the sky to provide copious sunshine for Mrs. Barn’s little orchard and garden adjacent to the stone wall, I recalled this earlier find. There was no handle remaining for the cant hook parts so I checked with the hardware store. They did not have anything suitable for use. Instead of ordering one I checked my lumber stash and Surprise! found the perfect scrap of vintage white oak to make a new handle. The rough stock was no account, having the live-edge running the full length of the narrow 10/4 board that I probably saved because I could not bring myself to throw away a piece of wood that “could be used for some project, some time.” Happily that time had come.
Even though I already had two log-handling tools, one a standard cant hook to roll a log over, the other a timberjack to roll the log over and lift it up off the ground for easier chainsawing, I decided to make a new handle for the cant hook parts and thus have one in reserve. Adding to the tool inventory is pretty much always an irresistible enticement.
I sawed out the blank for the handle and set to working on it, starting with the tapered end to match the metal fittings. A drawknife, spokeshave and rasp accomplished this in short order. Then I just started wailing away on the blank to make it rounded and swelled or tapered as needed for comfortable use. The hours spent with hand tools, working hard and even working up a good sweat in so doing, goes in the WIN column in my book. In a couple of hours, with my hands and arms tired from the exertion, the handle began to take shape. Actually I was working the metal spokeshave so vigorously that I had to wear gloves to protect my hands from the heat of friction. No kidding. Even with a sharp blade and a waxed sole the tool got really hot.
As I was extracting the desired handle shape from the rough stock the pile of long, sinuous shavings grew repeatedly underfoot. In their own way detritus like this (and from rendering Gragg chair parts) is treasured in our little Shangri-la as it provides perfect tinder for rejuvenating the wood stove every morning. Being an early-riser Mrs. Barn relishes being able to deposit a handful of these shavings on the bed of coals from the overnight fire along with some kindling and gets the fire going in just a minute or two while she sits and reads with a cup of tea as the sun is coming up.
Put another check mark in the WIN column.
As I approached the final shape and size of the new handle I affixed the hook and serrated tip on it so I could actually hold it and mock-use it to get the size and shape just the way I wanted it. A few more minutes of shaving a bit here, a smidge there, and it was ready to be put to work. The only thing left was to paint the handle fluorescent orange like the rest of my woodlot tools (to find them much easier on the work site).
A vintage tool rehabilitated and added to the working inventory of the barn without having to reach for my wallet? A big WIN.
So, an ordinary discovery deep in the woods yields a Win, Win, Win opportunity.
The view from a couple years ago.
With the first hints that Winter may be drawing to a close and Spring will soon be upon us a young girl’s fancy turns to… gardening! With that in mind last week I hired my pal Bob to come and fell a bunch of trees surrounding the old log barn. The barn did not care, but the trees had become so dense and tall that they were shading a small garden plot Mrs. Barn has been cultivating for a few years, including some small pear trees, right next to the garden shed behind the stone wall. The trees have not flourished as she had hoped primarily because the the limited direct sunlight in that spot.
So, the trees had to suffer mortal wounds. Only three or four of the trees were very large as these things go, perhaps a foot or so at the base, but even that tree weighs a couple tons and could really ruin a day. Plus a number of the smaller trees, 6-8 inches at the base, were sorta leaning the wrong way for me to drop them easily and in the right direction. that’s where Bob comes in, having been a woodsman much of his life he really knows how to “read’ a tree and get it to go where he wants it to go. even then we had to “push over” several of the trees once he could to a critical point in the cutting. On tree immediately behind the barn was too large and leaning too much for us to get this time, I’ll have to hook up a winch to pull it in the right direction when we cut it in the future.
But for now we have a whole lot of new sunshine coming through, and nearly a full winter of firewood on the ground.
We had planned to spend a little time on the road this morning, but imagine our surprise when we woke to 6-7 inches of “occasional flurries” on top of the several inches from a few days ago. My snow blower had a flat tire with no way to get it to an air compressor to it or vice versa, so we spent several hours shoveling snow.
On Monday we had our first measurable snowfall, we’d had a few covering skiffs but this was about 3 inches of magnificent huge wet flakes, imparting spectacular beauty to the branches and landscape. Today should be a pip, with nine inches expected.
Thus far even the temps have been reasonably mild, with some days requiring only a little time of my kerosene heater to take the chill out of the shop. It looks to remain that way for until Christmas, and I will not mothball the hydropower until then.
[Update — At mi-day there were another 4-5 inches of snow, although it seems to be vacillating between fluffy flakes coming down hard and sleet. Might by my first chance to use the mondo snow blower we bought 18 months ago.]
One of the things about owning a home for almost 40 years is that you get to see new trees sprout, young trees mature, and mature trees live long past their prime and thus become a hazard. Such is the case for our Maryland house where our daughter now lives.
The situation was brought to the front of the line recently when a silver maple sprout in the deck literally rotted and fell over (it sprouted from the stump of a giant maple that had been cut down 25 years ago; the deck was built around it) . Of course we did not know about the extent of the rot until the “falling over” part. This incident provoked me to arrange for a crew to come and do some serious whacking.
One fortunate happenstance is that the section of railing damaged in the fall was actually just displaced, none of the components were damaged but rather knocked apart. So all I have to do is complete the dismantling and reassemble the elements.
Perhaps the most worrisome tree was this decrepit box elder, a junk tree even when in the best of shape. Twenty years ago this provided wonderful shade for the Japanese tea house playhouse I built for the girls, a structure that still provides function to this day when dottir has friends with small children over. The old box elder was leaning so much I was instructing dottir to avoid the area when mowing. With the maple falling over it was time to act, and I did. Well, all the acting I did was pick up the phone and sign the check, but you get the idea.
Three other worrisome trees were gigantic silver maples whose branched trunks were beginning to list a fair bit.
We had two trees removed en toto and another half dozen major limbs or trunks removed from others. The yard and house are now much safer. Plus, I got to give dottir a new chainsaw and a lesson on how to use it. After finishing the task of cutting up the original fallen maple, she said she now understands the attraction of chain saws.
My only “complaint” after the fact is that almost all of the maple trunks were curly, with spalting, and the tree crew hauled everything away. Drat.
We are fans of squash, both summer squash (zucchini, yellow squash, etc. — her zucchini crush pizza is to die for) and hard winter squash, and Mrs. Barn’s harvest this year was really impressive. We think it is enough to get us through the winter. She shredded and froze a lot of the summer squash for use in cooking through the winter, and this mound of winter squash will appear on the dinner table with delightful regularity over the coming months.
Beans? Great. Tomatoes? Meh.
After a couple solid weeks of working my way through the pile of cut and drying bolts of wood, splitting hauling and stacking them to various location on the homestead, I note that winter now has my permission to descend on us. I’ve got about 1-1/2-to two winters worth of firewood ready for burning, with another two-plus years’ worth felled and on the ground up on the mountain above the barn. I’ll start cutting and hauling that next month to begin drying on pallets until I get around to splitting that too.
The “window” in the firewood crib was left open so Mrs. Barn could view her flower garden while rocking on the front porch. That void will be filled this week.
Being a southern California gal and enthusiastic gardener to boot, Mrs. Barn is singing the blues about the upcoming season. Given the work done last year to the cabin it is MUCH tighter than in previous years, and she even was heard to utter comments that it was too warm in the cabin at times last winter. Truthfully, I think the dearth of daylight is more distressing to her than the cold. Time to get out the happy light from the closet. And maybe revisit the subject of building her a greenhouse.
I am totally prepared for heating the shop, too, with far more firewood and bags of coal than ever before. Since taking this picture I re-stacked the firewood to move it back a few more feet from the stove, and added a loose-stack wall of concrete blocks to serve as an additional safety feature between the stove and the wood.
Now all that’s left is to winterize the yard equipment and finish assembling the “Tim the Tool Man Taylor-worthy” snowblower I bought to clear the driveway since our plowing guy retired.
Then the really chilly weather can start. We might be in Ol’ Virginny, but we have had at least a couple of sub-zero nights every winter. Last year was pretty mild, but this being 2020 I can only imagine what the coming winter will be like.
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I think I am back on track blogging-wise, more or less. I still do not have Photoshop up and running but found a good work-around for simple photo editing with Corel Photo-Paint, CorelDraw being my preferred vector graphics tool. I can’t do anything really complex with Photo-Paint, but I can crop and re-size which is all I need 99% of the time.
There are still a couple of minor hiccups with WordPress but for now I can keep moving forward. Thus I expect to resume posting three or four times a week for the foreseeable future.
Wish me luck.
Sometimes it is the very small or simple things that make life out here in Shangri-La rewarding. Some recent happenings and observations certainly fit into that description.
Last winter we had several large trees removed from alongside the driveway, and to make that happen with the least disruption and greatest efficiency I dismantled all the split rail fencing on either side of the road. The rail pieces were stacked at the edge of the yard awaiting reinstallation. My brother visited recently and we got about half of the fencing re-built, and earlier this week I finished the job. Given my temporarily limited mobility it was a slow process of negotiating uneven and rocky topography, but slowly and surely it came together over parts of two days (it also happened to be pretty hot days for September in these parts with temps in the low 80s. Unseasonably warm!)
The result is both mundane and sublime, slowly sorting through the split rails and placing them to find the best fit for every stick. I was also hindered by a diminished inventory as a goodly number of the rails were degraded or damaged to the point where they were not useful in this application. Still I was able to construct substantial sections of fencing, enough to re-establish the charm of our driveway appearance.
About one truckload of these unusable rails went straight up into the basement of the barn to be sectioned on my chop saw and used as firewood (it still burns great especially as fire starting material). Another truck load was leaned against a tree adjacent to Mrs. Barn’s flower garden that she has carved out of the hillside next to the cabin. I take no responsibility for it whatsoever beyond helping to move some of the materials, like these rail pieces that she will use for terracing and such. The season for flowers is mostly past and the brilliant colors of last month are faded, but she plans to expand and extend the garden another twenty feet or so to the rear so she can admire the flowers directly from the kitchen window. I am not a flower aficionado but they sure do add a sparkle to the homestead.
On top of that we are seeing the first hints of fall color as a few leaves of the walnut trees are turning yellow, the maple trees are showing their first hints of vermilion, and the locusts are soon getting their rust color. In another week or two the hillside will be an explosion of color. Perhaps not as brilliant and varied as my left leg, which from knee-to-toes looks like someone painted a psychedelic mural on it.
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