Taking down trees/pulling up roots....

Our first objective was to get a road cut into the middle of the property where the main house will be built.
First cutting the trees and bushes , burning them so we could keep the space clean. Then we hired a neighbor to dig up the tree stumps. We had looked at other options: 1) we could rent a stump grinder. It would have been very slow and we had about a hundred stumps to move. 2) There is a chemical that you pour into a hole that you drill into the stump. But it takes a while for it to kill and dry up the stump, again this would have taken a long time.

Thus we had his backhoe do the work and he got it all done in one day.
What we were left with was the stumps will a portion of the tree to cut off. Then we had to let them dry for a month or so then we burned them.
What a difference that made, we now had a way to drive to the center of the property!
It took us about a month to clean up the stumps.

A Visit from our daughter and Friends

Our daughter and some college friends braved the elements and camped out on the land. They had a great time playing Frisbee, cooking dinner on the campfire and

You can't have a camp-out with out
"S-mores"!


It was so great to have them as guests to see what we had been up to the last few months!

Setting up camp

It was getting old to get up really early in the morning, prepare meals for the day, drive an hour and a half, work till dark and drive back to our rental. So we started preparing a camp site . It was the perfect spot: out of the way of construction, very protected by cedars from the winds, yet easy to get to. It was very simple: a tent where we slept on a king size bed ( we had tried an air mattress but it deflated by morning, we needed a little more support for our 50+ bodies)
dry storage for changes of clothes, A coleman cookstove and an Ice chest.
we could now stay for days and be very comfortable. Oh yes we also had a latrene and an out side shower as well!

Many kitchen remodels and expansions.




Light was by oil lamps because kerosene was so volatile. I replaced the coleman stove as soon as possible with a propane stove that a good friend of ours gave us. What a world of difference! There were many times I could not get the coleman to work. They are very fickle stoves if you use them all the time as we did. The last straw was when gas caught on fire from the pump area and I had a hard time getting the flames out. That scared me too much. I can never go back.