All Clear

Hello friends and family,

Welcome back to another week with us at SRH.  Hard to believe we have been here for a little over three weeks now.  This has been an exhausting week.  Honestly it felt like Ground Hog’s Day.  The same thing over and over again. So, you will be happy to know that this week’s blog will be short and sweet.  What were we up to?  We were working on trees. We dropped some trees and process them.  Then an executive decision was made to drop all of them at once.  That way they were down, and we could process them the rest of the way all at once.  Was it a smart decision, yes and no.  Yes, because we could work together getting each step done.  No, it made it a little treacherous trying to work around everything.  I am happy to report that all the trees were dropped by the end of the day on Friday.

Next step, I used the DeWalt chainsaw and removed all the limbs from the trees.  Then I tossed them over our internal fence line.  We are getting quite a pile of debris around the open area now.  We will be wood chipping it as we need them.  Rick was measuring out 5-foot lengths and cutting them with his chainsaw.  It took a few days, but we ended up with a sea of logs.  To be honest, it was very overwhelming. 

Finally, it was stacking time.  Well before that, we restacked.  We had a few piles we made on our last trip down here that we did not like the location of them, so we moved them.  Yes, we hate doing things twice and three times, but we got to reclaim some of our open area back.  About a day or so into stacking, Rick was feeling very overwhelmed.  He suggested that we just clear the area where the cabin is going to go.  We have so many steps to get done before winter sets in here.  I convinced him to give it a few days to see how he felt.  Needless to say, we were making such great progress, he decided to just get it finished.  So today was that day.  We finally finished this evening.  Holy crap.  We do not want to deal with another log again for a while. 

So, what is next on the agenda?  Tonight, we marked off all the corners of the cabin.  Tomorrow, we are cleaning and clearing that area.  There are a lot of broken limbs, pine needles and vines that need to be dealt with.  There are also some tree stumps that need to be trimmed down, so they do not interfere with the building process. 

We are taking a much-needed break on Saturday and Sunday.  We are heading to the Self Reliance Festival in Camden.  We are so excited about this.  We will get a chance to meet a few You-Tubers we like to watch.  There will be some great demos and presentations.  I am very much looking forward to checking out the vendors and meeting like-minded people. 

Next week we will have to deal with rain, so hopefully we get in the footers but first we have to get a large supply of water and put in our large order at the local hardware and lumber store. Yes, we brought a lot of stuff with us for the cabin, but there was some stuff we held off on.  We were concerned about running out of room or weighing too much.   Besides, most of the prices were better here and they deliver for like $35. Win win for us. 

In other news, I got the insurance for the camper and the jeep updated today.  What a price difference.  We are saving so much money.  We helped Michelle and Mariane pack up and head to their new land.  It is going to be a great spot for them.  Bonus, their trees are already down, they just need to do some dirt work. 

Well folks, that was our exciting week.  Thank you for stopping by and taking a peek into our lives.  If you haven’t already, please subscribe so you get alerts when we post.  Our address is starting to get recognized by some companies.  We do have an Amazon wish list on our site if you are interested.  Please do not feel obligated.  Please check out our “Things We Love Page” if you haven’t.  You just might find something you are looking for.  See you next week. 

Panoramic view of the area that we cleared. I am standing on our conex.

The purple flags are all the corners of the cabin.