Since we arrived the first week of August (not that long ago), Dave has cut down standing dead wood and split and stacked the equivalent of about five full cords (aka "bush cords") of wood. He with the help of several other pals as they came up to visit, one at a time, built a new wood shed, and repaired and re-built a rotting shed on the property. He closed a huge hole in the basement wall leading to the crawl space with access to the outside world, hidden by insulation, which might as well have shown a huge, flashing, fluorescent sign à la "Beetlejuice" welcoming and enticing the mice, racoons, and smallish bears to come in.
Shed, before and after:
New Woodshed (partially filled - it is totally filled now with some additional outdoors stacks):
After removal of two old, heavy, wood stoves from the basement, we had a local company install a new wood stove, which will be the principle source of heat here, with the existing electric furnace as the back-up.
A local logging company is about to come in to cull the old trees, the junk wood, and the trees which are impinging on the maples in the areas which we think are viable for the maple areas. We'll be taking pictures of this operation, because it'll be cool!
A quick and non-exhaustive list (although much of it was exhausting!) of some of the other tasks completed are:
- Sealing all the logs on the house, which hadn't been done in 10+ years so multiple applications were required
- Servicing and doing basic maintenance on all the equipment (truck, tractor, 6-wheeler, etc)
- Digging down to the bottom of the foundation and addressing a crack that was causing water leakage into the basement
- Clearing the thigh-high grass from some of our fields
- Doing some initial prep-work on one of our fields to get it closer to being ready for a garden in the spring (there are still about a zillion rocks to remove)
- Building a fueling station for our equipment
- Setting the shed up with electricity via solar panel/battery/inverter
- Solving a mouse problem - they had many years of uninterrupted happiness in the house and didn't want to give it up too readily
- Flagging the borders of our property, which had no clear markers at all
- Clearing some of the paths that had major tree blow-downs blocking the way:
- Putting a temporary roof on the tractor enclosure
- Experimenting with recipes for Maple-related confections
- Making use of our apple trees, producing a huge supply of apple-butter and canned apples
- Hanging a HAM radio antenna
- Many other tasks, large and small, that aren't coming to mind
We've been kept pretty busy thus far!