While my writing was lacking in 2012, progress around the homestead was... less lacking, though maybe far from stellar. Here's a summary of the improvements we made.
- We reclaimed a couple of acres of overgrown scrub brush that was about waist high before. I'm not entirely sure what we're going to do with it, of course, but it's much prettier to look at, now, which has value in and of itself from the serenity perspective.
- We cleared out the land down by the lake shore. We own about 30 feet or so of lakefront, but before it was as overgrown as the rest of the property. Now it is neatly trimmed, though I still need to do some work with a limb saw. The neighbors are happy though... they now have some clear space to launch their canoes. The anti-social curmudgeon in me wants to shout, "Get off my lawn!" every time I see them, but they did ask first, and they're very nice people, so I try to stomp him down.
- We rebuilt the chicken coop. This turned into a major project, since we decided our portable coop wasn't big enough (it was). The coop went up in a weekend, but we built an enclosed pen as well. Unfortunately, we forgot to close the coop one night, and lost a chicken to something. Maybe a fox, maybe a cat. So, we had to roof the pen. That was a painful experience. Since then, the chickens have done fine, though, even on those occasions when we forget to shut the coop.
- We fixed up our two "play" rooms downstairs. One is home to our shiny new pool table, and the other we've set up to be a home theater. New carpet, new paint, new furniture, and the once shoddy looking basement now looks great. Still some work to do to finish things up (the lighting for one, is terrible) but serious ground has been taken.
- Replaced our water main. This wasn't something we wanted to do, but the pipe broke and we didn't have a choice. Fortunately, I was able to do some of the work myself, which saved us some money. Still had to pay the plumber a small fortune, but what can you do?
- In happier news, we made great progress on our Dojo/Home Gym. That isn't really part of the whole "getting back to the land" thing, but martial arts is one of our primary forms of stress relief. We've got our treadmill and mats installed, and should have our heavy bag in position in the next few days. We've also got a power cage and a decent array of weights. Still a lot of work to do around flooring and framing, but it's coming together.
- We finally pulled the trigger on a truck. This was more out of necessity than anything else. We hit the point where all the projects that we could do with my car were done, and we needed something with more hauling power. The plan is to pay it off as soon as possible, and hopefully we'll stay on plan.
So what's coming in 2013?
During the winter, we'll be focusing on improving the dojo. We hope to have flooring in by February. The framing and drywalling will take a little more time, but with the truck, we can at least get materials home.
Two other winter projects that we may or may not get to are setting up the garage as a workshop and swapping out the lighting downstairs. I can do the second without doing the first, and it is easier (though scarier) so I'll probably start there.
Come spring, we'll be trying the Great Garden Experiment. We're still experimenting with our soil, and this time we're going to get scientific with it and grow the same things in three different kinds of soil to see what we get the best production from. We'll probably start from plants rather than from seed this go round, since our experience with seedlings was not great.
The chicken pen is going to get a sand and gravel treatment. It's amazing how fast five chickens can strip the ground, and we've had so much rain that their pen is a mud pit. All frozen right now, but as soon as things dry, we'll be putting down a thick layer of sand and gravel.
And speaking of gravel, we've got to re-gravel the driveway and some other areas around the house. I'm not looking forward to this. The lazy in me says to rent a Bobcat and call it good, but that pretty much doubles the cost of the project. We had a lot of surprise expenses last year (I'm looking at you water pipe, and you too heating unit) so I'm trying to keep things cheap. I'll probably end up putting in the sweat instead of shelling out the extra cash.
Whew... there's more... a lot more... that we hope to accomplish in 2013, but I think that's a good start for now. I'm getting tired just looking at it! :)
Of course there is one last project, and that's to keep this blog going. I'm going to try and do at least 2 posts a month. First January post... complete. G'night!
