Spring turns into summer

Spring goes very quickly here on the homestead.  There is always LOTS to do!  Chris gone back to work means slower progress on the house.  Gardening, fencing, animal care, and spring cleanup leave little time for blogging.  So here's a condensed version of spring 2016.

The metal for the roof arrives!  Safely unloaded after the truck was almost swallowed up by the very soft mud

 Leveling and squaring the roof has been the most difficult, tedious, and frustrating part of building so far.

Our friend John is much more experienced with roofing and spent some time with Chris to make sure it was done safely and correctly.

It was hot, but thanks to the drought we have been experiencing it didn't rain

Chris spent many hours at night, in the cold of spring moving rocks by hand to create a small retaining wall along the East side of the house

Some of these rocks are huge!  I guess he's pretty strong!

He found some really interesting rocks.  See the profile of a face?

I found a tiny newt in the garden!  Great little bug eaters to have around!

Our several hundred garlic plants put in last fall produced several hundred delicious garlic scapes this spring!  I made 20 batches of scape pesto for the freezer and 7 pints of pickled scapes.  I used weeds (Pig Weed and Lamb's Quarters) in the pesto too.  One of our favourite pasta and pizza toppings!

Mama Salt hatched out some more babies this year.  See the tiny pip in the egg on the right?  We could hear it peeping!

Peek-a-boo baby chick!

I gave Salt 12 eggs to hatch, but I forgot to mark them.  Two days later she had 18 eggs under her!  I guess her sisters decided we needed more!  Unfortunately, 18 eggs is too many for a hen Salt's size to sit on.  Some eggs ended up not incubating properly and didn't hatch.  Some were also ready to hatch later than the original ones I let her have.  Once the first batch of eggs hatched, Salt abandoned the unhatched eggs to tend the new chicks.  I had to quickly rig up a makeshift incubator out of a margarine container and plastic wrap set to warm in the sun so the last few had a chance!  We hatched out 3 more babies and Salt accepted them as her own, 11 fluffy little chicks!

Salt is a good mama

I think that's the same expression I make when the kids are climbing all over me in the heat....

They're growing so fast!

Rafters: Part 3

Well, the stubborn ingenious man figured out how to raise the remaining rafters on his own.  I still don't know how he did it!  Leverage, strength, sweat and a few pulled muscles.  He humored me once by letting me hold the rope for him, but I don't think he really needed my help.  Because he was running out of horizontal room on top of the walls he raised the last several rafters and stacked them together in the center of the house.  Once all of them were vertical, he put a 2x12 through the peak of all of them and attached it to the far West rafter.  Then he slid each rafter along into its final placement from West to East fixing them in place as he went.   

Chris used rope to secure each rafter to its neighbour as he stacked them

Here you can see the rafters coming back to the centre of the house from the West side

Two more to go!

Done!

Feels like a real roof already!

22 roof rafters in all

Chris attaches the strapping that the metal roof will be fixed to

Site inspectors give us a pass

I guess its spring now

The site is pretty mucky

Chris built us our own temporary boardwalk to get us through the mud

Freezing rain

We had a pretty good storm through.  Lots of freezing rain!

See the tree that came down just to the right of the house?  It was already marked to be taken down in the spring.  Luckily it didn't fall info the house!

Pictures just can't seem to capture the brilliance of the sun shining on the ice

 

Winter arrives a little late

We've finally had a real winter storm! 

Molly loves it!

So do the kids!

They've built some snow forts and tunnels

Gramma and Grandad came over for a snowball fight!

Good thing it was Gramma who got Finnlee in the face and not one of her siblings! 
Gramma can get away with it!

If anyone else had thrown that snowball, Finnlee would be screaming!

Grandad got into it too!

Gramma threw them into the snowbank

It doesn't look like they were upset about it

All this snow is bringing the dear out of the woods to forage.  Can you see two of them?

Rafters: Part 2

Chris called some friends up to help raise some more rafters.  Eric, Louis, Laurie, and Steve came by to lend a hand.  But we discovered that you only really need 2-3 people to raise a rafter.  More than that and you have people standing around idol for too long while one rafter is being secured before raising the next.  So Chris has worked out a way of doing it with one or two people.  Its slow work, but its coming along.  My Dad helped Chris get the next few rafters up.  My Mum and I helped with a couple too.  We've now got 11 up and secured, halfway there!  The last ones will be challenging because we are running out of maneuvering room up on the walls as more rafters are put up.

Chris does a lot of climbing!

Eric didn't mind climbing up to secure strapping either

Louis and Chris levering the peak of the rafter up onto the wall

Eric and Laurie pushing the base of the rafter into place

There was a fair bit of standing around waiting for the next step

Up it goes!

Chris holds the rafter in place while Louis hammers in some nails

Building a house in the winter is cold work!

These are the collar ties that we add after securing each rafter

Looks like a roof!

Half of the rafters complete