Clean Up

Clean Up: fire pit ring

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Yesterday, things were a bit cooler and finally nice enough to start a fire in the fire pit!

I’ve been putting small branches and the invasive vines I’ve pulled up into there since last summer, so it felt good to finally burn that stuff away!

While I was at it, I decided to clean up the bricks around the fire pit that the skunks revealed while digging for grubs.

Knowing that these were the glazed bricks we’ve got all over the place under there, I decided to use the sidewalk ice scraping tool. Just a flat blade that would slide across the surface, and cut away the root mats at the same time.

It worked remarkably well!

In the above photo, I’d finished uncovering the bricks all the way around.

There was some seriously thick root mats covering some of them!

The next step was to hose them down with water, including using the jet to pressure wash some of the dirt out from between the bricks, and between the bricks and the fire pit ring.

Where the water pooled showed me the most uneven areas of the brick ring.

What I will eventually be doing is taking them out completely, leveling the base off as best I can, then putting them back.

Ideally, I’d be adding a layer of gravel under there, first.

I am seriously considering taking the wagon and a shovel out to the old gravel pit to see what I can salvage out of there!

Until then, we make do.

My next step was to use break up the ridge of soil and root mats around the ring some more.

Every now and then, I’d find a small rock, but then I hit was seemed to be a much larger rock.

A strangely flat and smooth rock.

I found another brick!

For a moment, I thought maybe there was a second ring of bricks, but the angle of it was too random for that.

Somehow, a single brick got left to one side, and got buried with the others.

The ones around the fire pit getting buried makes sense, but how does a lone brick on the side get left there long enough to be buried, too? Did no one try to mow there, before it got covered? Did people using the fire pit (and I know it did get used) simply walk around it until it disappeared, along with the other bricks?

So very strange!

I set it aside with another brick like it, that I’d found under some nearby maple trees. :-D

(These glazed bricks have been around for as long as I can remember. I have no idea where they came from, but they would be at least 50 years old, and probably quite a few years older. While I intend to take them out of the various areas they are in now, to replace them with what should be there instead (like infill around the house!), these are going to be kept and repurposed. They’re too slippery to use as a “floor” for anything (which is probably what they were salvaged from originally), but I think they would be great on walls or something, at some point.)

Once I broke up the ridge, I used the metal blade on the scraper to push the soil away, to try and level things a bit more.

The grills in the fire pit, btw, are the racks from our old oven. After burning away what was already in the pit, I started working on the pile of branches by the collapsing log cabin. When a solid bed of coals was formed, I put the oven racks in it, then built the fire up again on top, to burn away any grease or whatever that got on them while being used. We basically didn’t bother to clean the oven when we knew we needed to replace it fairly soon. It did have a self-cleaning function, but we didn’t feel it was safe to use. With elements on the stove sparking, we didn’t want to find out if anything electrical would give out in the oven, too!

So I used the fire pit to get the cruddy bits off.

Shortly after this, my daughter joined me, and we built the fire up once again, to get rid of more of the branch pile.

I also used a metal rake to spread the soil out more, then took the hose to it, to break up the clumps. The water no longer pools at the bricks. :-)

After a while, my daughter took out the oven racks and set them aside to be hosed off, later.

The next thing I want to do is empty the fire pit of ashes, which will be spread over a garden area or two.

Once it is cleaned out, I want to add some cinder blocks or bricks into the pit. They will be there to hold one or both oven racks. This way, if we wanted to, we could use pots and pans for cooking over the coals. I do have a campfire rack, but it’s meant to put food on directly to cook, not hold the weight of cooking utensils. The oven racks and bricks will open up more possibilities for what we can do on our fire pit. :-)

While I was working on uncovering the fire pit ring, I had help.

Not the most useful kind of help!

More like the “pay attention to me or I’ll trip you” kind of help! :-D

Eventually, he got tired of trying to make me pick him up and went for a nap. :-)

Such a cutie!

He would make such a loving indoor cat, but we’ve had no luck in adopting him or Creamsicle out. :-(

Lately, Potato Beetle and Creamsicle have perfected the art of rubbing against our legs WHILE we are walking, somehow managing to maintain contact and pressure even as we pull our legs away.

Such determined creatures!

Also, Potato seems to like my new shoes. Maybe that’s it. He’s happy I no longer have these.

My left shoe had actually blown out like the one on the right, but I’d used Gorilla Super Glue on it. Amazingly, it is still holding! The other shoe was only coming loose at the toe tip, so I glued that – only to have the sides blow out, soon after! The tip managed to hold on for days longer.

I’m not a shoe person. It’s so hard for me to find shoes that accommodate my feet, I don’t bother. I have one pair of regular shoes. Maybe a pair of sandals, too, if I can find them. Not this time of year, apparently. :-/

Women’s shoes don’t fit me, at all. I can wear extra wide men’s shoes, but to get the right width, I go with a size that’s a fair bit longer than my feet. Which is why I keep catching the toes of my shoes on things. :-D It means my shoes wear out on the sides faster, as my feet bend in a different area than the shoes are designed for. It doesn’t matter if they are cheapies, or if I spring for a higher end shoe. By the end of a year, all my shoes end up looking like this!

Which, if nothing else, is entertaining!

The Re-Farmer

New stove is in!

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Okay, I am beyond excited right now!

The new stove is in, and it’s absolutely fabulous!!

Yes, it did also take a couple of hours to get it done, but not for why you might think.

First off, moving the counter turned out to be a lot easier than I feared. Once I moved the dining table as far into the corner as I could, I had enough space that I would not have to move any other shelves.

Once the drawers, which held most of the weight (especially the cutlery drawer!) were removed, I also found I didn’t need to empty the cupboards, either. Once I got the counter unstuck from where it has been sitting for so many years, there were no issues.

I admit, it was a lot less disgusting back there than I feared.

Also, yes. That’s a piece of toast on the floor.

Oh, dear God. I just realized.

There’s another piece of toast stuck to the back of the counter.

I have just returned from pulling the counter away from the wall and cleaning it out.

Those would predate our moving here. In fact, they probably go back to before my dad had to move to the nursing home. Which means they’ve been there for probably more than 5 years.

And yeah… it’s still actually less disgusting than I feared.

There were a couple of things I expected to find, since I was there when they fell behind the counter. I did not expect to find a new jelly bag.

I was wondering what happened to the second one from the package…

Then there was this.

This would go back to before my mom moved to the senior’s apartment she lives in now, so it’s probably been there for more than 6 years.

The counter itself turned out to be remarkably easy to move. It didn’t even catch on anything in the process.

Then it was time to shut off the breaker and move the old stove.

What the flash in the photo picks up, that I couldn’t see when I went to move the power cord, is that grease had dripped behind the stove, onto the cord.

That was really gross to handle. I couldn’t even put on the disposable gloves we would normally use. It’s so hot and sticky, I wouldn’t be able to pull them on. So I used paper towel to handle things.

Things were so sticky back there, it took more effort than it should have, to unplug the old stove.

*shudder*

Once the stove was clear, I peeled off the self-adhesive shelf liner that was used as a backsplash.

Then I was done. It may not have been a lot of actual physical labor to most things around – I easily did it by myself – but by this point, I was absolutely dripping with sweat.

The girls then took over and did the hard part.

Cleaning.

Those two are absolute saints.

That floor is just … wow. The difference between the part worn out from decades of feet, and the part under the counter, could not be more dramatic!

Clean up done, the girls got to use the time needed for everything to dry, to cool down and stop sweating. Then they put up the self-adhesive backsplash.

Then we finally unpacked the new stove from it’s box. After measuring the other counter, we found we did not need to adjust the legs – at least not before we put it in place. The daughter that was trapped in the kitchen used a level on the floor, and it definitely sloped downwards, away from the wall.

The height of the stove, without adjusting the legs, was exactly the same as the height of the counter, but a sloping floor would have to be accounted for. First, we had to plug it in and get it in place.

Here, you can see how the 4 pieces of self-adhesive tiles were placed for the backsplash. We will get a couple more and fill in the gaps, later.

Then one of my daughters was an angel and sprawled on the floor while her sister and I tipped the stove flat against the wall.

Which made it perfectly level!

I guess it’s good to know our walls are straight, if not our floors… :-D

That made it a lot easier for my daughter to adjust the leveling legs.

No more food sloshing to one side of the pot or pan when we cook, now!

Once everything was in place, back went the counter.

The new stove is the same width as the old one, but deeper, so it sticks out further than the other one did.

It also has a much larger oven, so we’re very good with this!

It’s going to take some getting used to having the controls in front.

Once the breaker was turned back on, the girls figured out how to set the time, using the 24 hour clock setting. Then they tested out the cooktop.

We are just entranced. I don’t think we’ve ever had anything so nice and new before. It heats up so quickly, it’s mind blowing! The larger front cook surfaces have two sides to their controllers. Use one side, it heats the full circle. Us the other, and it heats a smaller circle.

It also has no element in the oven, and the self-cleaning function is a safer, less power consuming, technological upgrade. We’ve had self cleaning ovens before, and never used them. This one, I actually will!

Best of all – no more sparks!

I am so glad this is finally done, and so thrilled with the stove itself.

Next thing on the list: replacing the taps and faucet in the kitchen sink. :-)

I’m really, really hoping someone installed shut off valves under the sink at some point. I’d really prefer not to have to shut off water to the entire house, just to work on the kitchen sink! :-D Not that I’ll have anything to do with replacing that. A much more able-bodied daughter is going to have to crawl under the sink. :-D I actually went back to pictures I took from the last time we had to go under there, when the drain on one of the sinks broke apart. None of them show enough that I can actually say for sure, and we can’t remember. We don’t really use the cupboards under the counter the sink is in. Only one drawer and one cupboard at the end is actually positioned in a usable space.

Well, we’ll find out soon enough.

Until then, we’re just going to try not to melt away.

The Re-Farmer

Catch up, and kitties!

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I’m happy to say that, yesterday evening, when things started to cool down a bit, we got a couple of big jobs finished.

The first was to finish cleaning up the pile of branches pruned from the apple trees.

My awesome daughters actually finished the job by cutting up the largest pieces. Except that one big stump piece. We’re not going to bother with that.

It’s going to take a while to burn this away, but at least it’s neatly stacked, and I can mow around it.

Speaking of which, that was the other big job I finally got done. I finally got into the west end of the old garden area, and into the maple grove. The new mower is just awesome, getting in between the trees. I turned on the “health” app that my phone came with, for the pedometer, and according to that thing, I walked about 7 km (4.34 miles), just mowing in the trees.

I’m glad that got done last night, because when I did my rounds this morning, it was already 24C/75F, and the dew wasn’t even dry yet!

These flowers will soon be a riot of purple, all along the south fence by the spruce grove. :-)

Since manual labour outside was not going to happen yet, I decided to spend some time working with the basement.

The kittens had already escaped when I first came down to tend to them in the morning, and I couldn’t get them all back. My husband was sweet enough to supervise them while I did the outside part of my rounds (more to make sure the adult cats didn’t hurt any of them), then helped me get them back into the basement, so I could give them some wet cat food.

When I tried to go back down later, I opened the door and found 4 kitten heads at the top step – the door just clears them when it opens! – and that was it. They were gone. All five of them ended up upstairs, running around.

I let them be. They’d done all right earlier – only Fenrir is a concern for aggressiveness – and I decided to take advantage of them being out of the basement. I brought down a long corded power bar, and some large cup hooks (among other things). I attached the cup hooks into one of the floor joists running across the ceiling of the basement. Two of them are now holding the cord for the power bar, with the plug ins hanging down. It even has USB ports, if I need to charge my phone. Three other hooks are now there to hold whatever else is needed.

With the kittens away, I used my wood burning tool, with the knife blade attachment, to cut a couple of 5 gallon water jugs in half, then cut the necks off the top. The halves are now available to use as covers for plants, if needed, and the necks I left as cat toys. ;-)

I was then able to let the tool hang from one of the hooks to cool down, completely safe from kitties, until I could take off the knife blade and put it away in its case.

Then my daughter helped me bring the babies back down again.

Once that was done, I started working on my carving practice. I had kittens crawling all over me until they got bored and left me alone.

How adorable is that!!!

Beep Beep had been persuaded to come down, too, and she decided to join her babies.

That lasted until I started using my Dremel tools and scared them all away. :-(

After I was done with the noisy tools, and continued to work on the spoon, I started hearing a very tiny, very wet, slurping noise.

Yeah. That’s Leyendecker, nursing!

What a silly kitty! Even Beep Beep is looking at him funny. :-D

I am quite happy with how the spoon progressed today, but I’ll post about that later.

We’ve finally reached the high of the day for today (27C/80F), so things should start cooling down now. I’m hoping that, after supper, it’ll be cool enough to get stuff done outside. The next couple of days are supposed to be even hotter, with thunderstorms expected tomorrow, so anything I can get done tonight is bonus.

The Re-Farmer

Clean up progress

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I had originally been thinking of working in a different area today, to remove more dead and damaged trees in the West yard. That pile of apple branches, however, was bothering me.

So I started breaking that down, instead. Here are the before and after pictures.

This is as far as I got, before it started to rain.

I’ve been breaking it down to firepit sized pieces, to make it easier later on. I have to admit, as I cut some of the larger pieces, I find myself thinking that … some of them look pretty good … maybe I could salvage some of them… It seems like such a waste to burn this beautiful apple wood! I wouldn’t even want to use it for a cookout, since I don’t know how the fungal disease would affect the smoke. But gosh, apple is a beautiful wood!

I made very good use of the new long handled pruners I got not long ago. It was going through nice thick branches like nothing! I used to have to use a saw for a lot of these. I noticed, however, there was a rattling noise that seemed to increase. And was that anvil supposed to rotate with the cutting blade like that?

Nope.

At some point, we lost a bolt. There is no nut at the other side. It looks like a proprietary shape, too. Or at least not something I have seen when perusing the section at the hardware store.

It has a lifetime warranty, though, so I looked up the website and sent an email with the above photo and another of the bar code (because, of course I don’t have the receipt anymore… LOL) as proof of purchase. We’ll see how that goes. I might just zip tie it in place for now.

Hmmm… It looks like the rain has already passed. I might be able to finish breaking down the pile today, after all. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Clean up: more progress

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Today, I had a chance to work on cleaning up one of the areas around where we are planning to build a cordwood outhouse.

Here is how it looked, when we left off last.

Basically, I’d managed to clear around an old tree stump, and not much else, before being driven indoors by the heat.

This time, I brought out the reciprocating saw to take down some of the larger things, including cutting the stumps of what I’d cleared before, to ground level.

One of the issues we have with using the outside plug is, even the weight of the cord itself tends to pulled it out enough to kill the power.

Today, I tried a solution that worked out just fine.

This pole used to have a bird feeder on it. I took the feeder off to repair it, but with the lilac growing over it, I don’t see use putting it back in this location again. At some point, we’ll pull it out, but for now, it’s coming in handy! :-D

Here is how the area I worked on looks now.

The branches in front, on top of a stump, are for the chipping/burn pile. I cleared as far back as the next stump.

This turned out to be a very finicky job. I kept having to pull things out by hand, like crab grass and small saplings growing out the roots of things I’d cut away last year, then raking out debris, just to get at the larger things I needed to cut down.

I cleared only a little bit, towards a stump we uncovered while clearing this area last year.

In the process, I uncovered a bunch of flowers. I don’t know what they’re called, but I’m finding them kind of all over the place.

I also uncovered these.

There are quite a lot of these very delicate little wildflowers! I tried not to pull any up as I cleared debris from around them.

Further in is where more cherry trees are. None of which have bloomed, that I ever saw. You can see on the right of this photo, the cherry trees that were killed off last spring, when we had a sudden drop in temperatures after they started blooming. They got fresh growth from their bases. I think I have identified one or two in this area that look like they are strong and healthy enough to keep. The rest will be taken out.

Meanwhile, covering the left half of the photo, berries are starting to form on what I believe are chokecherries!

These are pieces of cherry wood that I will be keeping for future projects.

This is the pile of debris I cleared away from that small area!

We’ve started a pile behind the old outhouse, of what is turning out to be a tree debris compost pile. Stuff that we don’t want to add to the chipping/burning piles, but that don’t belong in the compost pile, either.

When we get to the point where we will be building accessible raised bed gardens, debris like this will be used on the bottoms of the beds to help fill them.

It’s remarkable how much stuff came out of such a small area!

When next I work on this area, I want to start on the other side of where we want to put the cordwood outhouse, clearing more towards the junk/wood pile. There’s at least one old tree stump in there, plus fallen trees that need to be cleared out.

Those might end up being part of the walls of the outhouse! :-)

I’d like to be able to access the junk pile better, so we can go through it and see what wood in there can be salvaged, what needs to be added to the debris pile, and what needs to go into the junk pile that will be hauled to the dump.

There are two Saskatoons and an elm growing on that side. We’ll have to decide which, if any or all, of these will be kept.

There’s also a mound of… soil? beside it. I’d like to get rid of it, but it’s got a layer of grasses growing on it right now, so I can’t tell what it’s actually made up of. The other mystery pile out by the barn turned out to be a pile of insulation. I’m kind hoping this one is something like gravel, or even just dirt.

The goal at this point, though, it just to clear access to the junk pile, then get back to clearing the space the outhouse will be built on, and start clearing out the sod.

I’m happy to have gotten at least a little bit or progress in there today!

The Re-Farmer

Clean up: very little progress, but gosh, that’s cute!

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I headed out to see how much I could do for clean up, before the weather drove me indoors.

This is the area we decided we will put the outhouse we are planning to make as a cordwood practice building.

The double ended arrow is a dead spruce that will need to come down, before it falls down. There is another spruce we’ve identified as a risk, near it. It’s still alive, but already starting to fall, with roots on one side torn loose from the ground. Likely from high winds. Getting rid of those before we build is on the to-do list. The last thing we need is to build what is intended to be basically an emergency outdoor bathroom (because we discovered a need for this!), only to have a tree fall on it.

The other arrows point to tree stumps hidden among the underbrush. The ones I’ve spotted so far, at least. I’m sure that, as we clear things away, we will find more. Hopefully, the roots of these trees will not be an issue when we start clearing away sod to a depth of 6 – 8 inches.

This is all the progress I managed to do.

Basically, I cleared a bit of an old tree stump. Some of the stuff I cleared last year was starting to grow back, so that had to be gotten rid of. Then there were some cherry trees that are spreading. The cherry trees in this area have still not started to bloom yet, unlike the one near the house, which has already completed it’s flowering stage. I did keep some larger pieces of cherry.

I checked the weather about an hour after coming inside, and it was 26C/79F, with a “real feel” of 32C/90F, and a humidity of 62% – and it would have started to cool down by the time I checked!

They’re predicting thunderstorms again. Go figure.

While trying to clear around the old stump, some grasses pulled away much easier than I expected.

It turns out that there is an ants nest in it. We have two common types of ants here (though I don’t know what their proper names are). Black ants, which build their nests in the dirt and in open areas, like lawns, and red ants, which like to build their nests of spruce needles and in trees. These ones are NOT carpenter ants. That much, I do know. But they will take advantage of a dead tree stump, if it’s rotting enough.

The other thing I was able to do was clear away the piles of old boards we’d used to mark out the garden beds and hold down the protective plastic. I didn’t want to just stack them on the ground, where they will just rot, but where to put them that will keep them off the ground?

Well… there are these two old dog houses by the old outhouses, that we will cover in the fall again, so little critters can use them for shelter.

May as well use those!

We are going to need to clean up the rest of the wood in the junk pile, so I figure we can add more of the better boards onto here, to create a sort of roof. Who knows if they’ll stay here, but it’s one way to keep them off the ground, and that’s all I’m really after, right now.

Once I got inside with my chunks of cherry wood, I went into the cool of the basement to debark them, and keep the babies company.

I misjudged my ability to work with them around.

This would be Big Rig, under Leyendecker, both of whom got all sleepy on me. As I was trying to maneuver my phone to take this picture, Big Rig’s head just flopped over like this as she feel asleep!

Then Beep Beep climbed up, waking them both up, so she could curl up on my chest and demand attention. !!

For I while, I had Saffron perched on my shoulder, just watching the world go by, Big Rig, Leyendecker and Beep Beep, curled up on my arm and chest, snuggling and falling asleep, while Turmeric climbed my leg and tackled the tip of Big Rig’s tale. Only Nicco left me alone, preferring to explore the table behind me, then curl up for a nap on the platform bed frame they like to sleep under.

Thankfully, since I was able to reach my phone, I was able to let the girls know about my predicament, and they came down to assist me after they finished making supper. I did manage to detach most of the cats off of me – temporarily. Saffron was just sitting on my shoulder, so I left her be, but even as I worked on a piece of cherry with a large knife, I soon had kittens back on my lap to watch!

Thanks to the girls distracting the kittens, I did manage to debark two pieces completely – and even get the bark off in one piece!

The thicker, shorter section was only partly done; more than half of it seems to have been in the process of dying or something. You even see where the colour changes in the photo, from fresh to dry wood. The bark just would not come off, and with my wrist still giving me grief, using the knife to take off the bark was not a good thing!

My daughter looked it up, and it turns out cherry is poisonous to cats (except the pulp of ripe berries), so all the little bits and pieces went into my sawdust bin, which has a seal-able lid. The pieces of wood are now drying in the rafters, and the bark I was able to remove all in one piece are now laid out on a shelf in the sun room, drying next to my seed trays (where a single squash of some sort has germinated!).

I do hope it we finally get a solid rainfall, instead of having the systems swoop right past us again! It’s not like we’re dry right now, but it would be wonderful for that humidity to finally be reduced! I would love to be able to work outside for longer! There is just too much to get done out there.

The Re-Farmer

Dismantling the failed goat catcher

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Another thing on the to-do list accomplished!

The pen we threw together to try and catch the visiting goat was finally dismantled. Which never did work. :-D

The “door” end was already trying to make its escape. :-D

The straw I hoped the goat would use for bedding went onto the little garden near the old kitchen; another area we’re trying to build up the soil with layers of organic matter.

The chicken wire belongs to the goat’s owner, so that’s all rolled up and, along with the containers he brought to try and lure the goat with food, it is set aside and ready to be returned.

After what happened when I walked the goat over to his place, I don’t particularly want to see him, or even go to his place, so I might just drop them off at the end of his driveway when we have the chance. :-/

The frames are just set aside for now. I plan to take them apart and will likely use them to make trellises for the squash. Before I do, I will have to snag one of the girls to help me get that table saw out of the shed so we can test it out. If it works, I’ll be able to cut straight ends to the pieces, and even *gasp* have matching lengths to work with. :-D

If it doesn’t work, I’ll see what I can manage with the circular saw.

For now, though, it’s done. We no longer have a pen in the middle of our south yard! :-D

Another thing checked off the to-do list!

The Re-Farmer

A bit of prep and clean up

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Yesterday, the girls were able to take our two black tarps and set them up on a future garden bed area.

We mulched this area with straw last year, as a start to try and amend the soil and add organic matter to it. The old garden area had been plowed probably the fall before we moved in. I don’t actually know. It left the entire area very rough, but the ground itself is incredibly hard and full of rocks. I remember as a child, we were constantly picking rocks out of here, though one section (now full of trees) was so bad, my parents stopped trying to plant anything in it.

We want to amend the soil by adding organic matter to it, but we have also not decided where we will be permanently adding garden beds. For much of this area, we are already planning of eventually putting fruit and nut trees, though for this year, outside of the section in the photo, we will be planting giant sunflowers.

The black tarps are there just to warm the soil faster. Along the North side, I plan to plant birdhouse gourds in a row running East to West. In front of it, we will plant pattypan squash and the zucchini mix, in rows running North to South, all with trellises.

That may change, if none of the birdhouse gourd seeds sprout! Still no sign of them right now.

After this year, I hope we will have cleaned things up and worked things out enough to decide where we want to plant raised bed gardens. And by “raised bed”, I don’t mean the ones I’ve seen videos of, where people just border an area with rocks or a layer of bricks that get referred to as raised beds. I am thinking of beds that may be as high as 3 or 4 feet. Accessibility is what I have in mind for these, as my body ages and I know my mobility in my hips and knees will continue to decrease. This means finding permanent locations, and from what I’m seeing, this may end up being on the South side of the house, rather than the North.

We shall see.

Among the other things I finally got to today was dismantling the cat condo I put together out of cardboard boxes and rigid insulation. The remains of the boxes went to the burn barrel area, but I wanted to keep the insulation for potential future uses.

I am amused by the very defined areas that cats used it for scratching! These pieces were all in the backs of each “condo”, and the scratches near the “ceiling”.

No wonder other pieces were falling inside. I cut them in sizes that would support each other. That doesn’t work if they get moved around by enthusiastic scratching! :-D

Another thing I finally set up for a bit of cleaning was the large crocheted blanket that was set up on my dad’s old swing bench, to help the cats keep warm.

The peed and crapped all over it. :-(

I’d already draped it over the sawhorses and gave one side a thorough soaking and de-pooping with the hose. Today, I did the other side on the clothes line.

The blanket, on its own, is already pretty heavy. Full of water, it probably weighs more than 20 pounds. It stretched the clothes line until the bottom was piled on the ground. The clothes line is on a pulley system, so clothes can be hung from the platform at one end, and the line moved as needed. (When I was a kid, there were three lines set up, but there’s just the one, now.) So I used some rope to tie the top and bottom parts of the line closer together, then slid that over to lift the blanket off the ground a bit.

I had actually tightened the line before putting the blanket on it, too!

We have another, smaller blanket we use for the cats. It was covering a shelf, so it didn’t get filthy like this one did. It, too, got a soak from the hose to try and clean it. Both are way to heavy to ever put into a normal washing machine, so a hose is the best we can do, right now!

I am hoping that, sometime next week, we’ll finally be able to empty the sun room to give the floor a thorough cleaning. We should be able to continue cleaning out the old kitchen, too, so we can turn it into a pantry.

Little by little, it’ll get done!

The Re-Farmer

Spring clean up started

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I finally got to get outside and start doing some dedicated clean up around the house.

But first, I must share this adorableness.

Two Face is getting all of the love from her siblings as she recovers from her visit to the vet.

Speaking of visits to the vet, we discovered our inside mama cat has been throwing up, so we are stopping the pain killers the vet gave us to try with her.

Dang.

My goal for outside had originally been to go around with a wheelbarrow and pick up all the little branches scattered all over the yard over the winter. Once out there, however, I changed tack completely. Instead, I removed all of the rigid insulation we put around the bottom of the house for the winter, removed the straw from over the septic tank area, and cleaned things up around the house.

When our septic failed earlier in the year, and we had to get the tank emptied, I had moved the straw covering the lid over to the side, on top of snow and other straw. As I cleaned away the straw, I uncovered a snow drift! :-D

That’s okay. The straw got moved over to the old kitchen garden, and the straw that was stuck in clumps of snow and ice will just add moisture to the garden. Plus, some of it was already starting to decompose quite nicely. Bonus! :-)

This is all just the straw that was covering the septic tank area. Later, I plan to cover the rest of this little garden with more straw from the bale we still have in the old big garden area.

The sheets of insulation around this side of the house were held in place with whatever was handy. Bricks, chimney inserts that will never be used (now that is an electric furnace) and little benches we found while cleaning up in the maple grove. They all fit quite nicely together to make a little seating area. :-)

In the future, we plan to make a path along the house, and a small garden of shade tolerant plants in this area.

On the topic of planting things, I was able to cover a future planting area with black tarp this morning.

The ground here is soft enough that I could actually use tent pegs to secure the corners. Unlike pretty much everywhere else, which is still frozen hard.

One of the things I want to do in this area as soon as the ground is thawed enough, is dig through it a bit more to make sure I’ve cleared out as many roots as I can. There were so many cherry roots running through there, it’s very likely we’ll end up with some trying to grow through our plantings, if I’ve missed any! Of course, we’ll have to be on the look out for any rusted nails and whatever else may have been missed when we cleaned this area out.

Also, the Potato Beetle decided to be part of my “found object” display. :-D

Him and his filthy, filthy nose! :-D

My other goal of the day was to start some seeds, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. It’s time for me to pain killer up again and take it easy, so that I’m not too wiped out to continue tomorrow.

Ah, the things you need to think about when you’re broken. :-D

The Re-Farmer

Clean up: basement – Done!!!

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Woohoo!!!

It’s done!

The girls and I made a push to finish tonight and, as I write this, we now have two very pregnant cats in the new “maternity ward”.

Before we hauled out all the stuff waiting by the stairs, my daughters and I went rifling through a shed and the barn to see what we could find to use as doors.

First, we went into the shed, where I knew there were some doors that might work. We decided against them, but found some decent wood in a corner. We found a couple more pieces in the barn.

With the trellis wire left over from covering the counter opening to the unfinished bar, we figured we could build a mesh door to size.

I also started to bring some of my tools down. I’m so excited to be able to do that!!!

While in the barn, we found these.

They are actually plastic windows. They were wide enough to fit over the opening into the unfinished bar – there’s space at the top, but the cats won’t be able to get up there.

They almost fit over the opening to the old basement, but that wider part on the bottom couldn’t be covered.

My thought had been to build the wire mesh door for the bar opening, which would have allowed us to make a hinged door (except we didn’t have any hinges handy). With using one of these windows instead, hinges couldn’t be attached, anyhow.

So I found some cup holder hooks and Bungee cords. The idea was to have a pair of Bungee cords holding the window pane in place. That didn’t work out exactly as planned, as we only had one Bungee cord that was the right size.

We made do. You’ll see how in the next photo. :-D

After bringing the stuff to make doors down, the girls and I hauled out what needed to be gotten rid of. We now have an awful mess outside our main door, but cleaning that up will have to wait until the weather improves. Plus, finished the basement was the priority.

The girls started working on building the frame for the wall opening while I started cleaned the window panes, then started cleaning up the area by the stairs.

When it was time to screw the frame together, the girls couldn’t find any usable screws in any of the buckets and miscellaneous containers we kept. There were just nails.

So we ended up using the deck screws I’d taken out from the barn doors, after our vandal had boarded them up.

I’m still giggling about the irony of that.

Once the frame was screwed together, the mesh was stapled into place in two overlapping pieces. There was a possibility of a cat getting through at the overlap, though. My daughter managed to find a couple of shorter screws and we put a cross piece on the mesh side of the frame at the overlap. The overlapping parts of the mesh were then stapled to the cross piece. This closed the potential gap, strengthened the frame, and it can even serve as a “handle” on one side.

Here is how they look now.

The frame ended up working better in the old basement side of the wall. It’s braced on one side by a table, and a Bungee cord attached to one of the cup hooks is keeping the other side in place. To get through, we can unhook the cord, then slide the door to one side.

As for the window-door, until I can find another cord the same length as the red one, we’ve got a longer one diagonally, just to keep the window pane from potentially flipping over. The extra window pane is now stored in the old bar. Who knows. It might come in handy for something else.

The fun part is, we’re already using the basement as a workshop!

I’m so excited! :-D

One of my daughters took over cleaning while I found and brought more tools down, then helped finish the frame. She even mopped the rest of the floor.

I can’t even think of when this floor was ever mopped, other than parts of it at times like when my brother found the water damage shortly before we moved in and had to scrub away mold and bleach the floor and walls in the corner.

Here is how it looks now at that end.

We have set up cat beds under chairs and the old phonograph. A flattened box is there to act as a rug, and we brought in the litter box that was in the sun room, since the outside cats don’t need to use it anymore.

And here’s the rest of it!

We set up food and water bowls at the far end, nearer the stairs.

When I went into the sun room to get the litter box, Beep Beep was in there, curled up on the swing bench. That was encouraging, since we would be getting her soon. Then Big Jim came out.

He had blood all over one side of his head!

It looked like it was coming from an ear, an injury that was most definitely not there this morning. The poor thing! The blood was dry, so whatever happened, it was no longer bleeding, at least, and it didn’t seem to be bothering him. He sure wanted pets, though!

After setting up the litter pan, food and water, one of my daughters and I went outside with some cat treats. I scattered some both inside the sun room, where Beep Beep and Big Jim still were, and in the outside food bowls.

Creamsicle and Potato Beetle were quick to come for treats, and I was very pleased to see Butterscotch waddling her way over, too. We let them eat for a bit, then tried to get the mamas in.

Beep Beep was more cooperative. She jumped out of my arms as soon as I got inside, but I’d managed to open the door to the basement, first, and that’s where she made her escape to – exactly where I wanted her to be.

Butterscotch was much less cooperative.

My daughter was eventually able to pick her up, and I was manning the doors so she could get Butterscotch inside, and into the basement, at almost the same time.

Butterscotch did NOT want to go down the stairs!

It took some persuading and gentle wrangling by my daughter to get her down enough stairs that I could close the door. Then she went back to the top step, essentially trapping my daughter in the basement.

Beep Beep, meanwhile, had already settled herself in front of the chalk board at the other end of the basement.

My daughter spend the next while trying to coax Butterscotch down the stairs. When she did get to the bottom, she immediately hid in a shelf under the stairs. My daughter brought one of the cat beds, placed inside a crate to make a “nest”, and put it beside where Butterscotch was hiding. This way, we hope she’ll find the nice, soft bed and a more enclosed area she will feel safer in.

And hopefully have her kittens in.

We will now have to add going downstairs to our cat care routine. It should be interesting to see how much of a challenge it will be to keep the mamas downstairs, and the other cats upstairs. Eventually, I want to have the litter boxes for all the cats downstairs, which will mean having the door to the new part basement open all the time. That’s not going to happen while the mamas are down there, for a while.

I hope they feel comfortable and safe down there, soon!

The Re-Farmer