And the work begins

Throughout the month of April, Keith has taken Mondays off from his off-farm job in order to be able to disassemble the old farm house. Typically he has Sundays and Tuesdays off, but by taking Monday off Keith has three days off each week. He aims to get the old house down and sorted with one hundred hours of labor, and a little help from me.

He’s been out twice before today, but I went out to the future site of the Runamuk farm with him today to lend my muscle–for whatever that is worth.

It wasn’t always so, but it seems the further Runamuk progresses, the harder I work to make this agricultural business a success, the more supporters we seem to gain.

I can’t help but be grateful.

Keith’s sister, and my best friend, Cara, comes over to help by watching the kids, sometimes helping with household chores, enabling me to go out to give speaking presentations, work in the apiary or the gardens, attend meetings with my business counselor or various educational workshops.  And this month Cara is coming over every week for the three days that Keith will have off, so that I can go out to the farm to help with the disassembling of the old farmhouse.  Thanks Cara!

You can imagine how excited we were to discover that much of the old timbers and boards in the old house are salvageable.  We’re planning an open-beam concept in the new house, and with any luck, there will be enough of them salvaged from the old house to put in the new one.

Construction on the new house hasn’t begun yet, I’m still working on putting together the loan package for the bank to process and a couple of things are holding that up.  Namely the blueprints and the soil test for the septic design.  The guys over at Hammond Lumber are working on our blueprints, but there’s nothing I can do about the soil test until the frost leaves the ground so that a sample can be retrieved for assessment.

We’re impatient to get started, but with the old house to take apart and sort, and more than twenty cord of firewood to stack, we have plenty to do at the farm-site while we’re biding our time, making plans for our farm and dreaming of what’s just around the corner.