It is probably fair to say that the bulk of progress we have made on the house/site since our last post in August is clean up work. We finally finished the gargantuan firewood project which was precipitated by the initial clearing for a house site and open space for a view. Still in the queue from that expedition is the management of the brush/slash piles.
I figured out that I cleared somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 to 3 acres of formerly dense albeit young woods. This resulted in somewhere around 50 brush piles the size of sedans. Happily the winter snows last year worked wonders in compressing these piles, if doing nothing to actually remove them. Since August I have run two piles through my small wood chipper (thanks Mom and Dad!) it is very slow going but the mulch was very useful for the perennial gardens we planted this summer. We also had 3 huge piles which were sitting on our proposed house site that we burned a few weeks ago.
The tractor is on long term loan from Lorien's father, it has been very helpful with everything from bringing up firewood to bush hogging trails and pushing brush into a bonfire! Sorry Joel it is a Kubota I suppose beggars can't be choosers.
With the brush piles off of the house site we are hoping to bring in an excavator to do some stump removal and scuff off the site in the next week or two. We are also just beginning the process of collecting stone off out of the woods for the construction of our masonry heater. We need to pick about 200% of the veneer of the heater. This works out to about 500 sqft of surface area made up of 4 inch thick stones. Yep, that will be a lot of stone. Just think, we are considering building part of our barn with stone too... anyone want to come help move stones... anyone?
