Yet another week has come and gone here in KY. What a crazy week it’s been too. I can never remember it being so warm in December. Forecasts call for 60 degree temps all week. Don’t take me wrong, I’m not complaining. I’ll take these temps over the single digits we had for a couple nights last week.

The contractor we ended up hiring for our project has almost demolished the addition my uncle had built on the house. As with almost any project you start, this one has opened our eyes to other problems we have here. In particular the electricity. It’s a mess. I knew it was nowhere near code, but I didn’t think it was as bad as it is. Lots of the circuits have double 30 and double 60 amp breakers for simple 110 volt plugs and lights. There’s no way they could trip if they needed to. I guess they used what they had laying around. That or the right breakers were tripping so they just put in bigger breakers. At any rate we are going to try to correct the problem if we can. The first night the contractor started his tear down we kept smelling something burning, but couldn’t find anything until 1 in the morning. A baseboard heater in the addition had caught some insulation and carpet on fire. Luckily my mother was here and just happened to see it. I ran out and grabbed a hose I had stretched to the corrall to put it out. Wasn’t very much of a fire, but any fire around the house is too big.

With my mom spending more and more time with us and my dad talking of retiring for the second time, we decided to buy a new double wide mobile home. This will give everybody the space they need and should help Garett with his asthma. We went small, but nice. We ended up with a Giles 28 x 52. It’s a little over 1200 square feet. We’ll have the best of all worlds. We still have the house and will have my family close some of the time. Now we can convert the upstairs to a farm office. My great uncle left us about 100 books on agriculture and I buy more all the time, so now we’ll have plenty of space for the books. The patio room and deck will still be available to us anytime we want plus we’ll have a big deck on the back of our mobile home. I got out voted on using the big window in the patio room we are building. The rest of the family wants to opt for 4 vinyl windows instead of the big window. I gave in easy, so they figured I had to be up to something to give up so easy. That coupled with the fact that I’ve been going around saving every piece of lumber I can salvage… gave me away. I’m building a small cabin in the woods.

We’ve made arrangements with a friend of ours to rent the equipment for clearing the land and have him do the work. We want to put a dam in one of the hollers and create a small lake. If everything works out I’ll put the cabin by the lake.

Just my luck, Thursday when it was cold and snowy they brought the doublewide. It was too big to go down the drive so they had to go through the field. Well, the trucks weren’t made to go off road- so one got stuck. I was out putting hay in to the horses, so I took the 6000 over and pulled the truck and half the doublewide up where they needed to go.

I got quite a scare one day last week too. Went to start the 6000 and nothing. Just a click. Of course I thought the worst. Turned out to be a dead battery. I’d left the key on and the brake lights ran it down. I just knew it would be shot but after a few hours on charge it’s working again. Keep your fingers crossed that it lasts.

My cows and pigs are doing okay. Eating a lot, but that’s to be expected for growing pigs. I’ve given each of the cows a round of penicillin just in case. I also moved them over to the other field where they can get into the barn and gave them hay and grain.

Monday and Tuesday my friend John Bryant and I spent all day trenching. We dug trenches for water spickets all over the place. As soon as I can get the water line in we’ll have water at both barns, where we plan to build the pig lot, and at the corrall. We’ll also have direct burial wire to the barn for electricity. We had been using extension cords.

It’s crazy here, but I know it will be so much better when everything is finished. That’s what keeps me plugging along. well I’m sure there is some work that needs to be done around here so I better go……….check back soon.

This entry was posted on December 14th, 2006 by joelw at 6:04 pm and is filed under Family, Tractors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.