White Christmas

You can hardly see the outside Christmas tree for the blizzard! We've had two big nor'easter snowstorms already, before Christmas. Last year there was no snow to speak of and sheep were eating green grass in January.

Happy Holidays everyone. Stay warm!

Animals in summer, finished barn

Our sheep and lambs prospered this year on the very good grass this land likes to grow. Maine is moist and warm in summer, but not overly hot. Grass grows well and abundently from late April or early May through late September. Farmers typically take two and even three cuts of hay. In season, square baled hay can be bought "off the field" for a dollar-fifty, round bales for $25. Sheep do well in this country, where the only natural enemies are coyotes and other predators. The only reason there are not more sheep in Maine is the lack of a good market for wool and lamb. Americans, it seems, prefer beef and synthetics. Our sheep cut all the grass on the homeplace, and clear a lot of the brush too. Soon they'll started clearing the brush on the leased land too. We let our chickens wander during the day now that they're grown. We raised them on pasture, in a so-called chicken tractor, which you can see in one of these shots. Another shows the finished barn in October, after it was all closed in, and full of hay.

Wrecking out and rebuilding the porch:

One of the more disturbing features of the house when we bought it was the 15-inch sag in the roof line of the porch. We used this 28 by 8 foot long porch the first winter for a doghouse, but the dogs were cold because there were huge gaps between the windows and the frames. It was also a lot of potential living space that had quite a pleasant sunny aspect on evenings spring through fall. We estimated that the roof itself could be saved, and wrecked out only the walls and floor. We jacked the roof square again, an operation accompanied by some rather worrying moments as it all creaked back into line. We put in an stone knee wall, backed by concrete, and rebuilt the walls to the roof with good new windows. Like the barn, the porch awaits some new siding, which will likely be cedar shingles as they last a long time without maintenance, and because shingling is one of Aimee's best skills.

More barn pictures:

Building the barn:

We had a good site picked out for a barn. It took a week or two to get a building permit, but we broke ground in May 2007. I used our "new" twenty-five year old Kubota compact tractor to scrape a level spot for a slab and to rake gravel. The slab was poured on one of the hottest days of the late spring, and it set up far too fast, but was solid. We used all local lumber from mills close by: hemlock from Gerald Fowler in Thorndike, bigtooth aspen from Peter Baldwin in Brooks. All told, the 20 by 30 foot barn with gambrel roof over second floor hay storage cost about $4,000 finished and wired. It houses our herd of sheep and a chicken coop, but will eventually shelter pigs, and possibly a couple of Fjord horses too.

Getting the sheep:

The original plan was to get animals in the late spring of the second year, but we are inveterate "Uncle Henry's" fans (the Maine second-hand merchandiser). The first winter I saw an ad for a small herd of Corriedale sheep. We were able to pick them up the next weekend. Three mature ewes in the herd were pregnant, so that gave us lambs that winter, too early for comfort (the ram not being separated from the ewes at the proper time, the ewes bred far too early). We became adept at helping ailing lambs survive, even to the point of learning to intubate or force feed a down lamb.

Fixing the house...

Picture: House and land the first winter.

The house was falling down. The rubble foundation had suffered from "freeze-thaw" effects, had begun slowly collapsing, and had actually parted company with the house for about fifteen running feet on the south east corner. The kitchen floor, built on 10-inch by 30 foot pine log joists, had fallen through, and by the time I wrecked out all the rotten wood, there was an eight by five foot hole in the floor. All the kitchen plumbing, and all the wiring, had to be redone. The house had no insulation to speak of.

We began by wrecking out the kitchen. We pulled down a partition wall to make one room 14 by 28 feet. We sistered in new floor joists and a solid 3/4 inch sub floor across the entire kitchen, making an attempt to finally level a floor that, since it was built on logs, was probably never level the first day it was built. I wired it anew and to code. We put up new insulation, 1 1/4 inch foam board with reflective film and an air space, and with the help of Jason, a student hired during the summer, new dry wall.

By this time it was June, and warm enough and dry enough to wreck out the basement. A new concrete buttress wall was poured to reinforce the flagging rubble, and take it back up to the sills. the house was jacked up 1/2 inch above the new wall, the wall poured, allowed to set, and the house lowered back down. All this was hand work with bags of concrete, and took about two weeks of hard "graft," as they say in Yorkshire. Post jacks were used to level the interior floor.

Then it was time to insulate and wire the rest of the house, prior to fitting new drywall. Two feet of cellulose were added to the attic crawl space. All the windows were replaced. Finish work included new light fittings and window trims, baseboard, and a finish job on the old hardwood floor.

For heat we left the old oil forced air system in place, but added a wood stove and a forced air wood furnace. We signed up for renewable power. The winter fuel use went from 700 gallons of heat oil to 200, and from ten cords of firewood to five, more than a 60% efficiency gain.

Aimee had a good if somewhat tortuous time picking out colors and painting. (Don't ever ask me to pick out a color.) Jason did quite a bit of the painting, especially priming.She did a sunset color wash on the living room wall, saving also the old Victorian tin ceiling.

We had five full fifteen yard dumpster-loads of wreckage and trash hauled away. The former inhabitants had grown quite old in the house, and towards the end had taken to just leaving bags of trash in the yard. There's still a lot of trash to pick up, but not even one hundredth of what there was.

We moved into the house in August 2006, three months after starting the project.