Barn pics!

Here are some pics of the barn... these aren't current, but I will get some more current ones as soon as I can!


This is looking at the barn from the back. The back wall is now completely framed in and the second floor is done.


Some inside pics... Obviously you can tell that we had to replace a lot of wood...

Looking out the front door...

More to come soon!

Next step - dirt moving...

Sometimes there is work to be done that I really don't enjoy. Today was one of those days. Dirt moving. Tons of dirt to be moved back up against the foundation walls of the barn. Hours and hours of work... We are more than halfway done, so I guess that is a good thing. I guess I should count ourselves lucky that at least we have a tractor and a blade and we don't have to do it by hand.

So 3/4 of the inside is done - only about 25 feet to go. We still need to finish the 2 long walls on the outside and that will be done. At least until it rains. When it rains it will settle and we will have to fill in some more I am sure.

The girls are really enjoying playing in the dirt. From throwing it, climbing on it, riding bikes over it. They had 2 baths today they were so dirty!

We had a good weekend. My sister is in town from GA visiting. Her, mom, dad, and Reggie came over Sunday for a few hours and visited and had dinner. This was the first time in 5 weeks mom has left the house other than to go to chemo. I'm glad she was able to get out. I'm sure that she is worn out now.

Today our friends Butch and Karen came for dinner. They brought their grandson Luke. He is too cute. He really wasn't sure what to think with all the animals running around. :)

Tomorrow we have to work on the condo and get it finished so it can be rented. The girls have school again to. It was nice to be able to spend a Monday with them today. I don't get to do that much since I am always working on Monday. Back to work for me on Wednesday. These 4 days off sure have flown by...

The barn...

The barn the day we started working...

After inside tongue and groove walls were dismantled, marked, and stacked - we took the tin off the roof and started on the outside boards.
























Tongue and groove from the walls of the chicken room - stacked, marked, bundled and ready for transport.










And the rafters start to come down...

Almost there...

All gone... one floor left. That's a lot of wood stacked up. We worked 2 weekends in a row in rain and couldn't transport anything home...

Tongue and groove floors gone...

Fast forward to today... Literally. The forms came off the poured concrete walls today. I had to make my mark on the walls.... couldn't resist...

The barn is ultimately being raised about 3 feet up from the original height. The walls are 4 feet up from ground level. 6 feet from the footer.

Yeah pictures!!

Chicken chicken and her turkey babies... they are Black Spanish Turkeys.














Guard dogs are great until they decide that the closed window is NOT going to keep them in the house. Naciye went through the window and cut her leg pretty good. We were lucky. $300 later and 3 days - Naciye can get out of every collar made, bandage made, every nasty spray tastes good, and her stitches are gone... On a side note - it still healed fairly well...
















The guinea keets heat lamp burned out and I used a jug of hot water to keep them warm while I ran to the store... think they liked it?? Oh and the kids insist of keeping stuffed animals with the keets when they are tiny... :)
















Daily enjoying the sunshine on the spring grass...

Our first chick of 2010. This is an Easter Egger/Buff Orphington mix.

Wow! We have internet now!

Been way too long since I last posted... its way too hard to type on the phone all the time so I just don't do it at all.

The phone company finally put high speed in here and turned it on tonight. So I imagine that I will be posting quite a bit.

So anyway - lots of stuff to update on. I have to figure out where I left of and I will update everything. Thanks for staying in touch!!

Hey look - a new post in less than a week!

I'm actually posting in less than a week! Can you believe it!



All is well in farm life I think. I broke my finger. It's a really nice shade of purple and blue. Oh well. Life goes on. I just don't understand how I can work all the time and never get hurt - take an entire barn down with hardly a scratch yet I break my finger moving furniture?? Go figure.



At any rate - getting ready for the party this weekend. Need to cut the grass. The neighbor Ben got us a load of gravel for the driveway so we have to work on that tonight. It is really sad when you are excited about gravel.



The guinea eggs are set to hatch on Monday. I'm excited. I know that the girls are too since I actually timed it this time so that they will be here for the hatch. I honestly didn't think about it last time and I regret that.



I need some cool things to do with Cassie. She is not her normal bright cherry self. It's almost like 8 year depression. She just isn't herself. I'm starting to wonder if this past 2 years with the divorce and all is finally taking a toll on her. Like she is missing something in her life and craving something. So I need some really cool fun small activities that I can do with her to cheer her up and have some bonding time. Maybe we will start with baking cookies. I haven't done that with her in a long time....



Anyway - off to push gravel for now....

Lots of updates!

Ok so it's been a while again. I'm sorry. We are so busy all the time and I just never seem to be able to find time. At least I think about it though!

At any rate - we went on vacation in mid-June. Had an absolute ball. Our first vacation together for all 6 of us and mom and dad went to. We went to their condo in Naples Florida. We were actually really dreading the drive - the plan was to drive straight thru - about 16 hours. 2 adults and 4 kids in the car. We really weren't too excited about the drive. So at any rate we did it. We stopped in Atlanta for about 2 hours or so and met my sister Laura and my niece Julie at Hard Rock for dinner. I really really miss my sister and hate the fact that I don't get to see her all the time.

So really for the most part - the drive was great. The kids were wonderful. We got to Naples at 6am. We were on the beach by sunrise. No we were excited at all. :)

So the vacation was great - everyone got along. Actually everyone got along better than we thought they would. The kids didn't fight - which is unusual. Usually there always something that has somebody in fits. We spent a lot of time on the beach, in the ocean, and at the pool.

Cassie in the ocean the morning we arrived on Vanderbilt Beach.

Me and the girls the morning we arrived.

Samantha learned several ways to flip in the pool.

Cassie, Samantha, and I.

Yes a picture of Dave and I does exist.

And for those of you how are wondering where exactly all my awesome photographs are - sorry. I can't post them on here. Simple reason - if I want to sell them - I can't post them anywhere. Sorry.

Oh yeah - I guess I should tell you what else we did on vacation. We decided to go to Harley to look at T-shirts and stuff. Harley Davidson of Naples lets you test drive the bikes. A lot of dealerships don't let you do this. This was actually the first one we had been to that let you. so we went there the morning before we left and rode bike after bike. Had a ball. We really miss riding. We missed it so much that we bought a bike. We bought in Florida and then had to have it shipped home. I haven't told mom and dad yet - considering that technically the bike hasn't been our possession for even a week yet (yes it took 2 1/2 weeks for it to arrive). So dad I know you will read this at some point. We bought a bike and we are sorry we didn't tell you - but we know how you feel about motorcycles.

So the bike is used. A 1994 Dyna Wide Glide. It's got LOADS of chrome on it. The guy that had it before put tons of extras on it. It only has 23k miles on it. We got it cheap. We can afford it. Put it this way - we did away with Direct TV so our finances don't change. We like the bike better than TV anyway. LOL.

Dave's mom stayed at the house while we were gone to take care of all the animals. Zeus plowed into Naciye and hurt her pretty bad. She's ok now - but for about 2 weeks she was hurting pretty good. My last female guinea hen got run over while we were gone too. So we only had 5 adult males left. Sigh. I took the eggs out of her nest and now have 24 eggs in the incubator. They should hatch around the 20th. Hey that's only a week away! Cool.

The 12 guinea keets - well I let them out of their enclosure to clean it and well they disappeared. Seriously - I saw them and then 30 minutes later when I went to bring them back in - they were GONE. I searched for an hour. Couldn't hear them, see them - nothing. I searched for 2 days after that. No sign of them at all. Then I guess my adult guineas herded home 4 females. I have no idea where they found them - but at least they brought home a few of them. So needless to say - I will be keeping all the ones that hatch from this batch since I wouldn't have anymore eggs this year.

Everyone else is great. Been riding the horses a lot more than normal. I ride with Carla, who lives behind us and has 80 acres. Daily tags along with us when we go so that I don't have to leave him home alone. He gets his exercise with all the running he does.

We had our July 4th party. It rained and it rained and it rained. So we didn't get to set off all the fireworks we bought. We've rescheduled the fireworks for July 18th for this who want to come.

So alot of work to do. Lots of projects. We need to start on building the barn. Our neighbor is getting his brothers backhoe so we can dig out of the footers. Anybody have about 500 cinderblocks???? LOL

Need to run for now. I've spent way too much time on here already.