Back at It

For most of September I was doing my best to maximize my time out in those last beautiful, sunny days of summer. But now we’ve hit the time of year where it’s time to get back to work while the weather holds before we hit the deep-freeze of winter.

I’ve got a pretty substantial pre-winter list, and not that many weekends to get it done in, which is pretty much par for the course on all the lists I make.

First up was creating some semblance of order in the garage…

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Ha.

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My mom recently sold her condo and brought a bunch of wire shelves she had leftover up to the farm, and let me tell you, they’ve made a huge difference.

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I now have a set of shelves dedicated to bee equipment, and one dedicated to automotive equipment and one dedicated to garden equipment, and I haven’t even half-organized the place yet.

Technically this garage has an upstairs, which would be awesome for storage if it wasn’t covered in raccoon shit. I’m just not at a spot in my life where I can deal with massive amounts of raccoon shit, so I’m going to put cleaning out the upstairs and creating a storage area up there on some future list.

For now I settled on a few random racks make of scrap lumber, and just creating enough room to walk around in the main part of the garage…

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There’s still a fair amount of work to do, but it’s feeling slightly less chaotic.

I also had a dumpster up at the house a couple of weekends ago…

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I even took a day off work so I could spend some uninterrupted time cleaning out the barns and then promptly got sick and had to stay in bed for two days. Ugh.

This is probably the fourth of fifth 30 yard dumpster I’ve filled since I lived here… this one was mostly for the pile of construction debris in the pole barn.

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This dates back to the original master bathroom demo, and includes all the tile, drywall and wood, from the second upstairs bath demo, plus a fair amount of debris from the kitchen demo earlier this year…

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Oh, also a grill that caught on fire this summer, plus some cabinets and windows from my garage/shop renovation last year, and more debris from the rubble pile I mostly cleaned up a few years ago…

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Still need to figure out what I’m going to do with this mess.

Also, I might be the only person I know who can turn a 7,000 sq ft pole barn into a disaster area inside of 3 years…

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(Which, in my defense, even with all the mess the barn still holds 10 vehicles, a tractor, two mowers, a golf cart, a couple of kayaks, a barn’s worth of brick and old beams, and all the rest of my mess, along with plenty of driving space… so, yeah.)

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I’d still like to put it in some kind of order before winter, and I have several plans for that I hope to get in place in the next week or two.

And then there’s all the usual winter prep, like cleaning out the garden, stocking up on hay for the donkeys, cleaning out the animal barn, and doing all my fall maintenance on the vehicles… which is to say, summer was fun, but now I’m back at it in a big way.

I know I’ve been quiet for the last several weeks, and while I’ve been writing things that feel big and meaningful to me, they aren’t really coming together into anything coherent to share with anyone else, so, for now, we’ll stick to updates of my messy garage and barn, but I promise there will be more on farm life soon.

17 Responses

  1. Damn…I have big barn envy, big time!
    If you can drive in it and find what you need, that’s ‘clean’ enough ๐Ÿ˜‰

    Time for writing, and reading it, when it’s really cold out.

    Psst get RID of the raccoons!

    1. The raccoons aren’t there now, but when I bought this place there wasn’t a garage door on the back so it was basically a raccoon flop-house.

      1. I just remember your cooing at one eating the chicken food…and seemed reluctant to ‘take care of the problem’.

  2. We built a 16×24 ft pole barn, 16 yrs ago. Now we are selling and having to clean up/out the place. It seems the more ‘storage’ space you have the more you collect. Plus, living out ‘back of beyond’, no one wants to travel out this far for yard sales or thru CL. One saving grace is the Habitat for Humanity ReSale Store. They came out and took our fine, quality ‘junque’. They also love to receive construction material to re-sell

  3. What are all those vehicles, and where did they come from? Is this stuff you inherited with the property?

    Have missed your posts, but glad you’re spending time enjoying yourself and the weather! ๐Ÿ™‚

  4. Happy to see you post. ๐Ÿ™‚

    Geez….I’m tired reading what all you’ve been doing ~ I don’t know how you do it all. No more complaining for me about keeping up with my lil house, yard, deck, etc.

    xo

  5. It’s too bad you live so far away otherwise you could have “help Kit clean up the farm and barn while patting donkeys and holding chickens day” every year. i’d volunteer for that anytime!

  6. I have discovered the fine art of occasionally hiring stuff out. Why don’t you hire some company that specializes in hazmat cleanup and turn them loose on the garage upstairs.

  7. We have a large pole barn but your’s is HUGE! I am very jealous.

    I love the feeling when I get a mess all cleaned and organized. It makes me feel creative and ready to build something!

  8. Hi Kit…I enjoy reading your adventurous inspiring, humorous posts of life on Black Feather. Before you added so much to the farm I knew not where you found time to write with multiple projects in the works.
    I too, have an affinity for large pole barns and had my little paradise valley come with more land I would have one but have gotten by with a small steel bolt together garden shed and a bigger vinal hoop building colored the same as the house and shop hidden behind the house from the road. I call the hoop building my machine shed because I can get my baby 440B Bobcat ( horse stall cleaner – but I have no horses-other than a very long legged Golden Doodle ~ LOL ), JD Garden Tractor, and it’s attactchments inside it ~ LOL
    I’m only guessing here but looks as if pops has a jeep collection going on…kewl. Ever since way back when I was knee high to a grasshopper I remember dad having a 1948 Willys Overlander > open-air rag-top ” JEEPSTER ” If you mentioned it to your dad he’d remember them. Not too many restored good ones around anymore. We had lots of fun all us kids piled in it riding out to grampa’s lake cabin singing songs all the way.
    It’s cooling down here and I’m finishing up a coulple – before hard freeze projects – basement sump-pump concrete hole sawed, jackhammered, concrete and wet dirt hauled out last night and pump round bucket fabbed with 1/4″ hardware cloth n landscape fabric rivited on set in and washed 3/4′ rock added around it finished last night by 7:30PM with the help of my son and another friend and his boy all ready to cement in, wire up on a designated circut, finish plumbing PVC under my front flower bed out 70′ to the ditch. When that’s done on to finish installing the egress window in the hole in the basement we’ve been hauiling the broken concrete and wet dirt n clean rock through….always something to keep you busy on the ranch ๐Ÿ˜‰ and away from the clowns n elct. circus on the box

    ๐Ÿ™‚

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