So, the biggest news is, the deck at the house is done.  Well, close enough.  There are 2 boards missing.  1 is a little piece of trim,

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May was kinda busy here, but some of it was non-eventful for the farm.  Some of it was awesome.
I tilled and cleaned out the garden beds and planted seeds.  With such a cool and wet Spring, not many of them came up.  I ended up re-seeding the spinach, lettace, and double up on some peas.  The onions seem to be doing fine.  We got a bundle of leftover strawberries that seem to have mostly taken root.  We also have potatoes and a double row of sunflowers coming up.    Besides that, I have a garage and basement full of tomatoes, peppers, lavender, various herbs, and probably a few other things getting ready to transplant.

I’ve been saying that this Spring would be exciting for the corn crib.  There were a lot of structural things, demolition, and odds and ends that needed to be done that didn’t provide much eye appeal.  Several projects have been waiting on hold for Spring, which would make a lot of visual changes.  But, there was a requirement…

The house in town had 2 sets of concrete precast stairs.  Both were getting quite askew and cracked, not to mention the lovely astroturf covering the front stairs.  These had to be replaced before doing serios work at the farm.  3 days with a jackhammer, and these were gone.  Reagan’s dad, Steve, came out and helped frame out a new pair of stairs, that were connected with a wrap-around deck effect.  The deck does not provide much for sitting chairs out on, but make a great bench for plants, sitting down on them with the neighbors, or melting on to after a good bike ride.

Three weekends later, it is nearly complete.  There will be a little raised bench near the front door, and there are a few more pieces of decking to get laid out.

Back to the farm….

I have done small bits of work on the stairs over the past month.  These are nearly completed.  There are a few riser panels to cut and install, and a few last treads to nail down.  We tend to buy local, getting supplies from Tri-County Lumber and Ace, but I love checking out the Habitat for Humanity ReStore in Des Moines.  I had to take the truck into town, and thought I could finally find a missing door.  No luck there, nor in the last several trips.  I know the original door we found there was sold at Lowe’s, so I swung by to see what the damage would be.  $228 each.  But wait a tic, there is a sticker on the one I’m holding for $150 clearance.  I pay closer attention…the left handed, 36″, full glass doors are $91.20/ea?!?!  The right handed doors were still $228, but the lefts were $91.  I loaded up the last two they had and checked out.  One of these finished out the set of faux-french doors between the inner crib and greenhouse, and the other would seperate the greenhouse from the outdoors.

Finally, the South side is starting to look like something.  You might also notice the coupla window, which was the passageway for the pigeon family.  It is now plywood backed and bird free.  It took getting a 2nd floor laid down to reach this window from the inside.

What’s next?  4 windows facing west over the main door, a finished staircase, proper windows on the South side with additional siding.  We did have some visitors over recently who seemed to love the progress.

The barn lives on!  I’ve also managed to figure out how we’ll start tackling the rest of the barn remains.  Our good friend Kevin Wilbeck, who owns Camp Coyote, did visit the barn carcass with the proper tools.  He dug out 5 sections of curved beams, maybe 5-6′ long to make a roof over a kiosk at his campground.  I’m thinking of doing something similar to shelter our main door.

Full size pics of the deck and farm HERE

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A few things around here got a little slack during the first half of the winter.  Finally, all these little projects are getting out of the way.  In celebration of the photo gallery getting fixed, I noticed that we never posted our last few pictures of progress from the fall.  Click HERE to see them.

For no real reason, I attacked the side of the corn crib with a circular saw, and hung up a pair of storm windows I had found in the barn.  I guess they are a little more solid then the slat wall, but having a view is real nice.  I used another window to cover the hole on the east side that had a piece of metal covering it.  The top windows were plugged with plywood to keep snow out this winter.  I’ve visited a few times, and things are staying nice and dry.

We did frame out the 3 door openings we wanted in the greenhouse.  While I was at it, I also planned and cut the framing for the big bank of windows on the west end of the 2nd floor.  Come spring, all these will be installed and we can look out at the bike path.  My last project was to figure out the stairs.  I got the first stringer cut, and 3 others traced.  The first one got hung so that we would know the height that the landing would be at.  Most people would have this planned out on paper first, but we changed the pitch of the stairs slightly after seeing the actual hole, and the center concrete floor did come out higher then we originally plan on paper.  We did end up saving a few steps.  The nice part is the fact that our staircase will be 4 feet wide.

Winter happenings….besides blizzards and ice storms?

-Mason and I did good at the Pinewood derby.  The cars were fast, but not quite fast enough.  Mason did take home the ‘Best Themed Car’ award.

-Bought a restaurant grade stainless steel set of pots and pans.  Oh, they are nice to cook with.  More of our home kitchen keeps upgrading.  I’m never buying consumer grade stuff again.
-My resume just got a little nicer looking.  I started working for StorageTek about 6.5 years ago.  They got bought by Sun Microsystems. This week it became official, that I now work for Oracle due to the last purchase.  I did get paid my Microsoft for a small project once. If I can add Apple and Google I think I would score some sort of Bingo or Yahtzee for listing all the biggest and best tech names out there.

-Greene Bean Coffee is still growing great.  Next is an upgrade to the license for ‘food plant’.  That will allow us to wholesale and let people re-sell the coffee for us.  I think I’ll start construction on that tomorrow.

-Reagan is taking Master Gardener classes.  Mason has marked everything he wants in the seed catalog for us to grow next year.

-RAGBRAI towns were just announced.  Short and flat.  442 miles, 14,500+ feet of climb.

-Finally saw Avatar 3D today.  Most amazing!

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Well, it was a white Christmas for sure.

In the past month, there was a statewide blizzard warning.  It left drifts from waist deep to neck deep all over town.  Luckily, just days before, I brought the tractor up from the farm and put the big snowblower on it it and parked in my garage.  Lifesaver.  During the first big storm, I went downtown at 11:00pm to clear off the first foot or so from the storm.  I figured getting more off now, meant easier going in the morning.  I found one of the sidewalks downtown almost bare.  Few wisps of snow.  The South side of the building had a knee deep drift running the entire sidewalk.  It took nearly an hour to clean this off.

The next morning, I saw a huge plow tailing at the end of the driveway but I could see tire tracks from last night in the middle of the driveway.  Nice….until I saw the back window and could not see the front of the car.  It had all drifted waist deep from the door to the car and to the garage.  I cleaned out the driveway and needed to take some coffee to People’s Bank, our downtown neighbor, customer, and bank.  Remember the knee deep snow I moved?  It was replaced by a drift that was neck deep on me.  The wind-swept side was a solid waist deep.

I refused to take the shovel out of the car and went back home.  It took nothing to swallow my pride and decided that it people drive their lawn tractor to the gas station in the Summer, I could surely drive a snowblower to where it was needed.  7 blocks up, and 2 over, it really was a quick drive.  There was a few intersections that I needed to turn the blower on to get past the piles of crud in fear of getting stuck.  Still, even with this power, I could push my way into a drift, hop off, then use the shovel to knock down the edges and try again.  It took a good 2.5 hours to clear this little area.

Fast forward to Christmas.  The Moon family came the weekend before to have Christmas and celebrate Mason’s birthday with us.  This was the first time in I don’t know how many years that we didn’t travel for once.  Instead of the usual camping experience in our house, they rented the hotel from Trailside Lodging and loved it.  We also met them for a great gravy covered breakfast from the Uptown Cafe.  We had a great time, and a nice low-key Christmas.

Nearly a week later, the forecast had another ‘epic’ storm on the way.  The predictions changed daily, but it sounded icy and deep.  I decided to fire up the generator, get fresh gas and find the cord.  I had plans for wiring in the furnace, I still should have gotten the connection ready.  Luckily, the power never went out.

During the first few flurries, I kept up with the driveway and sidewalk.  On Christmas morning, there was at least 8″ plus drifts.  I got our driveway done quickly, helped my dad clear his then went downtown in fear of the sidewalk again.  At least, the drift was narrow, but still about chest deep.  Most of the sidewalk was quite low, as in the max height of the snowblower.  I got on the sidewalk, and had to start at the Uptown’s door in order to reach my spot.  I got quite a good path going before I hit the drift.  Had to hop off once and knock it down.  After that, I was able to get through it and reach the corner.  From there, I was able to do laps up the sidewalk, even clearing the path past Uptown more.  During this, Wayne had shown up with his snowblower as well.  I had moved around the corner to avoid blowing snow then found him helping clear the last of my sidewalk in appreciation.  I had the same issue on the East side, I had to work my way down the sidewalk, past a pair of businesses from the curb cut to get into my area again.  Luckily, about an inch more fell during the rest of the day.

It is deep, the farm is at a standstill.  I did recently burn a large amount of barn out in the cold, the day before the first snow came.  Bonfires do keep the chill off.  Things are buttoned up and stored for winter.  Once spring and warmth returns, we’ll be back at it.  The next wave of crib work will make sure huge and noticeable improvements.

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Stairs!  This is excitement.  We have about half of the 2nd floor subfloor down, but we have been using a ladder to get up and down.

It took a while, about 3 days of looking, thinking, and scratching to finally figure it out.  I knew how to cut each step into the stringer, but failed to see how to form the top and bottom.  Finally I got it and drew out a template.  Swiped it both sides with a circular saw, then used a chisel to get those final bits out of the corners.  I realized the next morning when I went back to fit it, that I left the bottom stair too thick.  It was the full 7.5″ like every other stair.  I didn’t subtract the extra height of the first stringer.  Zipp, took a little extra off.

These were 16′ boards.  Even with that much, we knew they would not span from the 2nd floor of the crib down to ground level.  The plans called for a platform in the corner.  We never quite planed for the exact height of this platform, or how many stairs would come out the other side.  The results, 7′2″ clearance from the overhang to the closest stair, good.  The platform would be about 2′ off the ground.  That should give us 3 good stairs that will go over the existing sill plate for the main bin supports.  This could not have fit more perfect.

Other good news.  There is a solid wall between the greenhouse and ‘house’ portions.  It has 1 door panel, but not the other, working, part of the double door yet.  For giggles, there are two large storm windows on the exterior greenhouse wall.  It cuts down a little wind/rain possibility, but having a window does so much for the feel.  I also have the framing ready for a bank of 4 very large windows to go across the West end of the crib, overlooking the farm.  However, due to the small amounts of heat, light, and available days I’ve decided to let this sit as-is until spring until we cut the holes out.

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