July Projects

July is a busy busy month around here. There's always so much to do in the summer and I swear July is the shortest month ever. Last weekend we were able to get our usual 250 hay bales put up in the shop which is a pretty big project. It always has to be done on the hottest possible day of the year, this year was no exception. But, that wonderful heat acts as an excellent oven to cure the freshly cut grass....which in turn makes some lovely hay. I got to drive the trucks with trailers this year through the field as the bales were loaded. Definitely the easiest of the hay field jobs. Perhaps it's my lack of muscles that earns me that job, I'm ok with that. It's nice to have a shop full of hay again for another year of feeding hungry animals.

We always leave a truck sized square and pile up the hay around it so I can park my old truck inside. There are little paths leading back to the chicken house too.

The shop started leaking a couple years ago. It started in the sky light and has progressed since. Last fall I got up on the roof and sealed the sky light with a paint on sealer. It seemed to do the trick all winter but after our torrential downpours this spring it's back to dripping. Then the grade around the shop entrance changed and the shop started flooding after a big rain storm. It would ruin the bottom hay bales (wet and moldy hay isn't something you want to feed animals). So last weekend Sean got the old John Deere garden tractor up and running and dug down the dirt and gravel at the entrance to keep the rain from flowing in. It seemed to work, after a rain yesterday the shop stayed dry. Woo hoo!

 Sean started pulling down rotten siding on the front of the house a couple of weeks ago. The rotten siding is a never ending project. We've tackled one side every couple of years and are on our third side now. This, of course, was Sean favorite side. I'm being sarcastic. In the past we've just rented scaffolding from the local rental store and that's worked fine for the most part but we hate just giving them money when we know we'll just have to rent it again when we reside the next part of the house. So we bit the bullet and bought some scaffolding. We figure after we've rented it for three months we could have just bought it, it's a no brainer.

We ordered some from an online company and it was scheduled to be delivered by a trucking company yesterday. I assumed they would call before coming out so I went about my day waiting for a phone call. When nobody had called by 2 the kids and I decided to go run some errands. We are pulling out of the driveway and I look down the road to see a giant semi truck stopped three houses down. Wondering if it was our delivery guy, we drove down to investigate. Sure enough it's a full seize semi truck, stuck in the mud (we got a lot of rain yesterday morning) with our scaffolding in the back. He was waiting for someone to come pull him out. I wish he would have called and I could have told him how bad our roads are. Oh well. So I drove home and hopped in the truck, backed it up to the rear of the semi and we unloaded the scaffolding directly into the back of my truck.

 I asked the semi driver who do you call to pull out a giant semi truck stuck in the mud? He said "an even bigger semi truck". So when I got home, the kids and I, went up to the top of the driveway to watch as he was drug out of the mud. We all found it quite entertaining.

The roads don't look bad, but think of it as a coating of sand on top of pure mud. Luckily they dry out fast. That was our fun week.