When I met my husband almost nine years ago, he expressed his dream was to have a piece of land, some livestock and retire there. He's the fourth generation to build his own house, which has only added to the whole experience. It's been a year since we closed on our little piece of heaven and it's been a huge turn of events to be living life here.
Last month was all about water! Just when you think it couldn't get dryer out, it has. We are officially in a very bad drought and I'm going to share some photos from last year then compare them to this year. It's been an eye opening experience for me, we've never been more aware of how vital water is for our land.
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| One of my favourite months last year was June, we came out to the land and saw fields of gold - millions of coreopsis flowers and it was beautiful. We had a few weeks of seeing a handful of them this year. It's been a tough over the last few months with water set backs, but I was looking forward to seeing wildflowers all over our place and it just didn't happen this year. |
Our pond this year - down almost 7 ft.
Our large pond last year - about an acre when full.
June 2011
June 2010
Who knew how much goes into putting a septic system, apparently not this gal........
Robert, our daughter's super hero disguised as an aerospace engineer, took a weeks vacation to do the following...
We hit rock 2 1/2 feet down
He had to dig a hole big enough for this tank. He spent three days digging, jackhammering into the late hours eleven tons of sandstone.
Eleven tons of sandstone!
Some fun things.....the tractor was fixed and running.
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| scraping the dirt back into the 3,000 feet of trenching of water piping |
Our girls are growing up - the six hens (actually I think we have another rooster) and the four ducks are happily free ranging during the day and well trained to go back to their run/coop in the evening.
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| duck pond fun! |
We started building the house last October. I believe this photo was taken sometime at the end of November.
Here's the same space, but we have DRYWALL!
Robert started putting up the drywall this weekend and it changed the whole feeling inside the house. We have had some hard times building this house ourselves. Although the most rewarding experience, it's also been very overwhelming at times. It has taught us so many things about ourselves and how well we can function as a team, because it takes the whole family to live this dream of ours.
Here's a Darlin' quote... "Bud, we don't have lights where we need them." - made sense when I said it, both of us just laughed.
We have water in the house and a flushing toilet!!!!!!!
Our clawfoot tub that we returned, because it came in 'bisque'.....it is being reordered in white. It's going to look great in the bathroom.
to be continued........
