This is unfortunately not an improvement from my last attempt. The design is barely visible due to my poor choice of facing bark. Still, I’m trying to get better at this every year.
Done with the Roofers
So far in building, I’ve been happy to contract out roofing to otherwise more capable people with better tools. It’s always notoriously difficult to get contractors to show up, roofers even more. And I get it, no one wants to do their work and so they have even more leverage than most contractors. They don’t care what your building schedule looks like, they only care to have work lined up on their own schedule and will say anything to keep it that way. Their incentive is to keep you waiting so you’re available for them when they have a gap. This year I had it waiting for them and getting strung along, I couldn’t afford it any longer with Winter right around the corner so I went ahead with my usual “screw it, I’ll just do it myself”.
All in all it’s not very difficult but there are a few tricks to pick up, and it is definitely physically hard and fairly dangerous.
I was quoted $2800 for this roof, it ended up costing $1100 and I spent an extra $200 on metal cutting tool I didn’t have, and $250 on climbing gear to be safer and because I want to climb trees for fun. It also “cost” me 2 and a half days of work. I can’t say I’m sad I had to do it myself for the savings and tools I got. The real silver lining though, is that I’ll never have to call a roofer ever again. I now possess the knowledge and the tools. Now that, is a freeing feeling :).
After this, I finally got to proceed with the siding which was long overdue. My dad who is the worst handyman I know (I learned all my swear words watching him with a hammer), came out and helped. I was very apprehensive going in, one of the unspoken worries of homesteading is when people of little manual ability decide they too want to have a homesteading experience and offer their help. He ended up doing really great and helped a lot. Agnes stained a whole bunch of boards, both saved me a lot of time in one day.
I laid shiplap diagonally for strength, we get high winds and this shed has 12′ walls to catch them with. I was ok compromising aesthetics for strength. It turns out it looks really good. We’re very pleased with the result.
I put the roof on right before a big rain, and I sided 1 wall right before a big wind. Right on time, not waiting for the roofers was the right decision, I could have been in trouble if I had: more water ruining the frame, the wind catching in the big sail that is the roof without any structural strength against shearing.
Previously I could hear the building move on little wind gusts, with only 1 wall sided with diagonal boards though, I did not hear a peep during strong gusts. Diagonal is the way :).
I’ll be pushing hard in the next few week ends to close it all up. There is a lot of work left and it really needs to be done before the snow invites itself to Vermont.
Sometimes when I’m perched 20ft up a roof
it hits me that every layer from the ground up to my feet was built by me. And then I wonder how high I could go if I just kept building.
Hard Cider
Rebel without a cause, but with a bin full of apples
Hisse et oh
Using refined cane sugar is not an option
And now we wait
How I build
Winter on a computer, Summer on a ladder.
There it is, the final outline
I mentioned before the 2 things I enjoy most when building are discovering newly framed windows views, and seeing the outline of a building in the land.
I’ve been taking it at a reasonable pace building this sugarhouse, 4 hours here and there. It’s nice to not build until exhaustion. In some ways I’m slowing down from the frenetic pace of the past few years. I can’t keep working with a barbecue going and 2 kids jumping on the trampoline, signs of how nice life is becoming on our land. Let the good times roll.
Compromise
We acquired a gas powered log splitter. It’s not something that creeped up on us overtime, we never once considered it. In fact we helped a neighbor use one a while back and it very much turned us off. The work was noisy and repetitive.
Then a monstrous maple tree showed up, and even though I bucked it up in short logs to make maul splitting easier, the amount of work it took to get even a crack in it was just too much. We need wood now, and we occasionally get impossible knotted logs, it would be nice to be able to produce larger quantities of wood faster given our increase use with sugaring, and extended stove season much beyond cold weather for cooking and water. All of a sudden it simply made sense, but the decision was hard and I sincerely hope it won’t affect our family maul swinging tradition much.
After using it once, it is indeed nice to see super tough logs pop open with no effort, but I took no satisfaction in the work and this was reassuring in a way.
Sugarhouse Construction Push
All the rafters are done, tomorrow I’ll go after the cupola and do as much blocking as I can.
Vapor hole
Found a Monarch chrysalis, I’ll have to keep an eye on it in the next few days
Another culvert
Our land is really starting to look up this year. We’re steadily pursuing various improvement projects as we expand the range of our management.
Rock harvest
He’s really good at backhoeing, and he absolutely loves it.
We’ll need a rain or 2 before final adjustments
Monstrous Maple
A great gift from our neighbors, they had it felled by professionals as it was menacing their house. All I had to to was show up and buck it up, which still took a full day.Ā Several limbs were the same size of the full trees I usually go after. I had to move the main trunk logs with the tractor, splitting them will be a whole other matter.
Without Much Fanfare
A sugarhouse / tool shed / tractor garage / soap making shop, is being born. We’ve had many projects lacking dry space. I’m barely documenting anything, I also have to post some pictures of how incredible the garden is this year. This has all become less than extraordinary: growing awesome gardens, putting together buildings is simply what we do now. A sign of the completeness of the transformation we undertook 8 years ago. In a lot of ways we feel like we don’t need to achieve anything anymore while looking ahead to several large projects for the coming years. Maybe all we had to achieve was making this who we are, everything else follows naturally without fuss.
3 pillars which will be buried to support the lean-to part of the building
Site prep day, truck got stuck
Concrete pouring day, I’ll skip the stresses of dealing with contractors
12′ walls are no joke
He can help more and more but it’s still hard to have him around the site for all the dangers
Not the most conventional framing method but the computer model says it’ll work and I’ve grown accustomed to not questioning what the computer says. I braced the building because there won’t be shearing rated sheathing on the walls and we do get high winds. The roof line will be broken by a sizeable cupola. 20′ rafters also are no joke.
Starting to look good š 
I thought that was it for beekeeping
at least for the next few years, until we could shield the hives better during the long winters. We were going to put things on hold until we had a shed or a greenhouse to move hives in. I have to say beekeeping as fascinating as it was is extremely disappointing especially when compared to doing maple syrup. The way we keep bees in the West seems to be full of human dependence. Fumigating with chemicals, feeding refined sugar, neither of which is exactly local or sustainable.
Through the past couple of years I’ve wondered if some bugs would find residence in the hives which have been sitting empty outside.
Today as Nicole & the kids were in the yard, they had the privilege to witness a swarm of bees descend on one of the hives. A swarm sitting in a tree is impressive as it is, a swarm in motion is really something. Everything was buzzing around everywhere around the house.
It’s really quite a spectacle and we feel like we’ve just received a gift from Nature. Or gift from a beekeeping neighbor š hard to tell.
It’s kind of mind blowing to think of a swarm having a several miles radius to look for a new house, to pick our land, and specifically our hive. It really gets you thinking about the how smart the bees really are. They sent scouts everywhere, found an obviously good house (literally built for them), and somehow it won the popular vote through frenetic dancing. How amazing is this? Pretty fucking amazing if you ask me.
So here we are, bees in our hive, it’s a real pleasure to go see them. They’re already super busy coming in and out of the hive incessantly. We’ll give them a couple of days to acclimate, and we’ll see what we do next.
Brooding Chicken
We have a brooder on our hands, she’s always resting on the eggs and super defensive. She barely gets out to feed. I’ve never seen a chicken display such behaviors, she makes herself bigger as you get closer and makes aggressive noises.
It also looks like her big mama attitude has triggered other chickens in seeking comfort under her feathers.
Cheating the Laws of the Universe – Le Bruit du Frigo
That’s it, after 4 years of slowly learning and ramping up our solar production, we figured out enough to run a fridge. In truth we’ve had capacity for a while now, but I had things wired sub-optimally in a way that prevented us from running anything requiring surge power (power tools, condensers). Silly me for wiring our load to the “load” port on the charge controller, this port is apparently only intended for small loads. It always blows my mind how incredibly disparate information is about solar installs online. There’s so much fuzziness, various understandings, theories, concepts which apply, or not, no one really knows. Most posts are a person asking some random simple question followed by 50 answers going deep in the weeds on some highly specific aspect, unrelated to the question, and that no one but its writer gives a crap about. In one of these random threads someone alluded to this fact, that the load port on the charge controller isn’t really meant for anything surging. Sure enough, after wiring the inverter straight to the batteries, I can power fridges, ACs and power tools. It’s a very nice step up.
Now of course because nothing is ever simple I had other issues with our inverter so I just got another nice one which is really the cat’s meow.Ā We now have a full backup solar system, extra panels, batteries, charge controllers and inverter. They just all suck a little more š but I’m sure they’ll be useful somewhere some time.
After 4 years of battling with various shitty refrigeration arrangements.
I added 2 batteries, the fridge is a power hog.
Oh and I used the opportunity to revamp the solar monitoring page, mainly I separated the 12VDC circuit from the 110VAC one and recalibrated the sensors.
We’ve been catching up on all the ice cream we missed on (note that we ate plenty in the past 4 years, just not as much as we would like, which is too much) 
Now, having a fridge is really really nice. I joke that if I had remembered beer was so fresh in it, I would have solared us up enough to power one upon arrival. The reality is that I had to learn how things work and make plenty of mistakes along the way, and that the solar project competes for time against all the other projects.
We did question the need for a fridge for years, we were hoping to change our eating habits to not need one. The truth is that we didn’t (cheese is just too good), and that our eating habits “degraded” immediately after getting one. The fridge is always full and holds a lot of less healthy food we did with less of only a few weeks ago.
Our main concern however, and this may come as a surprise, is the noise that a fridge makes. Our house used to be extremely quiet, it’s something we noted when we moved in, just how eerily quiet the house was. Neither of us had experienced a house this quiet, and it’s something we appreciated. I thought the fridge noise would get on my nerves, but in reality I find it soothing because it makes me think about all the good stuff in there that’s being kept nice and fresh. Did I mention fresh beer is yummy? It looks like 4 years of not having a fridge made me appreciate how nice they are.
Now the coolest thing about this whole deal, is how we’re turning Sun heat into cold. It feels like cheating, and it’s elating. The hotter it gets, the more cold we can generate. How does that even make sense? I’m sure I can understand it but I choose not to, it’s just too good left as universe breaking supernatural magic.
It’s tractor time
I finally got the tractor to where it could work on the monstrous wood chip pile, so much fun!
I dropped the biggest tree I ever cut
then I dropped the biggest tree I ever cut. It’s been a good record breaking day, I took down 6 giant pines and several others which were all within striking distance of where we’re getting ready to build a sugar house.
the final boss today: one big fucking Christmas tree
I was apprehensive at first, I had never cut anything this large. Everything went well except on the smaller trees when I was rushing a little more and 2 didn’t go where they were supposed to. All the big ones did, experience is really nice, not that it removes all surprises. A few years ago I would have been shaking approaching anything half this size with a chainsaw.
No more plastic wedges for me
No one was allowed anywhere near the site of the treepocalypse for several hours, the house shook several times. When the carnage was over, Robin got to tame a sea of green to build Fort Awesome.
Spring hit like a ton of bricks
And it’s been a wet one.
So wet I can’t get the tractor anywhere it could be useful, I Haven’t been able to make it past this mess.
So wet ducks decided to come live with us. Never seen ducks on the land before.
IĀ can’t scoop the wood chips with the tractor so it’s all shovel & elbow grease.
I found some snow digging deep in the wood chip pile, I threw a snowball at Robin and his friend thinking I was so smart to throw snowballs in May.
Then this happened 
But it didn’t last. We are adding to the orchard as we do every year. More importantly we replaced the blueberries that didn’t take, and moved the raspberry which never did well. Not everything we put in the ground thrives 
I doubled the electric fence to maximize our chances of zapping pests.
We build a movable chicken coop, and tidied up their fence, of course they quickly found their way out.
Everything is in full swing, cleanups, the garden, the wood pile. Time is sparse and I have little time to document it all, or interest to do so as after 4 years, this is has all become less extraordinary in the best way possible.
Done for the season
We pulled the plug on the sugaring operation after a small but satisfying season.
We boiled for 4 days and made 5.25 gallons. Enough for our needs and some padding.
Sap started flowing a full month later than what we’re used to. For a moment we were worried the season wouldn’t even happen in the first place.
As always, early flow is clearer
This is the last year we are boiling outside. This Summer we will be building a proper Sugar House. I suspect our production will drastically increase once we don’t need to spend days outside.
A Sugar House will also make things easier logistically, we will be able to let half boiled sap sit a night not worrying about bears, we will be able to can on the spot, raise the tank to gravity feed into the evaporator.
A Sugar House will prevent the much dreaded nightly walk carrying 5 gallons of steaming hot almost syrup back home through the mud, snow and ice. Nicole took a picture to celebrate my last such walk.
Boil baby boil
The snow is still way too deep for the ATV, so this is a sled year.
30 gallons of sap is almost impossible to pull by hand on anything but snow, so the ATV takes over on the plowed paths.
Mound of snow = easy gravity transfer
Vermont can use a little more humidity.
The end of 2 days boiling, pulling at night right before it’s at syrup density. We filter at every transfer.
Finishing inside on the stove, this allows for finer control of the evaporation and the mason jars are right there for when it’s ready.