House Update

With much of the week being rainy and wet, we can't expect much construction progress to be made on the house. However, we would like to share what little progress was made since the last posting.

The posts have been set on the front porch! The deck rails are complete on the deck, lacking only the steps leading down. And finally, the screen porch on the far left of the house is finished being frame and waiting on screen.

The House!!

Chad has wanted to blog about our new home for quite some time but cannot seem to fit it into his busy schedule! So, I guess I will be the one to timeline our journey from 1979 Ranch Style to 2008 Craftsman! As most of you know, when we purchased our new farm there was an existing house on the property. We remodeled a few rooms in preparation to move in. Unfortunately however, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, we never got the chance. The March tornado destroyed the home almost completely and we were forced to clean up and start over.


Here is a picture of the house we purchased on February 29,2008.

Here is the same house on March 15, 2008. Words can never describe the heartbreak and pure shock we felt when we arrived at the scene. Even though we only owned it 2 weeks and never spent a night there, we do have some good memories in this house. We spent many hours together there painting and cleaning and ripping out floors and tearing off wallpaper and moving cabinets. Below is one my most treasured photos of our times in house as I will always remember them.

Yeah, losing the house and all the visions we had for it and for us living there was difficult! More difficult though was realizing the magnitude of devastation the tornado placed on our farm. I dare say the farm will ever look as it did. Only two of the Live Oak trees we loved so dearly remain.

On a positive note, there are some things about the old house I am thankful that I do not have to contend with any longer. One would be the 1970's bright blue bathroom! I'm talking about sink, shower, toilet, countertop, the works! Of course, the bathroom would have been easier to replace than the house, that's not the way it had to be! So, after much anticipation, debris removal, and clean up, we finally begin work on our new house!

Here is a pic of Chad in our new basement! As you may notice, we have a safe room! :)

Here's Chad sitting in our new living room thinking it all over! Don't you just love the view!

This picture is taken from the front right corner of the house. The cantilever area will one day be the breakfast nook! I can't even remember the house looking like this! Wow, it has come a long way!

As you may be aware, the house is built on a passive solar design. This type of design allows for lots of windows and wide overhangs as you can see we used. We love the old craftsman style homes. Chad drew out the basic floor plan on graph paper and then gave it to one of our milk customers to do our official house plans. Everything ended up perfect even down to the siding. We just cannot wait to call this place home!

We love the shed dormer and detailed siding. Plus you may be able to see the deck that is being built along the back side of the house. The back porch,which includes an outdoor fireplace, will extend around to the deck so that we will have plenty of outdoor living space! This is perfect since the outdoors is our favorite place to be!

Progress at the Farm!

Hello Everyone! I apologize for the delay in our posting! I know everyone is aware of what all has been going on around here but I wanted to apologize anyway! We are so excited about all of our progress and can't wait to share it with yall but sometimes it is difficult to find the time to blog. I am trying to do better though. In this pic Chad is checking out the preliminary plumbing done to future site of our egg processing barn. Of course all of the plumbing is done to perfection! We have an excellent plumber! But we wouldn't expect anything less from a customer and we do have the BEST customers!

Another picture of our future egg processing facility on our farm. The structure began as a simple pole barn and as you can see, is being drasticly transformed. We decided to only enclose the front half of the barn, leaving the backside open for parking equipment, the delivery truck and storage. Here Maureen (my momma) and Chad admire the progress of the day!

This picture is looking at the new barn from the back porch of our new home! How nice it will be to one day sit out here and enjoy watching our animals and overlook the farm. We can't wait to live here! I know what you are thinking though and YES I want to post pics of the house and it's progress but Chad is wanting to do that post. He wants to do before and after pics! I'll try to light a fire under him to get that going so yall can see our future home! These are all of the pics of the barn I have for now but I am headed to the farm now. I will take some more pics when I get there and add them to this post! I can't wait to see what was done today!

LOOK, its our new barn!

We are so ecstatic to have had a new barn built on our farm last week! As you can tell, the old barn sustained a good bit of storm damage! This new barn is the future home of our office, egg processing room, coolers, and small apartment for a future intern or employee. The first people to occupy the apartment however will be Chad & myself during the building of our home! We can't wait! The basic structure of the barn is complete and next we will begin on the plumbing and framing for the internal structures. Our goal is to have the barn complete in a month and a half.

We thought this picture was cool and wanted to include it on the blog. The birds heard something flying above and their natural instincts set in, compelling them to run for cover or be eaten alive! We thought it was so interesting the way they made their mass exodus from the foraging grounds.

Sunday, after the day's work was complete, Chad walked around the hen house to make sure everything looked secure and in good shape. I took this picture of him in the fence with the hens!

Lastly, I am posting a picture of the entire hen house from the service road at the farm. As you can see, there are doors aligning the sides of the house. The doors are opened and the hens have free range and access to the lush green grass around the house. The hen's do have access to a good bit of forage now, but we plan to order more netting (tomorrow!) to make this area even bigger. This will give the chicks more access to grass and insects thus producing darker yolks which are much richer and healthier for you!

My, it has been so long!

Sorry to keep everyone in such suspense but ever since we got the chicks in we haven't had a minute to stop! Well since our last blog, our hen house is up and running. Still not at 100% yet but much closer than before. This is a pic from the day we received the chicks. The top for the hen house we ordered was not in yet so a makeshift top was constructed from old hay tarps. We thank Chad's dad and brother for their help on this!

Later that same day.......the chickens arrive.......and we begin to wonder........WHAT HAVE WE DONE???

We dealt with the consequences of being ill prepared for several weeks. The feeders were up but the water had to be carried from the front of the barn to each individual bucket many times a day. The chickens were still pretty young so egg production wasn't much of a concern yet. We only averaged about 50 eggs per day out of the 2,000 birds. Sometimes we think of that as the good ole days! At this point, we had just gotten the birds so we hadn't opened the doors to let them forage yet. After several days of acclimating themselves, we began opening the doors and leaving them open for the chickens to forage. Of course with the heat, they favored early morning and late evening when the sun and the temperatures weren't so hot.

But now look at those happy hens! With our top now in and on the hen house, the watering supplied automatically and the solar electric fence keeping the predators at bay, the hens are free to roam in and out of the house as they please! As you can tell the doors along the bottom of the house not only allow for ventilation but also allow the hens access to fresh green grass anytime they like! We love our hen house and our hens!

And here we are as the proud parents! EXHAUSTED but proud! Our production is up tremendously and we are working on a barn for cleaning and cooling the eggs on site. We currently process at Chad's parents farm about 5 miles away. What a relief it will be to have our own barn on site. For that matter, it will be wonderful to just have our house on site again too! I will include a few more pics before I head to church. As many of you know, we were expecting but lost our precious baby a few weeks back. Some close friends from Albany, GA came up to spend some much needed time with us during this difficult time. These are some pics from their weekend here! We love you Matt & Margo!

Featherwise's First Post!

In an attempt to catch everyone up on our progress at the farm, we decided to display a pictorial history of our farms journey. Of course this journey is no where near complete. In fact, sometimes I do not even feel sure we know where we are going but nonetheless we are having an awesome time trying to figure it all out! We hope you enjoy what you see and thanks for looking!


This is the future site of our chicken house which will soon be up and running! This structure will intermittently house 2000 hens. Of course the hens will be able to range during the day and only be closed in the house at night for protection from predators.





HEN HOUSE FOUNDATION:

Since we want the hen house to be elevated somewhat, we moved dirt in to build the pad. (At least something good did come out of the tornado, we used the dirt dug up from the new basement location)

BREAK TIME! Chad resting after hauling many loads to the hen house.

After much anticipation, we finally begin to see real progress! We put both the end structures up first, then continued placing the posts in the ground!


Chad driving the last ground post! Chad is definitely thankful this is the last post! This 95 degree afternoon is definitely not the ideal time for manual labor!


FRAMING: Everyone is working hard to get the frame up! The women were working too just behind the scenes as usual!

FINALLY!! With the backbone and sideboards attached, we are closer than ever to having this hen house complete! We can't wait!