Insulation and Driveway (6/11/2016)

We headed up Friday after work, arriving roughly around 8pm.  Just enough time to unpack and start a nice fire for the evening.

Friday night was crazy, weather wise.  When we sat by the fire, there was some massive lighting East near Flagstaff.  Well, that crazy lightening/thunderstorm finally made it our way during the night.  It was very windy and raining really hard, and our loft has this one roofing panel that would flap horribly in any wind was going like mad.  So, our first task Saturday morning was to remove that damn roof panel and since our ‘noisemaker’.  Task completed!  Since in the wind…whew.

We then wanted to remove some of the loft insulation and use it in our second container.  We found last weekend that with the summer here that new container gets ridiculously hot first thing the morning as a bare wall faces East.  That would cause our refrigerator to work harder than it should.  While Sheralee took the insulation down, I used our remaining 2×4’s to frame in that wall.

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We added insulation where we could, and Sunday morning you could immediately tell it is going to make a huge difference.  So awesome!  Nice and cool in the morning now.  One funny thing was that when I took the tarp off of our generator, to use our miter saw, there were some mice young’n using the generator/tarp as a home.
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I helped relocate them and then on to the framing.

Another long term task we are working on now is moving our driveway, to help accommodate future pasture land.  Our current/old drive wound through the Northern part of our driveway, trying to avoid trees/rocks.  In the future that will all be part of 4 acres pasture land.  So, we needed a new driveway that would run not through that pasture area, but rather along side it.  We started driving it a couple weeks ago, but we would dodge around trees that need to be cleared out.  Sheralee and I had marked out our drive way, and marked groups of trees that need to be cleared.

I started clearing some trees this past weekend.  I don’t think I got a picture of this first tree, in it’s full state, but I did end up hacking it up and then finally got at the trunk.
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What I would do is dig around the base to allow the chainsaw to cut the trunk below the ground level.  Here it is after I have cut it away and smoothed out the ground.
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You can see the tree pieces beyond this area, using it to border our Eastern edge.  More to come on that.  On Sunday we continued clearing more trees that are along our new driveway path.

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This was a great start.  It was a small clump of four smaller trees.  One thing I learned quickly, make sure your chainsaw patch is clear of rocks. ha.  In cutting one of the trunks my chain tried to cut through a rock.  The result?  No more cutting with that chain.  So, I swapped out the chain and we moved on in our progress.

We also cut through another area, without removing any of the tree trunks, but we have enough room to get through.  We are definitely getting there, but I don’t think we will be completely clear until we do a large equipment rental over a long weekend.

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We are on our way to a straighter, better, driveway.  Hard work, but rewarding for sure.  This weekend will be another 100 degree weekend…thankfully that outdoor shower is running great!