Farming hard.

The whole farm.  It looks very nice from the air.

It is going to be a long three days.  I have Jason coming for three days to help me out and get some progress on the barn.  There is always more to do no matter how much gets done.  The important part is to work on the critical issues.  Annmarie usually keeps me on track as I get easily distracted.  Yesterday, Jason and I got the wooden oak trim in place on the kitchen counter faces.  I need to cover the nail holes and it will be ready for primer then a fancy epoxy/paint treatment to make it look like some form of natural rock.  It was cheap and it is supposed to be hardy.  We wanted a quick change from the bright orange veneer that is currently our countertops.  This winter I will tile the backsplash and kitchen window. 

Barn floor getting repaired.

We then moved on to the barn floor.  It had a huge buckle near the front and needed to be torn up and reapplied.  It got very wet from the water running off the roof down into the barn and I didn't finish screwing the floor down last year.  It took us about four hours to fix it and I ended up burning up another Makita impact hammer.  This is the second one in two years that has literally burned up.  They get so hot you cannot touch them and smoke comes out of them.  Well I was smart and bought Home Depot's 2 year guarantee!  So after three phone calls I learn that Makita has a three year guarantee and Home Depot doesn't cover until year four and five, plus you have to have the original receipt.  I had the receipt because of taxes for the farm and finally get a hold of Makita.  I have to send the impact hammer to a repair shop in Pasco.  It should only "take a couple of weeks" per the man on the phone.  I went and bought another Makita impact hammer from Home Depot, no home depot guarantee, and will send my one year old broken one out for repair.  I suspect I may get the new one to last through this year.  As soon as my old one is repaired I am using it nonstop.  I have four more years of use time in it and I am going to get every last one. 


Today, Jason, my nephew Gannon and a friend came over so we could pickup hay from the field and load it into the barn. First thing we did was to stand up the old grain mixer in the barn.  It took all four of us.  Last year we tried it with three people and could not stand it up.  It takes up a lot less space upright. It took us 4.5 hours to move seven ton of hay and get it all stacked neatly in the barn.  We ended up having to stack it five bales high to get it all to fit.  Zeke go to catch some mice when we took last years hay out of the old lamb shed and moved it into the main barn.  He likes to catch and kill them, he is not into eating them.  The teenagers left after lunch and we went back out to do more work. 

It was 93 degrees outside so I made an executive decision to not get up on the roof.  We will hit that first thing in the morning tomorrow.  Instead we worked on adding a second layer to the barn siding and getting the barn corner fixed so we could attach the gate to the side of the barn and close off the nursery area.  I still need to go down and fix the creek crossing as the sheep can just go right under the fence at the creek.  We had some issues with the yellow jackets and Jason got stung on the cheek.  I ended up getting stung on the arm also.  They were not happy with us banging and cutting stuff on the outside of the barn.  I of course do not have any hornet spray at the house.  The gate was pretty heavy after we installed it and the far side kept sagging so we had to find a bracket to attach to the barn so we could then attach a cable to the gate, therefore not changing the cable length when the gate was opened and closed.  We had to dig through the old scrap metal pile and ended up using an old heavy discarded hinge that we bent using the vice and a large chunk of metal.  The gate works great now and just needs a securing latch.  We decided to quit a little early as both of us were very tired.