Let's be Real

I started this blog in November with the intention of writing our homesteading story in chronological order over the winter. That clearly didn't happen and I know why. That was a VERY tedious and daunting task. I want this to be a fun project that I don't avoid. So, I'm going to jump forward in time to the present day. I know there will be moments when I slip into a time machine and explain previous systems we had, but hopefully that won't be too jarring. I want to share present day stories that are inspiring us and that will keep me motivated to post on a more regular basis. 

With that being said, let me get you up to speed...

We rented land on our friend's property for three years until we found a piece of land a few miles up the road that we fell in love with and could afford. It was an old homestead site on a private road with 67 acres of forest. We purchased the property in the fall of 2017, and started building in the spring of 2018. 

We hit the ground running in 2018 and built a stone foundation in the original homesteading house site by excavating the stones and placing them in a circle that the yurt could sit on. We worked alongside a good friend of ours who is a stone mason and a couple of local carpenters. We were still working our jobs while visiting the land whenever we had a spare moment to haul more stones or mix mortar. It was a grueling summer of endless work, but by September we had a foundation and were able to erect our yurt and move inside!

Here are pictures showing the steps we took to build our foundation and move our home to our land in 2018...

Overlooking a meadow on the new property.

We started clearing the homestead site with handsaws in the winter of 2017-2018. That overgrown thicket behind me is where the original house stood.

 

We started hand harvesting some of our firewood before there was much we could do to move the clearing of the house site along. This is Tracker hauling a piece of maple out of the woods down to our woodpile. 

 

The beginnings of our hand-harvested firewood for our first winter on the land.

Once we cleared the brush from the house site, we discovered it was filled with junk. We're talking bed springs, tires, scrap metal, etc.

 

We cleaned out the junk and were left with the original house footprint, also known as a muddy hole.

Looking spic and span! :)

 

We drained out the water from the house site, poured in gravel and our friend who's a talented stone mason got to work placing the stones of our foundation.

I should briefly mention that while the foundation was being built, we were also disassembling the yurt and putting it into a storage container on our land.

Boom! That's a foundation complete with four windows for ventilation and enough head room to walk around in without stooping.

That's the framing for the flooring of our yurt sitting on top of the stone foundation. We placed the insulated sips panels that we had used at the previous site on top of the framing and the finished flooring went on top of the panels.

Our family from Louisiana saved the day by helping us erect the yurt! They were here for an entire week working long days while we all slept in a nearby hotel.

We installed a new wood stove since we would be using firewood harvested from our land rather than pellets like we had before. We are reassembling the full sized loft in this photo.

Meanwhile, Meg and her brother moved our power shed to the land and mounted our solar panels onto the roof.

Fully assembled yurt and power shed by September 2018!