We hired a contractor to come out and rebuild the front and side porches, since both were riddled with wood-rot and falling apart under our feet. He also fixed some soffiting above the porch and some rotting wood siding on the house. We hired a local guy because we want our money to stay here in the community, but promptly started to second guess ourselves when we read in the paper that his son and one of the guys he had helping him were just arrested for distributing dozens of pounds of Methamphetimine. I asked him never to bring that other guy around again, and for the rest of the job he brought a lady-friend of his to help. As you can see in the above and below pictures, it ended up turning out alright. He was on time every morning and showed up every day until the job was done, which is more than I can say for the contractors we hired in Denver.
I’m still a little upset at myself for even having to hire someone to do this stuff. Isn’t our desire to homestead supposed to involve a strict DIY mentality? A lot of people buy land and camp on it in a trailer or yurt until they build their entire homes with their very own hands. And I can’t even build a little side porch? Our next door neighbor used to be a shop class teacher and he is working on a few projects this summer around his place. I’m hoping he’ll let me “help” him so I can learn a few things. I enjoy my work in marketing and it pays well, but I am SICK of not knowing how to fix and build my own stuff. This ineptitude simply has to stop.
That being said, it wasn’t exactly like we sat on our rear-ends all weekend. For now at least – I figure it’s good to leave the skilled jobs to the professionals (for lack of a better word in this case) when it comes to the home we plan on living in for many years to come. But we are perfectly capable of a little hard work as unskilled labor. I personally filled this roll-away dumpster to the full-line over the last couple of weekends:
I am starting to realize just how many “sayings” come from the country. When you’re in the city and get the trash picked up every week you don’t think much about where that trash goes, except perhaps going so far as to separate your recycleables. I just posted on the 
I know we owe you all some good video of this place, and I’d like to talk about all kinds of goodies, like discovering a new spring on the property and how to show a tom turkey who’s boss. But I have to get started at my full time job in 20 minutes and am a bit flustered by all of the stuff I have to fit into my upcoming weekend. The blog is just having to take a backseat for a couple of weeks. Here’s an example of my to-do list items: Fix holes in outbuilding #2, paint all outbuildings, clean out barn and get rid of the junk, find dental records from Denver and make appointment to get crowns, find health records from family doctor and find a new family doctor, open a bank account in town and begin the process of transferring all direct debits and deposits to new account before shutting down old account, update driver’s license and get new plates, build a fence around the yard for the dogs, buy more chicken feed, change water in watering buckets, scrape poo from under roosts, call fire department about burning the giant pile of wood (or haul it off), call a carpenter about rotting wood on porch siding, under windows and under soffits, call the raw milk guy Mr. Yoder told us about, buy printer ink and paper, install scanner drivers on work computer, fix the slacking piece of barb wire on the side pasture fence, read up on incubating turkey eggs, incubate turkey eggs, find Missy a good used car, replace all of the ancient locks on house doors, find a used couch for the front room, prune the apple trees and grape vines before they bud (if it isn’t too late), build book shelves for my office, build foot bridge across spring branch, paint my office, clean off and paint the two old tables in the barn so they can be brought into the house… And edit the video footage we took so that can go up on 