I’ve noticed that many people my age talk about wanting to travel the world. My friends from high school go on weekend trips to resorts and AirBnBs, seeking concerts and hiking trails and experiences galore. I’m happy for their joy, but also perplexed – I’m most content when I have a wide-open weekend, an ongoing project to pick at with leisure, and no need to get in a plane, train, or automobile.
These past few weeks, I’ve really been dragging myself out the door to go to work. I love my job, but like anyone else I’ve always had days when I didn’t want to go; unlike those days in the past, this dragging feeling has been much more-so because I do not want to leave.
In just 4.5 months, I’ve built a comfortable and beautiful place to live. I feel safe and accomplished and content, although there is plenty of work left to be done. It’s really hard to leave when the sun is casting pink streaks across the sky from below the tree line and the garlic needs to be planted. Paying the mortgage is a strong motivator, though, and leaving in the first place makes coming home that much sweeter.
As a reminder, I organize my week’s accomplishments according to my ultimate goals for this homestead property. Here’s what I got done this week:
Growing Food
The last hold-out in my garden beds are the carrots, which are beginning to shoulder. I will start to harvest them once I’ve used up the store-bought carrots in my refrigerator.
Though the frost has terminated everything else, my cold frame is producing so much lettuce and arugula that I was able to bring a salad to work every day this week! It’s maintained about 50 degrees despite night temperatures in the 30s. The slugs love the cold frame too, but they’re easily distracted by a shallow dish of beer.
I have several more old windows stored in the barn. Now that I know how well the cold frame works, I hope to build a couple more over the course of the winter; I’d love a deeper one for potatoes and other root vegetables.
Resource Acquisition & Preparedness
The gator has gotten a ton of use for a variety of tasks, but I’ve been focusing on finding, splitting, and stacking firewood for reasons that I will elaborate on later in this post. 🙂
My neighbor put a few more items on the curb, so the gator also was useful in hauling them back to my house. He’s been in the process of moving and, as of this writing, he is finally gone for good – I never met him, but he partially furnished my house and for that I will be eternally grateful. Highlights from this week include a little table for my porch and the world’s largest wine rack, which I hope to use to store root vegetables in the basement.
Aesthetic Utility
I’ve been trying to use the daylight hours for outdoor tasks while it’s still reasonably nice out, but I made the time to stop into a couple of thrift stores on my way home from work. I am collecting frames because I intend to install a gallery wall. I’ve also been getting back into cross-stitch – my favorite wintertime craft – for the same reason.
Energy Independence
A few weeks ago, after a wood stove and chimney inspection, I decided that I needed to have three things installed: a new wood stove, an updated chimney liner, and a chimney cap. The professional who originally recommended these improvements gave me some other advice that made him seem untrustworthy in addition to an exorbitantly high quote, so I knew I needed to look elsewhere for someone to actually complete the work.
The process of researching and requesting quotes was overwhelming. I found several suppliers that would be happy to deliver and install for a price of approximately $10,000, plus additional charges for things like moving the old wood stove. These suppliers provided mixed opinions on what work needed to happen to the chimney liner, and the chimney cap was outside of their scope.
It became clear that I needed to approach this in two steps: acquire the wood stove direct from a dealer, and then have a local professional install and complete the chimney work. Buying the wood stove was easy – there’s a great company in Connecticut called Preston Trading Post that was able to answer some of my questions and place the order. They’re even willing to deliver for a reasonable fee even though my homestead is pretty far away from their warehouse.
I was concerned about finding a chimney professional for part two, since my original pick didn’t turn out to be trustworthy. After reaching out to half a dozen leads, I got lucky! I found a local small business that will be able to install the new chimney, update the liner, and install the chimney cap. The owner was super helpful and knowledgeable, and didn’t try to nickel and dime me in the slightest.
It will take a few weeks for the stove to arrive, but I wound up spending $5,145 for a Blaze King Ashford 20.2 to be delivered to my house, and $3,256 for the installation, new chimney liner, chimney cap, and moving the old stove to an outside location. While stressful, all of the time spent researching and comparing quotes saved me about $2,000 – and, unlike in the other situations I considered, I feel very confident that the work will be high quality.
With the solar panels now functional, I am just a few weeks away from total heat independence – a far cry from true energy independence, but a significant start.
Moving Forward
I am feeling a lot of pressure to get ahead of my firewood situation, which will be genuinely impossible to do this year – to be on schedule, I would have needed to have had a cord of wood split and stacked by this time last year. Thankfully, the previous owner left me enough seasoned wood to get me through December, but realistically I will probably be burning sub-par wood in my fancy new wood stove come January. The best I can do is to keep chipping away at the job in preparation for 2027.
Oh, did I say I enjoy having an ongoing project to pick at? I guess I did. How lucky am I?
You know where I’ll be every day after work this week…
Talk soon,
KC