Building Fence

Well.....it's been a while since I posted, but I've been out and about!  I and three other students were chosen to go to Atlanta this last weekend and present to the FEA conference!  What a treat to go south for a visit.  I've been to Atlanta before and enjoyed the visit.  The other friends I was with hadn't been there before, so it was fun showing them the little bit that I knew about it.  I wish though that we had more time...there are so many things I would like to see and do and we just didn't have the time. 

But now with that aside...I want to tell you all about building the fence at the farm.  When we purchased it, there were just some scraggly remains of an old fence.  So, we knew we needed to get it done...you can't keep your cows in if you don't!  After measuring the perimeter, we figured it was roughly about 2 miles of fence.  We started purchasing posts and barbed along until we felt that we had enough.  If you purchase a pallet of posts you'll sometimes get a little discount.  We purchased about 1000 posts which gave a little leverage when it came to pricing.  If you will call around for prices, sometimes stores will match prices.  You've got to do what you can to save money in these times.  We watched for specials and did a lot of price checking. 

Last spring we hired a man to weld the corners and the entrance gates.  Your fence is only as good as your corners and we want this to last. 

We hired a local man to do the welding and purchased the pipe in bulk from a company that specializes in pipe.  The welder told us what we needed and I ordered it.  The problem we encountered though was that the pipe was longer than anything we had to haul it.  Fortunately, the welder had a long enough trailer and he hauled it to the farm for us. 
After he was finished, we were ready to start pounding posts into the ground. It was July and we were ready to get started.  We knew we could do this! 

We stretched our string from welded post to welded post, laid out our posts at 10 foot intervals and began pounding post in the ground.   After about 50 of these buggers we thought maybe we should hire a local guy who had been bugging us to hire him to put in the fence.  We're no spring chickens any more and thought maybe we ought to give him a call, besides it was HOT and we just don't have a lot of time.  So we called him, he came and he and the Mr. shook hands on a price.  Well after waiting 6 months on this guy to start, we decided he didn't want to work.....imagine that!  So, we put our gloves back on and got to pounding posts again!

866 post later, we  had put in 5 1/2 ft. steel fence posts with 5 strands of barbed wire all around the place. There is great satisfaction in driving down the road that borders our place and seeing all of that fence that WE put in!  If I do say so myself, it looks pretty darned good!

Burden on my heart

Do you just ever wonder....what might be your purpose for being on this earth?  I'd like to think I'm doing

and walking the path that I'm supposed to.  We raised two fine sons to adulthood.  One is happily married

and the other is still searching for his lifemate.  We have plans to move to the farm after I graduate.  We still

need to build a house and are waiting for our other farm to sell, to be able to start that.  But, I have a burden

on my heart that keeps surfacing.  I keep thinking about children who need a home.  Whether they need a

foster home or they need to be adopted doesn't seem to matter.  I keep thinking about them.  I keep thinking

that there are children that don't have parents that love them or a place to call home.  That is so vital to a

child's well being.  Every child deserves that.  I'm curious to see what the future brings to us.  We can't do

anything right now, but what about in the next couple of years.  I wonder what our grown sons would think

about another sibling.  In the meantime...I'll just keep praying that I am walking the path intended for me.

Snow

  Oh my goodness.....we have had the snow and extreme cold.  This isn't unusual for some parts of our

United  States,   but here in our part of the world, we usually don't get this much snow.  We woke up

Wednesday morning to 8 inches of fluffy white snow.




                                              

The dogs certainly enjoyed it!  After it began to warm up a little  ( it was 3 degrees)  it made for a great day

to see all of the beauty!

I don't know if you can see it or not, but the grass was sparkling as the sun shone it!   It looked like the faries

had been out sprinkling their magic dust!  Beauty all around us.....enjoy the day and see if you can see the

beauty!!

Continuation of story

Well....I don't have class today.....yeah!!   Another snow day here in the Ozarks....we'll see how bad this one gets.  The weather men are predicting some really bad icing here and that's just not good at all.  Two years ago we had one of the worst ice storms I've ever seen and don't want to go through one again.  We were without power for about 6 days and that's a lot better than a lot of people had it.  So I figured I could get some computer time in and continue the story of finding our farm.
     After we moved over here in 2004, we began casually looking for land.  We'd look at the listings on the internet. Everytime we were out and they had real estate magazines, I'd pick them up and peruse through them and we'd look at the newspaper listings.  Then after we found something interesting, we'd go look at it and hike if it really interested us.  
    

     We found a beautiful 80 acre piece north of Gainsville, MO.  It is in the Almartha community.  We originally went with the real estate agent and looked at it and went back the next weekend and hiked around it.  It is completely fenced and has two ponds on it.  It is about 60% open and 40% wooded.  There are some beautiful views from the hill top.

    

     Then as we hiked around it, we found some very interesting rock formations in the woods.  I thought it would be a wonderful place to take photos of people!  If you look very closely, you'll be able to see that the rock looks like a bench; it is open underneath it. 

     It is gently rolling with lots of lush grass and we could just visualize our cows happily munching along. 

     It even has an old homeplace on it!  I can only imagine what it was like living in that house! 

     But alas.....this wasn't to be the retirement farm.  We realized it was too far from the lake.  We really like to fish and wanted to be closer to the lake.  So......the search began again. 

If you are looking for a wonderful place......this one is for sale.  80 beautiful acres...it is quiet and serene with beautiful views of the surrounding farms.  The taxes are low...$28 per year.....can you believe it?  If you might be interested....contact me!

Have a great day and hopefully you'll not have too many problems with the weather!
  

Something Cool!

Do ya wanna hear something cool?  I found a give away this morning.  Go on over to  Hey What's for Dinner Mom?  http://heywhatsfordinnermom.blogspot.com/ 

She's got a Mr. Bento giveaway from those wonderful folks at CSN....so check it out and enter....you can't win if you don't enter!

Who's out there?

I'm wondering.....who is out there and reading this blog?  Any questions or comments?  Do you have any thoughts about your retirement farm?

The first "retirement farm"

We began our search for the "retirement farm" about four years ago after my husband was transferred from Northwest Arkansas to North Central Arkansas.   We already had 160 acres that bordered the Buffalo River corridor.  The only problem with it though was that it was just too darned steep.  We knew that we wanted to raise cattle again and it's difficult getting up and down those hills.  You're either going up or down those steep hills.  Now don't get me wrong, we loved that place.  We originally purchased that place about 1999.  We knew that we liked that beautiful area and needed a place for the guys to hunt and found this place that was 120 acres.  It had an old house and a barn on it.  We purchased it and then were able to add an adjoining 40 acres to it.  We let a neighbor tear down the old house and we put up a log cabin. 

We were involved with the building, but we didn't build the whole thing.  The man we bought the logs from knew how to notch the corners and frame in the windows.  We helped as we could.  We then had another local man build the fireplace for us.   We hired another local family that does metal roofs to put ours on.  It was a fun place to go for the weekends. 

We also had the carpenter bring over his portable sawmill and mill some of the cedar to be used for planks inside the cabin....it always smelled so good when you first opened the door....just like a big cedar chest!  You can see that we used it on the gable ends over the fireplace.

Please excuse the mess, this picture was taken while moving stuff around.  this shows the inside though.  It was all open with the bathroom door to the right.  We hadn't added a kitchen yet and were only using a hot plate and microwave for cooking.  We had a small dorm size fridge and it all worked pretty well.   The loft held an iron bed and we had a ladder to climb up there. 

Our water source was a spring that had originally  been piped up to this house site.  Before we had purchased the property, a mobile home had sat there, so a septic tank was there also. 

This was also already on the place and just need a little repair to stop a leak.   Tank filled from below from a spring and then was piped up the hill to the cabin. 

I do miss our little cabin on the hill.    We put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into the building of that thing!   We also had a lot of good times there, but we realized that we didn't want to spend our years on those hills, although they are beautiful!