Back at It

For most of September I was doing my best to maximize my time out in those last beautiful, sunny days of summer. But now we’ve hit the time of year where it’s time to get back to work while the weather holds before we hit the deep-freeze of winter.

I’ve got a pretty substantial pre-winter list, and not that many weekends to get it done in, which is pretty much par for the course on all the lists I make.

First up was creating some semblance of order in the garage…

Ha.

My mom recently sold her condo and brought a bunch of wire shelves she had leftover up to the farm, and let me tell you, they’ve made a huge difference.

I now have a set of shelves dedicated to bee equipment, and one dedicated to automotive equipment and one dedicated to garden equipment, and I haven’t even half-organized the place yet.

Technically this garage has an upstairs, which would be awesome for storage if it wasn’t covered in raccoon shit. I’m just not at a spot in my life where I can deal with massive amounts of raccoon shit, so I’m going to put cleaning out the upstairs and creating a storage area up there on some future list.

For now I settled on a few random racks make of scrap lumber, and just creating enough room to walk around in the main part of the garage…

There’s still a fair amount of work to do, but it’s feeling slightly less chaotic.

I also had a dumpster up at the house a couple of weekends ago…

I even took a day off work so I could spend some uninterrupted time cleaning out the barns and then promptly got sick and had to stay in bed for two days. Ugh.

This is probably the fourth of fifth 30 yard dumpster I’ve filled since I lived here… this one was mostly for the pile of construction debris in the pole barn.

This dates back to the original master bathroom demo, and includes all the tile, drywall and wood, from the second upstairs bath demo, plus a fair amount of debris from the kitchen demo earlier this year…

Oh, also a grill that caught on fire this summer and almost blew up my boyfriend (he’s fine), plus some cabinets and windows from my garage/shop renovation last year, and more debris from the rubble pile I mostly cleaned up a few years ago…

Still need to figure out what I’m going to do with this mess.

Also, I might be the only person I know who can turn a 7,000 sq ft pole barn into a disaster area inside of 3 years…

(Which, in my defense, even with all the mess the barn still holds 10 vehicles, a tractor, two mowers, a golf cart, a couple of kayaks, a barn’s worth of brick and old beams, and all the rest of my mess, along with plenty of driving space… so, yeah.)

I’d still like to put it in some kind of order before winter, and I have several plans for that I hope to get in place in the next week or two.

And then there’s all the usual winter prep, like cleaning out the garden, stocking up on hay for the donkeys, cleaning out the animal barn, and doing all my fall maintenance on the vehicles… which is to say, summer was fun, but now I’m back at it in a big way.

I know I’ve been quiet for the last several weeks, and while I’ve been writing things that feel big and meaningful to me, they aren’t really coming together into anything coherent to share with anyone else, so, for now, we’ll stick to updates of my messy garage and barn, but I promise there will be more on farm life soon.

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