I received a text this morning asking if I would be ready to pick up bales of hay this afternoon between 4:00 and 5:00. Sure thing! We made it through a few days with no rain! Just barely! The storm on Saturday only missed the field by a few miles. But agh, I wish we had known! I have three acres just BEGGING to be cut!!!
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| A beautiful sight to pull up to. |
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| It's VERY clean grass hay! |
I went out to the farm without a great deal of intention as far as work today, but it's amazing how many projects you find. Dad met me out there.
Our goal was to remove all of the ceiling fans remaining in the house in order to allow the demo crew to have an "easy" work area tomorrow. The last thing I need is electrical issues with hammers flying! We had three to remove.
The one in the kitchen was fairly simple...but not easy. It was held up by two large nuts! The one upstairs in the Master Bedroom was a pain. It was held up by nuts up in the attic! I had to go up in the VERY hot attic to tie off the wires on the fan in the hallway and to remove the nuts on the bedroom fan. But they were double-nutted, and I couldn't get it with the tools on hand. So we elected to just cut the bolts from the bedroom.
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| The fan in the kitchen. It was pretty rusty. |
The fan in the hallway was EXTREMELY heavy but didn't provide much problems as far as taking apart. They had hard-wired this fan in the attic, though, so I had to cut the wires up there.
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| The ceiling fan in the upstairs hallway. |
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| Cutting the wires in the attic. |
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| The ceiling fan in the upstairs bedroom. It was held up by nuts in the attic. |
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| No more fan! |
This was my first time in the attic and (surprisingly) my first time peeking into the attic. I was actually hoping for some neat finds, but it looks like the attic has been well-used (platforms across most planks, new sheathing from the newer roof), so I didn't expect to find much. Whatever gem was up there from the 1800's was long gone now!
But I loved the architecture of the home. It's actually quite simple! Instead of plywood or OSB, they used one-inch wood cut in various sizes. They didn't care how straight it was on the edges, as long as it was the same thickness. Too funny. I did find it odd, however, the the roofing crew put new OSB on top of the one-inch planks on side of the roof...yet removed them from the other side and went straight onto the 2x4 roof "trusses." Quite interesting.
But the attic is free and clear and easy to move around in. You can stand up easily. I took note of the two chimneys. One has been removed to inside the home and is to be removed by the demo crew this week. It should be fairly simple. Someone will have to enter the attic and break the bricks down inside the chimney where they will fall to the bottom of the chimney in the living room. But once it's out of the attic, full access is available in the Master Bedroom where it runs through the closet.
The other main chimney is going to be tricky. It's still up on the roof. So as soon as the guys demo it from up top (do they really plan to get on the roof for this?...I mean, they would have to, but that one project seems like at least a day in and of itself!), I will have to have a roof guy lined up to patch up the big hole in the roof. I imagine that alone will cost me $1000. Sheesh!
But it's in pretty rough shape and needs to go. I had secretly hoped that it would be salvageable so you could highlight it in the rooms, but it just doesn't look to be the case. The bricks are breaking apart.
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| The main chimney shows significant signs of wear. It's a good thing I am having it removed. |
The sand family came back again today, and I eagerly loaded them up with a couple more loads! They even brought two trucks today! So twice I was able to fill two trucks and one trailer. I LOVE IT. Bye, bye, sand!!!
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| This guy is LOVING my free sand! I am LOVING him taking it even more! |
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| I can't fill him up fast enough! I just can't believe how much sand I have! |
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| Take it all!!! |
The hay guy came around 2:00 this afternoon, and Dad and I took a break to watch him. But our break was short-lived, as the wind was gusty and blowing the hay rows all over! We had to rake them up just before the baler came by!
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| The beautiful rows of hay. |
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| It's a nice-looking field! |
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| The teeny tiny tractor and the big baler. Notice the sand guy leaving in the drive! A good day! |
The field produced 87 bales. It's 1.9 acres, so it's a bit less than I anticipated. That's just 45 bales an acre. I was expecting and hoping for 60-100 bales after my research. I was WAY off! But they are all sold! I contacted the stables that requested to buy ALL my bales. She even wanted to pick them up out of the field! So sure enough, at 5:00 P.M., she showed up with two helpers to do just that. I kept two bales for myself, and one was a split bale of straw and hay so not charged to her, so she ended up buying 84 bales. At $4.00 apiece, that brought in $336.00. The farmer and I did a 60/40 split, with me getting 60, so I made $201.60 today. Not bad for growing grass.
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| The 87 bales ready to be picked up! |
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| A beautiful view! |
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| Very clean bales. |
The other side of the drive is 3.3 acres, so it should produce another 148.5 bales. ha! That will be another $356. If I can do this three times a year, that's close to $1500/year in the land giving back. That's pretty equivalent to renting out the land to a farmer to plant corn or beans! But I like the hay aspect.
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| The other side is just BEGGING to be cut!!! |
As an interesting side note, I had an SUV pull up the drive as we were baling today. He wanted to buy them all. He is down to his emergency bales, he says, and no one is able to bale due to the crazy rains this spring. He said we are the first he has seen. Needless to say, the hay market is hot right now. No one is able to bale, or if they do, it gets rained on (like what happened to my neighbor). It's nice to have a hot commodity. Unfortunately for him, mine are all sold. Even the next 150!
The horse owner's husband was one of the guys who came out to help pick up bales tonight, and she wanted to see my house...and she wanted to show him! So I walked them through the old gem. The husband was a retired contractor after 35 years. So not much that I showed him was too much of a surprise. He's kind of seen it all.
But he WAS intrigued by the living room ceiling joists. I showed him where the ceiling joists had been sistered to another, and I sure couldn't figure out why. He couldn't either. I gave them a full tour, and we ended back up in the living room where he just stared at the beams.
And then it hit him. "I know why they did that."
Oh?
And then he proceeds to explain to me that it was actually the TOP joist that was added (counter-intuitive). His deduction was based off the fact that that board was PERFECTLY lined up with the bottom of the upstairs flooring. In other words, that sistered board was holding up the upstairs floor. But why sister it? It was because when they added the addition to this part of the house (yes, more on THAT in a second!), they needed to run the upstairs floor perfectly level across the entire house. And this original ceiling had sagged too much.
Another tell-tale sign: the lower ceiling joists actually WERE sagging when you looked at them from side to side across the room. And they were the only joist that had lath nails nailed into them, meaning that the other board was added AFTER the original home simply to hold up the second floor.
Which gets be to this point: This house is way older than 1866!!! The ADDITION was added in 1866, but the original one-room cabin is much older. How much older is beyond me! But as soon as he said the upstairs was added, so many other known facts INSTANTLY made sense.
#1--The living room is the only room which has a limestone foundation. If the house were built all at once in 1866, the entire foundation would have been brick.
#2--The living room is the ONLY room that has post-frame construction. It's also the only room that has wooden pegs for the framing. I had assumed I would find these elsewhere, but as the walls come down, the addition was built with balloon framing.
#3--The chimneys make more sense. Having two chimneys so close together would have been rather odd in a house like this. They were usually on opposite sides of a home...or only singular. I'm eager to see if there is a brick change as the chimney moves from the first floor through the added second floor.
Just like that, the house made more sense. But how old is this one-room cabin?! Is it 1850's? 1820's? Could it be possible I have one of the earliest homes in Sangamon County? The oldest known cabin dates to 1823. The addition only misses that by 43 years. Could a cabin have stood here for 43 years first?!
It's kind of exciting to think about!!! I have a VERY historical home!
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| Totally random, but I saw this guy in my yard today! What a creature! |
A pretty good day. I'm excited about the hay (I just LOVE the look of small bales on a field). I told Dad today that we need to get our own equipment if just to enjoy the process. Every boy needs a tractor. I'm disappointed in the demo crew not showing up, but I am hoping for the best for tomorrow.
Tonight's parting thought: Isn't it crazy to think that someone from my house could have served in the Civil War?
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