Chickenaddition
Songster
This is a thread dedicated to our progress on our property as we slowly renovate a 1935 home and transform the property into our dream hobby farm. I hope people follow along as they see our successes and our follies.
A quick background to where we started. My SO and I rekindled our search for a home at the start of 2018. After a series of frustrating searches in Raleigh a former employee who called me to see how I was doing and when I told her that we were searching for a house with a decent amount of property, she mentioned to check out Wendell. (hence the start of the Butterfly effect) I am so thankful that she called and mentioned this. We then began to search this area and eventually landed this property. We both turned 50 in 2018 and are so thankful to start our dream hobby farm. It is going to take a huge amount off sweat equity and a decent amount of money to get it to the shape we desire.
This property is 2.33 acres and there is a fairly unique situation on it. The main house was originally built in 1935 and there was an update on it in 1960. The good news is that the house also has a manufactured home about 70 feet away from the main house. Our real estate lawyer told us we were very lucky as this was grandfathered in. You are generally not allowed to have two homes on one property. So currently we are living in the manufactured home while we renovate the main home. This allows us to work at our own pace (both physically and monetarily). Each project that we need to do we figure out the way we want to do it and then what we can’t do ourselves we can then save or prepare to pay to get it done the way we want. I am so very thankful as it saves us a great deal of headache and heartache that is typically associated with renovations.
We moved in and headed into working on the house as we were very curious as to what was behind the walls and what good and bad things were hidden. I will show what we discovered later in the thread as it’s both exciting and daunting.
During the summer after we had been on the property for a few months, I realized that no one had done any tree management on the property in quite some time. So with a hand saw (yes… a hand saw) I went about to start cleaning up some issues. I don’t know if I have many pictures of the early days, but I will find what I have. On the property was a 40’ burn circle that apparently the previous owner had “cleaned up” the yard and the only evidence was this 40’ diameter burn circle. I decided to carry all the trees I hand fell to this circle and would repeat the burning. As I worked the pile quickly grew in size and I honestly got carried away (you will hear this as a reoccurring theme on my weekends). I realized the burn circle’s proximity to a line of trees and the huge pile of pine trees was not a good combination and so things stalled for the rest of the year on my cutting of trees (not to mention hand cutting trees is fairly taxing… if only they made a device that would cut trees… maybe someday someone would solve this dilemma).
Here is an early picture of the tree pile. It gradually got bigger until I stalled. To give scale it was easily 30'+ in diameter and eventually got to be around 6'+ high.
I am fairly terrible at documenting so I am hoping this format helps me keep up. Hopefully people asking questions or commenting will also help in the process
.
More coming.
A quick background to where we started. My SO and I rekindled our search for a home at the start of 2018. After a series of frustrating searches in Raleigh a former employee who called me to see how I was doing and when I told her that we were searching for a house with a decent amount of property, she mentioned to check out Wendell. (hence the start of the Butterfly effect) I am so thankful that she called and mentioned this. We then began to search this area and eventually landed this property. We both turned 50 in 2018 and are so thankful to start our dream hobby farm. It is going to take a huge amount off sweat equity and a decent amount of money to get it to the shape we desire.
This property is 2.33 acres and there is a fairly unique situation on it. The main house was originally built in 1935 and there was an update on it in 1960. The good news is that the house also has a manufactured home about 70 feet away from the main house. Our real estate lawyer told us we were very lucky as this was grandfathered in. You are generally not allowed to have two homes on one property. So currently we are living in the manufactured home while we renovate the main home. This allows us to work at our own pace (both physically and monetarily). Each project that we need to do we figure out the way we want to do it and then what we can’t do ourselves we can then save or prepare to pay to get it done the way we want. I am so very thankful as it saves us a great deal of headache and heartache that is typically associated with renovations.
We moved in and headed into working on the house as we were very curious as to what was behind the walls and what good and bad things were hidden. I will show what we discovered later in the thread as it’s both exciting and daunting.
During the summer after we had been on the property for a few months, I realized that no one had done any tree management on the property in quite some time. So with a hand saw (yes… a hand saw) I went about to start cleaning up some issues. I don’t know if I have many pictures of the early days, but I will find what I have. On the property was a 40’ burn circle that apparently the previous owner had “cleaned up” the yard and the only evidence was this 40’ diameter burn circle. I decided to carry all the trees I hand fell to this circle and would repeat the burning. As I worked the pile quickly grew in size and I honestly got carried away (you will hear this as a reoccurring theme on my weekends). I realized the burn circle’s proximity to a line of trees and the huge pile of pine trees was not a good combination and so things stalled for the rest of the year on my cutting of trees (not to mention hand cutting trees is fairly taxing… if only they made a device that would cut trees… maybe someday someone would solve this dilemma).
Here is an early picture of the tree pile. It gradually got bigger until I stalled. To give scale it was easily 30'+ in diameter and eventually got to be around 6'+ high.
I am fairly terrible at documenting so I am hoping this format helps me keep up. Hopefully people asking questions or commenting will also help in the process
.More coming.
) you & I have talked about your trees in the not so distant past.
