Well, it's been a year in the works but the official move to the farm is almost over. There's just a couple odds and ends left at the old house. It's been a rough couple of weeks and it seems like the past few days have been the hardest. It's absolutely amazing how much crap you can accumulate over 13 years.

To bring everyone up to speed. We've had our home up for sale for the past year. To say the current housing market sucks would be an understatement. After countless showings and a deal that fell through, we close at the end of the month.

So between last year and now I've spent my time fixing things up around the farm. Last summer I spent most of my time rebuilding the old bank barn. Let me explain this a little further cause as I type that it doesn't sound that impressive.

The original homestead can be traced back to the William Penn land grants. The bank barn was built sometime in the late 1700's early 1800's and is probably the oldest structure still standing on the old hunk'o'dirt. The whole place is stone and hand hewn logs so you can't just run to home depot and pick up some boards when something needs replaced.

Had an Amish crew come in and replace a 20 foot section of old stone wall. Replaced the hay mound floor. That's no typo, here come's your history lesson; Back in the day, before modern hay equipment the farmer would "mound" cut grass/hay in an area in the barn. Normally the floor in that area had gaps between the boards to let air circulate and the dedicated area in the barn became known as the hay mound....at least here in central pa. As with most things I'm sure it varies from place to place. Moving on...I also replaced half the floor of the equipment bay. This meant I had to replace some hand hewn beams. Built a new front wall to the livestock bay in the lower floor and constructed 6 new stalls...that was all done before Christmas.

Once it got cold I set to clearing overgrown pasture. They were packed so full of brush and trees we have decided to call the farm green briar just as a reminder of all that we've gone through. Now that it's warmer I'm putting most of my effort into replacing fences.

So that's it in a nut shell...my past year in 4 paragraphs. We'll see where we go from here.