Diverting Rain Water from Barn Roof

The final phase of diverting the rain water off the barn roof is finally complete.  Jens, Jeff and Lars worked on this most of Saturday and Sunday.  They finished digging the drainage ditch, laid the perforated pipes, dug a hole which they filled with gravel, and then covered everything up.  The ground was still soft enough to work this late in December - lucky for us.  Still needs to get some "finish work" done, to smooth it all out.  We'll plant grass on most of it, but decided to make a gravel drive-way from the road to the barn ... to avoid future mud pits :)

Holiday Decorating Continues

One of the little troubles with moving to a different house is making your holiday decorations fit the new rooms.  This is our second year at the new house and decorating was a lot easier.  Our living room continues in the complete "country" style, but in the dining room we tried for something a little more traditional, as the "country" style just does not fit the room.  Each of the 5 large windows (with deep window sills) is decorated a little different, but each one has 3 gold balls hanging by gold ribbons and a single (electric) candle to set the tone. 

Holiday Decorations in Hallway

Bottling Wine

Finally got caught up with bottling some wine over the weekend, almost 100 bottles:

• 6 gallons of "Honey Crisp Apple - 2010" 
• 5 gallons of "Mixed Apple 2010"
• 3 gallons of "Peach 2009"
• 5 gallons of "Concord 2010"

Finished labeling, shrink-wrapping and storing them just this evening.

Cement Hardened Off Nicely

Within two weeks of having the cement poured, it had hardened off and turned a grayish white color.  Ready for us to set the final missing support posts in the bottom of the barn...

perfect smooth barn floor

front "porch" for half the barn

in front of the house - using left-over cement

Another Fence Row Cleaned Out

Took advantage of unseasonably warm weather and worked on the upper fence row of the 3 acre field.  Jens and Zach both came (with their chain saws) and Lars was the "brush runner".  Some of the limbs were large enough for firewood, but mostly we pulled out thorny bushes, vines and small trees.

Completely took out an old electric fence row and "reclaimed" about 12 feet of extra space behind it, toward our border with the neighbor's field.   This will definitely allow us to extend our grape vine rows :)

We ended up with quite a brush pile to burn on the next rainy, non-windy day.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas...

We actually bought our Christmas tree already - from a local tree farmer - and it smells wonderful throughout the house.  It's a Douglas Fir and not yet decorated.  We always have to rearrange the living room to make space for the tree, which also involves a good cleaning job - so we did not have time to decorate it yet.  But we did get some of the outside decorations and lights up.