Snow in November

By the end of November we have a blanket of snow that did not stay.

Fall frosty

This looks like snow, but is just a heavy frost at the end of October.  

Readiness for winter

Although last year was a warm El Nino year, this one is forecast to be a cold La Ninja.   Our firewood pile is stacked to over ten bush cords and covered with a tarp - perhaps next year will bring a wood shed?  We put jacks permanently into place on this the north side of the house to facilitate easier chimney cleaning.  Every year there will be improvements.

Speed of progress and beauty

 We had hoped to get further finishing the porch soffit (just the front is done as well as the pine paneling of the arch), but building the barn took priority.  Taking in the beauty of where we are is something we remind ourselves to do, the top photo from a morning walk with Harley shows why.

Fall lovely

 Fall is getting frosty but is beautiful none the less.  Walking with Harley the Wonder Dog.

Angara sign hanging ceremony

We have a champagne sign hanging ceremony with our neighbours, the Kahles and Marshall families.   The day was graced with bright sunshine and was enjoyed by all, including the ever present Harley.   We made a dedication to Frank and Rose Cook, who were the previous caretakers of this property when it operated as a golf course.  They had a log cabin at the same site as the current "Angara", and we think that they would have approved of our project to carry on with care of this place.

Horses home

 And so they are home!  After 20 months of separation, it is really such harmony to have the whole "family" home.

Inside finishing

Stalls are in place with some skiffs of snow - just in time to bring the horses home!

Shaping up

Fence posts are in now and the cladding is caulked and sealed for this year.  Next year we will put board and batten on the outside, then will stain it the same color as the house.

Walls and roof take shape

Bob puts the last piece of plywood wall cladding into place and the shingling is done.  Frank, Bob and I completed the shingling in two days.   The shingles were left over from the house construction, so we have a nice color match.   We needed to top up with just a few additional bundles.   We also were able to use left over roof edge from the house for this roof.

Walls and roof framing

 The stud walls for the barn take shape on the double row of concrete block.  John dedicated a week of his vacation to helping us get the walls and roof trusses up.  We backfilled the concrete block wall base with concrete that we mixed on site.   With this we cast in the anchor bolts for the stud walls.   Frank, John, Danny and Lou helped us to get the trusses into place, we used pole scaffolding to make a runway up the middle of the building.

Pouring the barn footing

We slug the concrete into the above grade footings, a rugged 10" high X 24" wide with three rows of reinforcing bar.   She will stand for a long time.  Much appreciated help comes from Danny, Ken and Charlie - the brother and brothers-in-law!

Well drained base

Using the "thrower" truck to position the A-gravel base for the barn, giving us a good thick and well drained base.   This follows having scraped off the top soil and back filled with pit run gravel using the tractor.  

Barn building begins

Harley poses in front of the block and area under preparation for building the horse barn.

Harley helps

Harley the Wonder Dog helps with laying the natural stone drip line (to the left) around the edge of the porch.  This addresses both protecting the drip line from the roof porch and it raises the ground to within the necessary two foot drop from the ground necessary to have a porch without a railing.  The only side that will have a log railing is the west and basement walkout side.

Progress on panelling the arch

We are making progress on the inside of the arch at the front door and the soffit along the front of the house.   The outside round of aluminum soffit is all done, but the other three sides of inside/long sections of soffit remain to be done.   We need to pull wire for the lighting as we go, which will make the later electrical hook up much easier.   Next we need to remove some of the pole scaffolding to the west so that we can set up to do the short TIG pine panel installation for the outside edge of the arch.   Also we have to drill holes in the arch log for the eye bolt to support the Angara log sign, every step has a few catches....

Tiger lilies

The tiger lilies are in bloom, bringing tidings of the end of the "dog days" of summer.  

Flag is up

Although we are trying to stay focused on necessary and structural work, we made a diversion to install a flagpole.    We love having the Canadian flag flying and could argue that it is valuable for showing wind direction...... so not entirely a cosmetic diversion.   In any case Bob has drilled four lengths of rebar into the bedrock and poured a concrete base, all properly parged.   This should make it a firm foundation for many years of enjoyment.

A house and a house

Catherine's dear chum and her husband came for a visit in their RV, pictured in front of Angara.   They plugged into our trailer hook up and so were here but in their own independent "camping" facilities.   For each of us there is a time for being gypsy and mobile, and a time for being stationary and rooted.   This was a chance to share those two paths!

Finally photographed a Sandhill Crane

We just love these gorgeous and huge birds that come to feed in the field next to the house.   They seem to nest in the wetlands below the ridge at the lake and mouth of the river (which we leave undisturbed).    What is most haunting about them is the prehistoric sounding call that they make when taking flight, landing and if they become alarmed.  If you half close your eyes, listen and watch them fly over, it seems that you are transported back to the time of the raptors and other long extinct creatures.

Suspended animation - water hydrant for the barn

Here is the hydrant in mid installation.   The hydrant itself was assembled by Mickey's Plumbing, we installed a concrete block under it as shown, for stability.  We then backfilled a reservoir around the bottom of the hydrant with good clean gravel, covered it with landscaping cloth and then backfilled the hole.   There is a 1/8" weep hole at the bottom of the hydrant, which allows the water to drain back down out of the assembly when the hydrant handle/valve is closed.  This provides freeze protection because after backfilling, the weep hole will be buried below the frost line (and will also be sheltered inside the barn structure).    It looks a bit odd sitting all alone out in the field for now.

Trenching for the water line to the barn

Our friend John is very talented with heavy machinery and masterful with a backhoe, here he works with Bob to first dig and here bury back in the water line to the barn.   We went with 1-1/2" poly line, the same as the main line.   We curved the trench around one section of bedrock, only to encounter another!   This one was a little deeper so we went to its surface at 32" below grade and enveloped it in 2"rigid styrofoam (top and bottom), before filling it in.   We marked this spot and will mound over it as well for extra depth.    We then connected at line at the "T" rough in that Mickey's Plumbing left for us.

Transformation - lovely to food

Lovely but rather too much percentage alfalfa (legume) in this particular patch for what is best for the "Angara" horses.   The rest of the field was more timothy grass type hay and preferable.  Nonetheless, it was baled and the end of July meant that we had 270 small bales in as a backup supply.  We will be using large bales in free choice feeders for the majority of the feeding.   

Mago prefers to play

Mago is shown at his temporary home, but he would rather play than hear that we are working on his permanent home.  That said, now that he has "natural horsekeeping", he does not use the barn much.   He and the three "girls" have a combination of 24/7 outdoor living with pea gravel loafing areas, barefoot hoof trimming methods and mixed pasture, rock and trees for a paddock along with a run-in shelter.   They rarely use the shelter in winter, preferring snow and blizzard outside..... however they do use it often in the summer to get out of the sun, plus to escape driving rain and sleet.  Since he was "rescue", I had a horse chiropractor look at him a couple of days ago to be sure he is ready to go under saddle.  He does not mind it being put on or me riding him for short periods, but I wanted to be sure he did not have any muscular/skeletal pain issues.  He has a clean bill of health (with a few preferred massage spots)... so is ready to GO!  Will make more time for him but keep at the log house project.

Wild blueberry time!

Mid July brings lots of wild blueberries this year in the field next to the house.   Harley has added blueberry detection to his doggy skills and helps to find them, but also EATS them!!!  They are very tasty but small, so it takes lots of picking to get very many.  Bob is shown enjoying some on ice cream.   Ahhhh.

Porch soffit progress

Installing this soffit is making Bob a patient man.   He rests under where he's made progress.   It is a little tricky getting the pieces to fit snugly so we take our time and work through it.

Art imitates life?

This opening is on the east side of the house and will eventually be a bay window with a sit-in window seat.    For now the opening is still settling in and although the concrete piers are already installed under this section of porch, we are going to wait another year for the opening to finish this settling process before putting the window structure in.   In the meantime, Catherine cleaned, caulked and weatherstripped the spot in preparation for another winter season.  The space looked awfully BORING, so a little Folk art is now added.   Note the LARGE F for Folk and small a for art.....   Catherine had better not have her heart set on being contacted by the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.....    Harley poses in front of the mural but George refused (he has become a little pudgier than what the picture shows).

Happy 143rd Birthday Canada

We take a break at Angara to celebrate Canada Day.  In the absence of a flag pole, we improvise with a front and centre location under the arch.

Front archway work

Bob works on the cedar siding under the arch and we try positioning the "Angara" sign there.  We decide that it should instead hang from the arch, so we set about sourcing some hardware to do so.

Roadwork

Bob and Harley clear the trail into our neighbor's camp.   This hemlock came down roots and all and was found the afternoon after the Wednesday June 23 earthquake tremors that passed through this area.  We did not notice anything until the 5.0 event at the Quebec-Ontario border (north of Ottawa) was reported on the radio.   Catherine and Harley found this hemlock blocking the road that afternoon, but we don't know if that's what knocked it down.

Summertime!

It is June and summer solstice!  There is a profusion of daisies, buttercups and many other wildflowers everywhere.  Harley thinks that a dead fish smells much better but he looks at the flowers to humor Catherine.

Keeping the habitat

This partly dead sumac tree was destined to be cut down until this flock of cedar waxwings decided to use it in the mornings and evenings as a meeting place.   They appear groups of 10 to 30 to chatter and conduct feather grooming, then they disperse and go about their daily or nightly bird activities.   On its own it is not such an attractive feature just outside the east side, south end window - but as habitat for these beauties, it will stay until they are finished with it.

This time a moose?

This fresh print was at the bottom of the hill behind the house, on the way to the marshy area next to the river.  This is a large print and rounded at the heels,  maybe matching the moose that we have been seeing in the area?  There are some elk around as well but we have not spotted any this spring.

Preparation for parging

The trim work is now stained so that this last outside basement wall can be parged.  We plan to just parge and paint it with a stucco-like finish for now.   Note the horseshoe maintained in the "tips up" lucky orientation at the lower left of the doors.

Its hot out here

The hot hazy days of summer are arriving before the summer solstice.   Harley looks in the back door, it's time to go for a walk..... or maybe have a snooze?

Landscaping by Bob

Harley dashes about madly at the pile of fill when Bob uses the front end loader to smooth some of it out for landscaping and a wider parking area.   It seems that Harley's bones and other special buried treasures were secured in this pile.   He was wide eyed and frantic until Bob took a break so that he could dig up and relocate his things.   It must be the part beagle responsible for this characteristic.

Feline supervision

George seems a little put out that there is too high a proportion of work to cat petting going on.  He plops himself on to the drawings and glowers at us.

Bottom to top alignment

It took a couple of tries to align the partition wall for the bathroom with the flattened log beam above.  We sacrificed a couple of inches of width for the bathroom  on our second attempt to get a more centered alignment.

Time for laying turtle eggs

This gal was a little cranky about being moved to safety off of the roadway into Angara.   Catherine pushed her with a stick as she is of the snapping turtle variety to put her closer to the bank which has nice digging soil.   She did not appreciate the gesture, perhaps thinking that the vehicle could just WAIT for her.

Bearing column jack

This section of the main floor partition wall includes a bearing column with a jack that (like the king post and porch column jacks) is  adjusted in spring and fall for the settling of the walls.   The jack is shown being installed on the ply'd column which is embedded in the partition wall.    There are two of these under the white pine summer beam that runs lengthwise supporting the mid-point of the loft, it ranges from 13 inches diameter at the tip end to 23 inches diameter at the butt end.

Main floor interior walls

Here is partition stud wall construction, looking to the right towards the main floor bedroom, which will act as the spare man cave - the room where men go to watch big screen television (when we get around to getting one), or what ever it is that men do when they go into that room???  We need to leave the end wall off of the adjoining bathroom to bring in a one piece tub/shower unit.

Inside log dressing

Work continues inside Angara!  Now that we can keep the windows open again, its back to interior log dressing.  This is a finished inside corner after three coats of the Sansin Purity Interior Clear Satin product on the white pine logs.   The logs were treated initially by the builder with power washing, a Borax solution and solution of Timbertek (dilute exterior stain).  For this final interior finish, the logs were sanded with a random orbital sander plus hand sanding for the grooves in the corners and where the logs meet each other.  Note the nicely carved out receptacle slots - they just have "fish" wire in this spot.

Deer passing through?

Judging from the size of Catherine's hand, perhaps this is a large buck deer or maybe an elk?  The print was in the damp ground between the house and the well.

Just a little more snow

Just a few more snowflakes in the first week of May, but they did not last.  We have a nice pile of cedar logs here from the harvesting earlier this year that will be peeled and used for fencing to make horse paddocks.

Trail patrol

This part of the trail system is one of my favorites, lined with white birch.   They are especially lovely in the spring as the new pale green leaves begin to show.   May brings the bugs out too, Harley thinks that if I could just run faster that we'd stay ahead of them.   He has to settle for running back and forth since I am not as quick as he is.