There are only two months to go before the other half of Team Buckner moves to the farm.  The reality is that the house is barely ready for Kristin and I, even though we are only inhabiting 250 square feet of it for the foreseeable future.  The house is about 1600 square feet total.

Our little “apartment” holds the wood stove (our only source of heat), our new fridge, toaster oven, bed, two tables, a dog, a cat, and the day to day possessions of the two of us.  The place is pretty snug, but we are getting used to navigating it.

We now have running water, but no hot water heater.  We also have power, but only one working outlet.  Small steps seem to take forever, but in the larger picture the pace is not really all that bad.

The rest of the house is in a state of rotten.  The floors collapsed or were in the process of collapsing.  All of the timbers that hold up the house frame have been eaten away by water and termites.  They literally crumble into dust when touched.

The original construction of the destroyed parts of the house was done with any available materials.  The pilings that hold up the place are merely stacks of field rocks and random bricks.  One section of the house is held up with two scrap pieces of firewood.

In order for Noel and Danielle to take residence in the upstairs portion of the house, the bottom level has to be rebuilt in order to hold the weight of two people and their stuff.  At the moment it would be sketchy to even think about living above the disaster.

I’m not sure how the stairs are even held up.  They float above the dirt floor like a ghostly transporter to the upper floor.

The large chimney was built on top of a pile of rocks with no other support.  It is no wonder that the chimney itself is turning into its own pile of rocks.

The floors came out pretty easily with the help of a sledge hammer and reciprocating saw.  Mike and Noel tore it up in a short period of time.

We found evidence of other residents.  A pile of deer ribs, half a corn cob and a turtle shell told the tale of a scavenger living among us.

Another entrance to the house has been consumed by water damage.  A ruptured pipe under the house and a leaking roof provide plenty of standing water and rot.

Outside the house Danielle, Noel and I also found time to scour the woods for downed cedar trees.  These will be used for fence posts to hold in the goats and keep out the deer.

Planting time is coming soon, and the decision to take on a farming apprentice in February (more on that later!) is making the house and land preparations all the more urgent.  I have been hauling horse manure and cardboard like a crazy person, getting the building blocks for the farm beds together.  Let’s start the countdown…

Trying to stop leaks on an old rotted house is an interesting process.  Figuring out where to start is also interesting in that I don’t really have much experience doing shingle roof repair.  I worked for a year doing tear-offs and replacement roofs on power plants and a Corning facility, but that did not prepare me to do flashing on chimneys or replace asphalt shingles.

It took me an entire day just to replace two sides of chimney flashing and repair the shingles that I had ripped up around it.  All the old flashing was just a pile of rust.  It was held together by layers of decaying silicone caulk and fragments of termite digested wood.  There was also a nice helping of orange spray sealant foam that served no purpose except to develop holes and hold water in those holes.

I had to use extra roofing tar just to fill in some of the brick joints.  I will mortar the rest of the chimney when I get a chance but just wanted to get the thing to stop leaking.

The other side was a horror show of four layers of shingles and a half dozen previous repair attempts.

This repair is anything but pretty but it is sealed and tight.

In new house news, we marked out the lines with our builder Malcolm Duff.

Hopefully the construction will start in a few weeks.

Every time we go out to the land, we learn about a “blue million” new things.  This last weekend we learned about the elaborate trail system through the woods, where the natural springs are, where the home site is where our 77 year old neighbor, Don Buckner, was born.

We learned that that same neighbor was featured in a Chatham County Herald article in 1980 where he talked about doing some of the same things we are about to get ourselves into.  The article was all about organic agriculture, resource conservation and energy effeciency.  Windmills, solar hot water, woodlot management… Sound familiar?

On August 31st we leave Wilmington for the land in Silk Hope. The replacement produce manager has been hired on at Tidal Creek. Kristin is working out her work plans. Inspections for septic and electric are going on this week, and we hope to have final house plans in our hands by this Friday.

The plan is to live in part of the old house while we build the new house. We’ll work on parts of the old house in order that it is more livable for Danielle and Noel when they arrive in the winter. For now we are ripping out the water logged wall boards, fixing the leaky roof and generally making the house not so much of a mold and mildew factory. The hope is to make the place livable for friends and family in the future, so repairs need to be of pretty consistent quality.

I spent some of this weekend clearing some of the vines that had grown into all of the windows and parts of the roof. The porch roof is starting to separate from the house because the vines grew up between the house and the singles.

The roof on the back of the house has some bad leak issues. Some old fixes have no become real problems.

And siding is coming apart where water now runs into the house…

…exposing insulation and interior wood…

…providing great habitat for termites.

And the worst part is the unintentional skylight in the side porch’s roof. It really adds aesthetic value to the place. And the aesthetic smell of wet fiberglass insulation makes it a real keeper.

The inside of the house is another battle. From a neighbor’s description of the place, it is basically layer upon layer of fixes, cover-ups and DIY patches. Once I started tearing out some old paperboard, I could see what he was talking about. The existing roof is built over at least one other roof. I haven’t gotten far enough into to everything to see what else is involved. It is quite funny so far. How all the pieces of wood fit together is also great comedy. I felt like I was in a tree fort that a bunch of neighborhood kids put together out of scrap board and bent nails.

But all is not old. We received our first delivery of AAC block which will become the first floor of the new house.

While all this fixing up of the old house, building the new house and starting the new job is going on, we’re also supposed to be starting a farm. More on that soon…