Fortress of Social Isolation AKA Zombie Free Zone

Busy- having a great deal to do.

That is what the dictionary says. I say that it, is us. We have been going out to our property nearly every day to get things done as we wait for the construction to begin. Projects that we can do on our own.

One of our big projects was to clear under our giant oak trees. We are thinking that this area would be our yard. I bought a tractor to help with so many of the projects and if you look behind it you can see what the area under the oaks look like.

There are hundreds of small trees that we need to remove. Our son came out one day and cut most of them down.

Those three pictures show the progress we made over a three week period to remove the downed trees. Once the trees were gone we had around 150 tree stumps. So we rented a stump grinder for the day and went to work removing those. It took a solid 7 hours of continuous grinding to get them all.

This was a great little unit and it went threw the stumps like crazy. Once the stumps were gone we did a little bit of raking and cleaning up of the area until we had our finished project. 

It looked amazing. Now we need to plant some grass and then we will have a great area for the grandkids to play in.

We built a new driveway to access our property. It was on a hill and everytime it would rain heavily (and that happens a lot here) it would wash out.

I can fix it and I have the means to do it. It only takes 1 to 2 hours to do that with my ATV.

It looks good after I grade it but each time I do that it feels like the gravel gets softer and softer. Many times I would have to put the truck into 4 wheel drive so that I wouldn't get stuck halfway up the hill. Tired of dealing with that, we decided to bite the bullet and pave it. We called and got a bid and they said that they could have it done in a couple of days.

This is the look before they started working on it.

It looks great. As we felt that that would solve our problem of traction and washing out, we still felt like we would have a problem on the left side. So that created another job for us. Drain tile. So Lisa and I got some drain tile and started to trench along the side of the driveway.

It was 100 feet, uphill, both ways. That's what we will tell the grandkids anyways.

It always feels good to get one project done. Then we can get started on the next.

While we have been doing our projects, they have finally started working on our bungalow. They started with prepping the site and then they had to dismantle half of our barn to finally begin building the new section.

All in all it is really coming together now. We took a drive to see if the resident eagles have survived the storms we had lately.

We were amazed that that tree is still standing. I also took a couple of days to travel to Indianapolis to get our storm shelter. Our bungalow does not have a basement and in this part of the country you get a lot of storms. So for piece of mind we found a fiberglass underground storm shelter that we will bury next to the bungalow for emergencies.

Before you get your hopes up,it only holds eight people. So those people who are going to be saved should have already got their notifications in the mail. Sorry to those who didn't get their notifications.

Well that is it for now. We remain busier than ever and hope to be able to live in this over the winter. With the virus thing, we feel that it isn't a good winter to be traveling around.

TTFN.