Planning Day on the Farm

On Saturday Ethan, myself, and the kids headed out to the farm to meet up with an engineer who was going to do our perk test for our septic system. When he got out there, we discussed our plans for the property and helped pick out where we wanted to put the septic system. (He showed us the best direction for it, and we fine tuned the placement.)

Because it can't be driven on, shouldn't be grazed, and shouldn't have trees planted around it, we picked a spot by the fence line that would be a bit out of the way. We are going to look at planting native prairie grasses and wildflowers over that area to keep it low maintenance and have it be another thing to set off our farm . Ethan came up with that idea, and I think it is a great one!

The engineer worked about an hour and a half, so we also used that time to do some work. We had brought out a bunch of metal fence posts that we used to stake out the position of our house. Caleb was a great helper and felt quite involved when we let him deliver the posts to where we needed them. Hannah was quite content to walk around with her hands in her pockets, step in puddles, and look at the ants franticly try to rebuild their foot high ant hills that got mowed down. (They won't have the years needed it took to get them to that point though!)

This picture shows the area we staked out. You can click on it to enlarge it. In the background you can see the tip of a house. This is one of the two houses visible from our property. We will be planting a windbreak on that side though, so that house will eventually be out of view.Here is a picture of the second house visible from our property. This would be seen by looking toward the entrance of the lane to our house. Ethan wants to put up the hay shed along the fence line by that entrance, so this house would also be out of view from our house. They do have a really neat barn on the left though, so maybe we could place the shed just right to block the house but see the barn!Although it wasn't raining out, it was quite cool and very sloshy. Even so, the kids had a fun time and we got a lot done.

Things are starting to come together on the construction front now. We have our builder picked out, various bids coming in, and materials lists forming. Hopefully within the next week or week and a half we can have everything signed and submitted to the lender to get our construction loan rolling.