Finished cleaning up
the organic material littering the ground at the sauna building site. Ended up with one enormous brush pile to be
burned once the stumps are put on top.
Also ended up with about 6½ cords of prime hardwood firewood… a good
mixture of black cherry, white and red oak, beech, and maple, that has to be
cut to length, split, and stacked in the woodshed before September 2016. If I start now, should be done by then. Dolores drank another 12 gallons of propane
last week. First little stump I dug out
down at the sauna site also uncovered a thousand pound rock… that I got out of
the ground just enough to block my exit route back up the hill. With visions of the Kubota spending the rest
of the week marooned, crossed my fingers and hooked up my big logging chain and
come-along… which moved the rock just enough for me to escape for lunch. Spent the entire afternoon digging out the
oak stump that was right in the wrong place.
Maneuvering around the stump gave me many, many gray hairs… even wearing
the Kubota’s seat belt. Eventually got
the stump loose, and found out why my brother keeps urging me to put a winch on
the tractor. Took every chain I had, and
countless resets, to drag the stump, using the backhoe, up the hill far enough
that I could then tow it the rest of the way to the burn pile. As a side note, there ain’t no way I’m going
to get the footers for the sauna down to the elevation called for on the site
plan. Good thing it’s supposed to rain
for the next two days, as some redesign is definitely needed.