Cabin Crafted

I moved into an apartment between the house under construction and my new job.  We moved DH and Son 2 into an apartment in Virginia Beach until DH was ready to retire and we visited back and forth across the state every three or four weeks for almost 3 years.

In the meantime, the house was being built with Son1, DIL, and anyone he could enlist including me on occasion installing the wood siding in rooms and closets, baseboards and the interior side of the logs oiled with boiled linseed oil, floors laid, homemade floor wax created on a hotplate on the back deck. Much of the stone work had already been d one by him and DIL, what was left was finished after we moved in.

The house wasn’t quite finished, but their lease and mine were up and we began an interesting couple of months subletting, house sitting, and other alternative living arrangements while Son 1 was struggling to get the house to the point where we could get a temporary move in permit.  That day came almost 16 months after I had moved here and I was still working, hoping to retire again in the next year or so. Our exploration of our area showed us that the farm that we bought is only a few miles from the farm on which my maternal grandfather was born and raised.

Once DH retired and we moved the rest of our furniture to the mountains, I worked for another 7 months and retired with him and the farm blog was begun.  First, we planted fruit trees, beyond the coop in part of the area that had been garden, the garden was reworked to a size I thought I could handle on my own.  Then we bought a coop and I got the new chicken owner syndrome and went from a few chicks to way too many and too many of them turned out to be randy little roosters.

Most of my life from my late teen years on, I had a vegetable garden of some form, usually just a small corner of the urban yard, but that was the extent of my farming experience.  So here I was on 30 acres with chickens, at least half of them young roosters that couldn’t stay, fruit trees that the deer were eating, a huge vegetable garden that I couldn’t keep up with and lots to learn.  We had thought about raising horses and enough cows to keep us and family in beef, but we never got the fencing done.  We did take riding lessons.  Fortunately, for the first few years, Son 1 and his family still lived in the area and he was more than willing to dispatch the young roosters while I learned to help.  It still isn’t something I like to do, but I can get much more involved in the process, preparing them for the freezer.

Over the years, the garden has been altered, fenced, and topped with hot wire to keep the deer out.  I have learned to buy only female chicks and limit the number to no more than 9 or 10.  The success with the garden encouraged me to go beyond making jam and learning to can and freeze the bounty.

During the period prior to DH retiring and moving here, I connected with a knitting group and learned to spin.  One of the friends I made through knitting, made soap, and she generously taught me one afternoon, leading me to make more of our self and house care products, and Cabin Crafted Shop was born.  And the spinning skills connected me with a local Historical site and my adventure in living history as a spinner during the Revolutionary War period began.

That brings us to the present, living in social isolation during the pandemic, enjoying the spoils of the garden and orchard, the eggs from the hens, practicing the skills I have learned to make gifts and to try to earn a little bit of pocket money from these skills.  This has been my journal over the years, my record of success and failure.  I hope you enjoyed this walk down memory lane.

A few of you may have followed my blog from the very beginning, however, I changed blog platforms and lost many of the earliest posts, then did an adjustment to Son 1’s server and we lost another chunk.  So, some of this may be familiar to some of you, to others, brand new.

For at least a decade before we relocated to our farm in the mountains of southwest Virginia, and we still lived on the east coast of Virginia where I grew up and where we raised our three children, DH would ask me what I wanted for various gift giving times, and I always answered, “A cabin in the woods.”  Several “cabins” entered as a result, a cabin similar to but smaller than ours on the edge of a lake under a mountain as a painting, a log cabin bird house with pine cone trees, a wood pile and a tiny axe with a sign in the front that says “A cabin in the woods.” 

We talked about mountain property, but were still both working and were not in the tax bracket that would allow a vacation second home.  Then I retired from the school system, totally burned out, but too young to get Medicare by a decade, so I went to work part time for an educational non profit to keep us with health insurance. 

Around that time, DH had inherited from his father’s estate and we had begun looking for land or a house in the mountains, much farther south and west of where we had originally thought we might retire, and after two trips to meet with two different realtors, we found our farm, no house and three times more acreage than we had thought about buying.  With the second realtor, who took the time to research and locate properties, emailing us links to look at, we had a list of about 10 to look at one mid December weekend in 2004.  This property was the third of the day and we almost didn’t look further, but he had gone to so much trouble that we continued looking (all the while listening to an interminable stream of Christmas music from his car radio).  We never found some of the properties, one, we liked was being leased out to a cattle raiser that didn’t want to lose his pasture, so he kept taking down the signs, but we came back to this land, made an offer, returned to Virginia Beach, and a week later, left for Florida to see our daughter for Christmas.  The offer was accepted and the following month we returned to close on our new farm, giving the prior owner a couple months use to prepare to move her herd of miniature horses to new pasture.  We decided if we liked the property in dead of winter, we would love it in spring and summer and we were right.

We now had land with no well, no electricity, no house and a house with a mortgage we were living in. At that time FSBO (for sale by owner) was a big thing and there was a small company in Virginia Beach that would put your listing on MLS and published in a FSBO biweekly magazine for a relatively small flat fee.  We did some painting, some serious clean up of lawn, beds, and listed it for more than we hoped to get, and it sold the first weekend.  Now we had no house on the farm, jobs in Virginia Beach, no house in that area and started looking for a rental.  We found a small 3 bedroom house to rent and moved in.  It was during that year we made monthly trips to meet with well drillers, figure out how to get the power easement, decide where the house placement would be, meet with the design team for the log home company, buy the logs, have them delivered, and construction begun, and I found out that to keep working, it would have to be full time.  An idea was tossed around that if I was going to have to work full time, I should go back in education and applied for a position here in the mountains, for which I was hired.  Son 1 and his family had relocated to this area to supervise construction of our log home and do all the stone work and finish carpentry after the shell was erected.  During the time they were waiting for it to be at a point they could begin the stone work, they worked on the land, dug trenches for buried electric lines, and water pipes from the well, and made the garden, much larger than I ended up using.

To be continued …