How has it only been two weeks since I last reached out to say hello? With all that is going on in the world it feels like our last email update was two years ago! Back then, it was October and it was freezing cold and snowing day after day. Now we’re into November… and the temperatures have been back up in the 60s and 70s for the past week! We’ve enjoyed the last hurrah of summer/fall and the projects it allowed us to work on comfortably.
First and foremost, our packshed is now insulated! Hurrah!
Jeremy and Matthew work on clearing things out and getting organized.
The toughest part of the project was that we needed to move the fruiting chamber away from the back wall. We’d built it in place right next to the wall – as in, you couldn’t slip a piece of paper between the walk-in and the posts of the building! Amazingly there was enough of a gap at the very bottom to get a chain through so Jeremy managed to get a chain wrapped around the whole thing. He hooked that up to the skidsteer and then slowly dragged it away from the wall.
Adjusting the chain.
Part of the difficulty was this water pump was INSIDE the fruiting chamber! We had to cut a hole in the wall for that to pass through. Once the chamber was dragged far enough over so the pump was in the cut out, we propped the chain up high enough to pass over the top of the pump on the chamber’s last foot of travel. Phew! It worked!
The pump escapes from the fruiting chamber!
Once that was done, all the walls were accessible and the insulation guy came out to insulate!
Checking on the progress after day 1.
All done!
We’re just about snug-as-a-bug in here now. There are two new windows Jeremy framed in that we’ll add at some point. We also framed in three doorways on the north wall. One of them will be going to the new fruiting chamber when we get to that. The other two will go to future fruiting chambers… if we ever do that! For now we’ll just pop some rigid insulation pieces in the door way and pretend it’s a regular wall.
This last week was very stressful and difficult for most people. When things feel out of control one of my coping mechanisms is to clean and organize – so thank goodness I had a BIG cleaning and organizing job on my hands after the insulation was finished Thursday morning. I lost myself for hours moving things around and setting up new configurations in the space. It helped pass the time until the good news was finally announced!
We feel relief and we also recognize how much work there is to be done. Not only is a farmer’s work never done, but our work as citizens of this country is never done.
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