My word... has it really been four months?

 Apparently, like many things in life, updating a blog is a bit of a pain in the ass if you stop for a bit.  Stupid habits, and their need to be maintained.

The last four months have been a big time. As I write this, we're two days into the Spring of '21, so it's hard to believe that I last wrote a blog post while we still had snow on the ground. Of course, 2021 was a bizarre year in Southern weather--while we didn't have anything like what happened in Texas, we did get 12 inches of snow here in Nashville, and basically couldn't leave the house until it melted.  That was a hoot.

The puppies loved it, of course:

When I look at the photos, it's hard to believe this was just a few weeks ago:

We did have to make some hard decisions between sustainability and convenience, though.  I'll do a follow-up post about this, once I've finished this "hey I'm still alive!" post, because this has been a major subject of conversation in the last four months.  One example is that we swapped out the wood stove for a propane heater for now:

Unfortunately we hadn't stocked up enough firewood, so we were struggling to produce enough heat off the wood stove. We were also getting a bit too smoky in there, so we decided to just pull the wood stove out and plug the hole in the roof for now. We'll put one back in, but for now we're deciding between a better quality wood stove or learning to build a fireplace (and we're leaning towards learning how to build a fireplace).

On the utilities front, we made great progress though! 

Right? That's pretty uptown, ain't it? We've got a ceiling fan, electric lights, and a great battery bank on our solar setup now.  Not too shabby for a couple months' work!

If your brain went "wait, couple months?" then yeah... exactly. Hence why I need to do a follow-up talking about things like motivation and time management.  What, did you think living in the woods is easy? Shut up, city-jerk.

But not really, shit can be hard, man. This isn't all we've done, but it really does start to feel like it sometimes. Looking back on the last few months though, once the weather warmed up, we got a lot done really quickly.

For instance, we built a loft!

Holy storage space, Batman!

We also installed a sink that drains into a bucket:

Indoor plumbing comes later--for now it's just nice to be able to brush our teeth indoors.

And we built a new door:

We wanted a window, and the door we had was entirely too drafty, so we made a new one--two layers of OSB with insulation between. It's pretty snazzy.

We also decided to celebrate Spring by trying out something we saw online--a tankless propane water heater. Again, that follow-up post about time management will touch on this, but long story short, holy shit running hot water is amazing.

I think that about wraps up the updates... I have some great photos of hiking around on the land (we discovered some really amazing rock formations), and I have a couple of other posts planned to show off things we're working on--my woodland mesh network is becoming (in my opinion, at least) pretty impressive, so I want to show how that works.  Of course, I also want to talk about time management (as I've mentioned entirely too many times now), and I want to show off some of the larger purchases we're working towards.

But for now, I bid you farewell! Stay awesome, homesteaders and fantasizers, life outdoors continues to be awesome, even when it's a crapton of work.