Gingerman and the daughter came home for the weekend. I had plans on not doing anything outside as we needed to get the Christmas decorations finished. Annmarie had her village all set up but the rest of the house had nothing but a bare tree. Saturday morning it only took about an hour to get all of the rest of our Christmas stuff set up. The Gingerman had brought his large chainsaw with big bar and he wanted some directions on which trees to cut. This gave me a great reason to abandon the Christmas setup (we were on the last thing). So I put on a vest and went outside, the weather was amazing, it was almost 50 F. I grabbed a chain and fired up the Kubota and we drove out to field #4b.

Way before we moved back, 18 years ago, someone had felled a bunch of large trees and then they pushed them next to the existing trees instead of removing or burning them. There has not been running water down that part of the field for a long time before we moved back. We have had running water now for almost five years from the spring above. I have been wanting to cut those trees up and burn them forever but they are so massive they won’t come out with the tractor and I tried to burn a few and only got a partial burn.

The Gingerman was able to make a few cuts before his saw heated up and quit working. So this gave me time to move the pieces out and start stacking them up. We opted to just keep the piles on each side so I did not have to try and carry any wood across the spring. I was able to drive the tractor through the ditch and onto the other side without difficulty.

This worked pretty great as the Gingerman kept helping me and the saw kept cooling off. So about the time I had everything on the pile he was able to cut a few more pieces. There were a couple of casualties. I managed to poke out one of the headlights from a branch sticking out of the burn pile. I was trying to get closer to dump off wood on the center of the pile. Near the end I used the tractor forks to break up dead branches from the live trees and managed to bend the backstop on the forks some. It still works just fine, I just twisted a part near the top of the backstop.

I ended up feeding the cows a large bale then dropped off the forks and the weight bucket on the 3 point hitch. The tractor dealer is coming out this week to take it in for some annual maintenance. I have a list of items that need to be repaired also that I will tape to the steering wheel tomorrow.

I am hopeful that Mr Rainman can come out one day this next week and finish cleaning up the small branches near the spring and hopefully we will have a burn day soon. We want to burn both piles.

That only took a couple of hours and I decided to get started on creating our vanity for the bathroom remodel. So I started tearing apart the dresser and removing the bottoms from all of the drawers. Normally, I would not do that but this had been inhabited by a lot of mice. So I sanded the entire cabinet inside and out. I want the vanity to look aged so I half sanded the finish. I will clean it up then stain over it all and then seal it up. It should still look very old. We need to order new handles and drawer pulls. I still have one drawer to tear apart but someone at some point has already tried to repair the dresser. So I have been sanding glue and chipping drawer bottom out of the grooves. Originally, those bottoms would have been held in place by two nails at the back of the drawer. They should have been super easy to remove. Instead they had a lot of glue and extra nails. The last drawer has OSB glued to the bottom! This will be the drawer that I cut part out for the plumbing. I will have to do this to one of the top half size drawers also. They will be super narrow in the front, 6-8” at most.

I will draw out the holes on the top and then drill them out. This way I can just take the vanity to the stone countertop place and have them match the top shape and the holes.