I got home tonight from a busy day at work and thought I’d seek some agricultural therapy. My dad got me a new string trimmer last weekend and I was itching to see if I could start it and wreck havoc on some overgrown parts of the farm. But first I headed to the well house to grab my safety glasses. I was just about to open the door when I looked down and saw this:

“Huh,” I actually said out loud. Truth is, I’d been expecting a snake in this structure since I bought the property. It’s cool and damp and home to mice, and I always felt the energy of a snake whenever I went in it. And here he was.

Unfortunately, he presented me with a quandry. I have a great respect for snakes, and know that they are excellent predators for eliminating rats and mice and other undesirables. But I also keep poultry, some of which are still small enough that they’d be an easy lunch. So what to do? I didn’t really know. All I really could think of was trying to temporarily displace this snake so I could grab my safety glasses and start weed whacking.

I grabbed a shovel that was in the wellhouse and chased him out. It was a laborious process, moving this heavy churning mass with a shovel. In truth, I am grateful to this snake because I’d spent a lot of time today thinking about my yet-to-be-built chicken coop, and by watching how this snake moved, I gained a new understanding of the measures I must undertake to predator-proof my enclosure. I mean, this thing went straight up the wall and could squeeze through the quarter inch between the door and the threshold. It was beautiful, and impressive.

Once I got the snake outside, I had no luck capturing him in a bucket. So I used my shovel to toss him a few feet at a time toward the back of the property. What is absolutely uncanny is that each time he landed, with a thud that sounded like a thick rope hitting a deck, he was always pointed toward the wellhouse and began immediately to slither toward it. It was baffling. So I kept tossing him, further and further from the building, to the edge of the field. I tried to stuff him in the fox hole, figuring the two could keep each other company, but he wouldn’t go. And then I gave up because I signed up for a hot date with a string trimmer, not a black snake.

With that level of determination, he will no doubt be back. And I am pleased to make his acquaintance. We will just have to find some way to coexist, because I store my beer in the wellhouse and damned if this five-foot long black reptile is going to come between me and my Midas Touch.

Today my farm took a giant leap forward in credibility with the arrival of my first livestock: 32 guinea keets. After having had two tick bites already this season, I decided to go the natural pest control route with these little guys. Guineas have a reputation for eating all sorts of bugs, snakes, mice and other undesirables—without scratching as destructively as can chickens. They also make a loud, obnoxious alarm cry that has earned them the nickname “farmer’s watchdog.”

At 8:10 this morning I was on the way out the door to work when I got the call from the postmaster of the little rural outpost office that handles my mail. I sped up the road to receive a small box full of raucous peeping and beady peeking eyeballs. All the way from Murray McMurray Hatchery in Iowa my little babies had flown, having not had anything to eat or drink from when they hatched at 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday, May 4. Baby poultry feed off their yolk sacks for a day or so after hatching, which nourishes them through the trip.

Yes, 32 birds in the space of shoebox…but that’s actually what allows them to survive their journey. By being so tightly packed, they can conserve their body heat. I have at least five different colors of guineas, and I can identify pearls, whites, lavenders. The other two variations are somewhat perplexing…perhaps buff and royal purple?

I was expecting to open the box to some losses, but all birds were up and vigorous and ate and drank immediately after I placed them in their brooder. Building a house sure comes in handy when raising poultry—all these giant cardboard appliance boxes make perfect first homes!

My mom took great care of the babies on their first day home while I was at work. She even e-mailed to say that a couple of bugs fell in the box and the birds ate them right up! How precocious are these little pretties!

All this excitement has them a bit tuckered, and they look absolutely hilarious when they fall over and pass out. No this bird isn’t dead, he’s sleeping!

Stay tuned as the birds navigate their potentially challenging first few weeks of life. They are supposedly more fragile than chicks, so I steel myself, like any farmer, to the possibility of loss.

But, I am super excited to now be able to write less about house construction and more about the things I’ve been wanting to do at this home!

Much has happen in the last two weeks. My builder emerged from the holidays like a house on fire (knock on wood) and there has been a steady stream of tradesmen through the house. The siding guys completed much of the horizontal siding. Taking my cue from the old wood siding on the well house, I went with a 5″reveal on the HardiPlank to approximate the look of an older home. It’s primed and ready for paint, though a neighbor stopped by the other night to tell me how much she loved the color of it as is!

I’ve been kept very busy figuring out my electrical plan, including phone/tv and data cables, the blue and black wires shown above, dangling in the laundry room awaiting eventual hookup. I’ve also plotted out all my light fixtures and exactly where they need to be hung, and walked the house many, many times “practicing” tuning on light switches to make sure their locations make sense.

One of the small joys of building a home is that I get to put things exactly where I want them. In many ways, this house is sized to fit me. From the placement of outlets and switches to the length of the bathtubs to the height of the showers and the head room above the toilet in the master bath—above—I’ve used my own body as a measuring tape.

Insulation went in today, and I was amazed that all the exterior walls and roof were accomplished in one day. The house feels different now—fluffier! I am particularly taken with the shape that’s emerging in the large gable dormer that’s in my upstairs bedroom:

Next week we say goodbye to the studs and hello to real walls as drywall starts on Jan. 25.  My builder wrapped the faux beams in the kitchen in preparation.

Other changes include the build-out of the porch. The front porch is getting beefed up with a drop beam, weightier paneled columns, and the tounge and groove floor and ceiling pine is ready and waiting in the garage. I won’t even get into the hours of consternation and drama that went into figuring out how to finish this porch. It was a challenge!

In the meantime, seed catalogs are pouring into my mailbox and the recent warm up has me dreaming of planting time. I can’t wait until next summer when I can come home from work, take off my heels and dress clothes, and walk right out the door to my garden. I have a feeling it’s going to be great.

I’ve searched for an old mantle for at least five years. When I lived in my apartment, I wanted a mantle to make a focal wall and add some architectural interest to an otherwise character-bereft space. I set up CraigsList feeds to scope out any old mantles offered for sale. I searched and hunted but never found a mantle that made me pull the trigger.

And then last May, a mantle found me. I was up at my house, before I closed on it, after the previous owner had held a yard sale to clear out her belongings. There propped up against the wellhouse was the most beautiful old mantle I had ever seen. I loved its proportions, its old black paint, everything. Turns out it was for sale by the man who had helped orchestrate the sale of the farm to me–the brother-in-law of my home’s owner. I asked him how much he wanted for it, and at the time felt too directionless to accept his offer. The mantle disappeared, but didn’t leave my mind.

All summer I thought about it. And then when I got to the point with the house where I needed to figure out what to do to the interior fireplace bricks and potential hearth, I knew I had the perfect mantle in mind. I called up the man, who’s a woodworker, and went down to his shop. We struck a deal, and on Saturday he delivered the mantle back to the farm. My parents and I horsed it into the house and against the bricks. Miraculously, it’s fit was darn near close to perfect. And  I love it.

Turns out its previous owner had removed it from a home built in 1840 in Farmville, Virginia. It still has its original coat of black paint on it, which I’ve heard is incredibly rare for a mantle that old. The paint is crackled and gorgeous, and all I plan to do to the mantle is wash it down and wax it to bring out the beautifully faded finish and exposed wood grain. I think I will add a big bluestone hearth below it, and a cute little Jotul stove similar to the one I fell in love with in Alaska. After I paint or parge the bricks, it should be pretty neat.

I made a change from the plans and decided to keep the kitchen and living room open to each other, instead of building stub walls with five-foot pocket doors as I originally drew. I think it’s an interesting effect, to enter into the lower ceilinged, cozy living space that the opens up into the vaulted ceiling in the kitchen. We’ll see. If I change my mind, these are easy walls to add after the fact.

On Sunday, I had my first porch picnic with my parents. The porch is now officially broken in! We’d gone up to try the mantle on for size before I cleaned it up, and ended up staying all day picking up leaves. Dad blew them into piles, Mom and I picked them up and put them in the bucket of the tractor, and then I drove them down into the woods and dumped them. I had quite a massive pile by the time I was done, and I am keeping them all piled up so that they’ll hopefully decompose into very nutritious leaf mold for next year’s garden. It was a fun, gorgeous day, and it felt good to be looking after the house. We had a gorgeous pink sunset, which I enjoyed from the new front porch.