August 12,   2017

    After purchasing the saw mill, we began to mill wood right away.  We started with some of the
many trees that we had cut down in the beginning of the summer. The first ones we cut were
10' long 6 x 6 beams.  They will probably be used later for a lean-to for the drying wood.
After we mill the wood it has to dry for ideally 1 year. But our wood has already been outside for quite some time, so it just needs to acclimate to the climate.
    Dan and Daniel built a base to lay all of the wood on to completely dry out and acclimate.

Once the base was completely level, which was not as easy to do as it sounds, we could begin stacking the cut wood.

So we continued to mill the wood and carry it over to the stack.

We were originally milling sweet gum trees. Dan also wanted to use western red cedar for our house.  He found that beams made of western red cedar were pretty expensive, and the amount of beams we needed for the house would run us about $15,000.00 . So he needed to go to plan B.  After doing some research, he learned that telephone poles were usually made of western red cedar. So he searched on Craigslist and found a guy named Mike who had a bunch of poles for sale.

Mike

So Dan and Daniel went to visit Mike and found that he had over a hundred telephone poles and he wanted $50.00 for each one. WOW. That's a big difference in price.  That was a major reason that Dan wanted to buy a saw mill in the first place and do it himself. He knew it would be so much more economical.

So, they made many trips back and forth to Mike's house and before we knew it, we were milling telephone poles.

The poles were each between 21' and 34' long.  So after getting them to our property by trailer, we would drag them by truck over to the saw mill.  Then we would roll the pole over to where the mill could pick it up.

 Once the pole was on the mill, Christina would run the metal detector over the entire pole before Dan began cutting.  If he cut into any metal, it would wreck the saw blade. 

We pulled out many nails, staples, screws, and even bullets.

                                                

Bullets

After the pole was free of metal, Dan would start cutting it to the size he needed. Then we would carry it over to the pile to dry out.

August 4th and 5th     

      Dan has been researching saw mills for quite some time now.  He noticed a Wood Mizer for sale up in Maine.  So he decided to take a weekend trip up there to check it out.  He asked the kids if
anyone would like to go for a really long ride. When Juliana found out that there was a pool at the
hotel...she was in.  So they set off for the weekend.  When they were close to Maine, they made a stop at the auto parts store for the right adapter for the lights  to be attached to the back of the saw mill as it was being towed home.  They also needed an extender for the hitch.  And after a few bathroom breaks, they were back on the road.  The saw mill turned out to be just what we needed. So they made the purchase, hooked up the saw mill to the back of the truck, and headed back to NJ.
They did need to make one more stop, though. LOBSTER! After all, you can't go to Maine without having lobster.

And ice cream apparently....

Cutting down trees

April 21, 2017   Today was the first day we were going to clear the trees along the street so the electric company could run the wires for us.  We rented a high reach and a skid-steer.  We made stop signs and slow signs.  We had safety vests, hard hats, chain saws and plenty of gatorade, water and snacks.

Scary group, huh?

We had roughly 40 trees to drop over the course of a 3-day weekend. Day 1 went very well.

Day 2  Didn't go very well.  Someone stopped by and asked if we had permits to do this work. They called the police and by 8am we were shut down. We were told we needed proper signs, a traffic plan submitted to the police, and our flaggers had to be over 18 years old.  So, since we had the equipment rented for the weekend, we decided to put it to good use. We went back onto our property and cut down 13 trees on the right side that needed to come down.

We had to rework our plan. We submitted a traffic plan to the police, rented proper signs, re-rented the machines and set our new date for May 5th, 6th and 7th.

Traffic Plan

May 5, 2017 We started by 7:00 am.  Dan was in the high reach and he would trim up the top of the trees. When he was finished, he would give the signal and all of the younger kids would run into the street and drag the branches out of the road. They drug them onto the property and threw them into a big pile. This became a bird sanctuary. By the end of the weekend, we built 3 enormous sanctuaries.

When the top of the tree was gone, Dan would come down and cut the trunk down. Then he and Daniel would cut the trunk into pieces that Katie could pick up with the skid steer. Everyone agreed that Katie had the best job driving that little machine.

She would drive the logs to the back of the property. (Future firewood)

We didn't really have any problems all weekend. Although it rained a little. And every once in awhile, someone would stop and ask if we had permits.  Or they wanted to know if Joanna was over 18, because she was one of the flaggers.  I was the other flagger and no one stopped to ask me if I was over 18.  By Sunday night we had taken down 41 trees. We even cleaned up the road when we were done.