Most of you are probably unaware, but we have been deeply embroiled in a debate about the foundation for our future house. Both of us would like to have a stone foundation for a variety of reasons. A stone foundation means we need A LOT of stone – many, many tons worth. Buying that much stone would be completely out of the question for our budget which leaves us with the unappealing prospect of quarrying it out of our woodlot. Digging and moving that much stone would take all winter when we need to be working timbers and means that we would need to clear a road into the woods to be able to get the stone out. We would also have to dig up a large chunk of the ridge which would mean clearing several trees and figuring out how to get rock up the ledge to the top tier of the ridge. Ugh. Thus our debate – do we quarry on our property or do a traditional concrete foundation? We’ve been going back and forth on this issue for several weeks.
Then, this past Sunday we saw the following ad in the Lawrence Journal World: “Scythe - includes spare blade. Also barn stuff. All for $50.”
We’re always looking for good tools and even a cheaper, heavier scythe would be put to good use on the farm, so we called. It took until Tuesday to make it out to look at the scythe.
When Jeremy arrived, he met the current owner - a wonderful older lady named Peggy. She took him into the barn to see the scythe and proceeded to tell him that the “barn stuff” listed in the ad included all of the following: a small stock tank, a garden cart, a digging/pry bar, a cider press and a hand cultivator. The scythe also turned out to be 2 scythes, 2 blades and a hand held brush cutter. Wow! Jeremy expressed his gratitude, put the scythes into the car and explained that he would have to come back with our truck or the hatchback to get the rest.
Fast forward a few hours. I get home from work and Jeremy shows me the scythes. They’re all a bit rusted, but in very salvageable condition. All 3 blades are stamped blades, not forged blades which means we will either have to peen out the edge a fair bit or continue to sharpen them with a file (and much more often). Jeremy rattled off the list of other things we needed to go pick up and my eyes kept getting bigger, and bigger and bigger. The scythes by themselves were easily worth the $50. I’m sure it was evident on my face that I couldn’t believe our luck. After dinner, we got in the matrix and drove back down to pick up the rest of the “barn stuff”.
Everything miraculously fit into the back of the matrix with the seats folded down (we were surprised to – this is why we bought a hatchback). After loading, we went to the house to tell Peggy thank you and so that I could meet her. When we got there, she was rolling a small compost tumbler out of the garage which she said we were welcome to have as part of the “barn stuff” also. We inquired about a set of scaffolding that was in the barn and she replied that she had bought it for $15 and would be happy to sell it to us for $15. Sold!
As we were saying goodbye and getting ready to drive home, we complimented her on the stone facing on her house. She explained that the stones came from the foundation excavation. Then she said that they had dug up a lot more stone when they recently re-did their water line and the stone was piled up at the end of a road into the woods (she pointed the road out). If we could use some stone, we were welcome to it.
At this point, I’m about to fall over in shock. Did she really just say that she had free stone? That all we needed to do was go pick it up? I looked at Jeremy and could tell that he was thinking the same thing. We calmly say that we’ll walk over and take a look. What we found was 2 piles of newly dug rock. The first was about 6 feet tall and 8 or 10 feet around. The second was about 4 feet tall and 6 or 8 feet around. There was also a 50 yard long, 2-3 foot tall windrow of older stone that had clearly been dumped there many years ago. In total, we were looking at enough stone to do the bath house foundation, the house foundation and likely the root cellar and barn foundations. It was all right there at the end of an easily drivable road, piled and waiting to be picked up. We couldn’t believe it.
We walked back up to the house to talk to Peggy. We asked if she was talking about just the new stone or all the stone. She laughed, looked around the yard at all the stones growing out of the ground and said, “take all you want – we have no shortage here!” Apparently the older stone came out of the foundation to the house when it was built in 1980. We asked if we could please pay her something for it and she flatly refused.
From here the only possible sticking point would be if we needed to move stone right now. We had planned to quarry stone in the winter after we finished the bath house. Taking a few weeks (at least) to move stone now would mean delaying that project to the point that we could easily run out of non-freezing weather. So we asked how long we had to pick up the rock. She said they weren’t going to sell the house until next March and we were welcome to pick it up anytime between now and then.
So, in short, we went looking for a scythe and found a foundation. Unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable.
In other news, we will be spending our winter ferrying many tons of rock from Peggy’s house to the farm where it will get sorted and stacked in preparation for building the foundation. If any of you have some free time and want some good productive exercise – let us know!
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