Tree In The Road

After a bit of real estate work (a couple of offers in the works) we got back over to Waterville today. We were hoping to get more of the Sawmill Shed site leveled but it was too wet after the deluge of last night. I think we are going to be declared a rain forest area soon. Anyway we had another tree come down across the road up to the field so we had more than enough to do. It was a good sized one which snapped off about 25 feet above the ground by my estimate. So we had no choice but to start cutting. Caroline moved the branches out of the way while I did the chainsaw thing. Actually took a surprisingly short time to get the branches off and cut it into 12 foot segments. We are going to need a dozen 12 foot 6 x 6's for the shed so we figured we might as well start cutting them. Also 12 feet is the longest the sawmill can handle without adding it's extension. So it seemed like a good length.

Unfortunately we realized that we didn't have all the tools we needed to set up the sawmill, and since I needed to talk to a client, I went back home and did some quick real estate work before heading back with all the tools I thought we would need. Caroline stayed and stained the 3rd side of the shed. Next step on that will be to get a longer ladder than we currently own and start on the top. It also appears to be safe to do the front since the baby birds have not been in evidence. They are probably off having their own babies by now.

We wheeled out the sawmill and set it up at the other side of the driveway. Leveling took a bit of time but we found that all in all it was better to set it up in the Summer than in February when it's really cold. We had a couple of little problems with setup but we were ready to go relatively quickly. We managed to get the first log on and started squaring it up. After awhile we realized that working in the sun was really beating us down so we gave up when we discovered that the cant we were forming is a bit out of square. We'll pick up where we left off tomorrow with any luck.