2nd big round of work

Here I was thinking that construction and heavy equipment time was over on the farm. Boy - was I wrong! Some construction work around the house right now:

1) Flashing around the foundation of the living room and downstairs bedroom. During a really wet series of days a bit of water tends to seep into the basement, so the thought is that this flashing will help push the water about four feet away from the foundation and keep it away from the basement. Got my fingers crossed that this will work.

2) Replumbing the closed-loop geothermal heat loops. The system has not performed as well as hoped - during the winter the loops have been too cold, and during the summer too hot. Turns out that the way the manifold and trenches were connected up has probably been directing all of the water flow down one loop, thus getting only about 25% efficiency from the ground loops. Thus the manifold has been torn up and the pipes exposed; waiting on parts today.

But wait! That's not all! If you start bringing in heavy equipment, might as well do it up right! So I decided to have a pecan tree removed that's fallen into the hemlocks, remove the euonymus vines from the cedar behind the kitchen, and fix up the newly planted maple trees that haven't been looking so spiffy.

The cedar particularly looks great - I can't believe the difference in that. Unfortunately there wasn't good news on the maple trees; four of the 10 are not in good shape and will have to be removed. The nursery didn't do a good job and the trees were too deep in the root ball, so the root system is all messed up on them.