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I told you in my last blog about my first birthday wish. The following year, my wish was to start our house on the farm. That way I knew the day I started and could see how long it would take to finish it up. Peggy and I had been talking about where we wanted to build. Several places we talked about had to be scraped because when the creek flooded the water rolled into that area. I guess that is one reason the Lord held us off building, so we could see what we would be facing. After a lot of thought and prayer we decided to build across from where the creek cave is located I had been studying different ways to build where I could do most of the building myself to keep cost down. I had looked at straw bale housing, stress skin panels, metal frame housing, log cabins and a variety of others. One idea that I thought I might be able to do was pole built. Jeff, a guy in our church worked at the electric company and had 16' poles he said I could have. I decided to go that route. My first job was to set the poles and to set the poles I had to dig the holes. On my birthday, July 9, 2004 I turned the first dirt with my post hole digger. I had 9 holes to dig and it was not going to happen overnight. These were not little holes or shallow ones, but I was excited and felt like this was the start of us getting to move to the farm. I know a lot of our family and friends thought I was crazy. There were times I thought I was crazy, but I continued on. The boys did there fair share of digging also. I did get some help from Mr. P who had a fence post digger on three of the holes. The digger went down as far as it could and I had to hand dig the rest of the hole. Any help was great and made things a little bit easier. Where we were building was about 70-80 feet from the creek and was on a slope up toward the road. To lessen the chance that the house would flood we were going to build it on poles 8 foot out of the ground in the front. With the slope of the land the back would only be one foot out of the ground. Close to where we lived, a building had been taken down that was built on poles. I stopped there one day and talked to a guy working there about the poles. He said that I could have them. The boys and I loaded up the chain saw and went and cut them down. They were about 10 foot long and would work for several of our back poles. One day Jeff loaded up some of the poles he had. I now had the poles I needed for the foundation. Looking at those 16 foot poles I was wondering how I was going to get them upright and into the holes! The old saying, “Where there is a will there is a way” included Mr. P for me. Mr. P showed up with his tractor and he had a small boom on it that he used to lift up different things around his farm. We chained a pole on to the boom and raised it up. Slowly we moved it over to the first hole. As he moved it I held onto one end to keep it from tipping. At the hole I pushed down on the end to direct it in the hole as he raised the boom. To my surprise it went right in. Praise the Lord! We did all three front poles that way in a very short time. I was excited to get that done. It was amazing to see those huge poles pointing skyward.
The other six poles the boys and I put in. They were pretty easy to put in, but several we needed to take back out to enlarge the hole. We found that we could take a 3 foot metal pole and wrap a chain around it and the wood pole and pull them straight up. That was a lot easier than trying to hug it and lift it up.
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Posted by Anonymous
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