As the leaves fall in the final days of autumn, so too fall the giants that bore them. 

Not everywhere, of course. But on the site of the future Hill family farm, the first signs of our future have been heralded with the felling of trees and the clearing of space for our new house. 

I don’t spend a lot of time promoting businesses through this column, but I would be proud to throw my endorsement behind our excavator, Scott Zablocky of Zablocky Excavating. 

Scott is one of those hard-working, old-school kind of guys who gets the job done right and fast. Not only that, but he’s been there to answer a lot of questions along the way and keep us in the know.

Advertisements aside, I was thrilled to see our little patch of woods start to take form as he sculpted it out and prepared it for the next steps of construction.

Since our lot is mostly woods, we had quite a pile of trees to harvest for future firewood. Aside from the trees, we also seem blessed by the Keystone State’s signature resource—rocks. Hopefully, as the foundation is dug we find a few less than have been unearthed thus far.

In the pioneering days, we would have been happy to have an abundance of rocks and trees to use for house materials. Today, I almost feel like we are cheating by just shopping for a modular home. 

My wife has already been informed that I plan to take a more traditional approach to our future workshop, timber framing it and using stone for footers and insulation around the woodstove. I’ll cheat and use metal on the roof, though. Even the old timers liked a sturdy tin roof.

In any case, I swear I’m not a glutton for punishment; I just like to have a hand in the process. I’m a fan of tried-and-true methods, be it building, farming or just good clean country living. Whether I bite off more work with the house or not, I’m guaranteed the labor that will come with moving our chicken houses and building a new fence, along with all of the other spring chores and checklists. I’m already behind on planting my onions for next year, can you believe it? 

But fortunately, despite ruining some of our garlic harvest from this year, we managed to get almost as much seed as we wanted, and got it in the ground just before the end of the month with a nice sprinkle of clover to keep it tidy in the spring. Do we still have more to do before winter falls? Of course. But for the time being, it’s nice to see progress where we’ve seen opposition for several years now. We didn’t want to be up against winter to get our house in, but as with the rest of our work, we get it done when we can. 

There are so many things to be grateful for in our situation. Soon we will have a house, we will be right next to the family farm where we do all of our work, and we won’t have to drive hours every day for a commute. We’ll be near our crops and animals and be out in the country, as we’ve always lived with a swath of state lands backing us up. 

The way out here the felling of trees proclaims anything from a warm home to the construction of a new one. With more trees growing around us all the time, it’s easy to ponder what they might be used for down the road. Perhaps they will heat our children’s hearth, or maybe support the roof they call their own one day.