we buy a pipe line

 As much as we love our cows, we were not going to be milking 20+ cows by hand!

We needed a pipe line. Those things are expensive, but then again so is starting a dairy farm. But how we got this gem is great.
My husband grew up in this town. He knows all the dairy farmers, and most everyone who lives in town. But I guess when your family has lived in town for 8 generations, you get to be known. Anyways...
We ran into a fellow local dairy farmer, and he was asking how things were going. He knew we had just bought a farm, and were working to get it up and running. They talked for... a while. You know how it is. LOL. In the conversation Matthew said we were looking for a pipe line. Well the farmer looked at him and said his dad had one in his old dairy barn that was fully intact, and wanted to get rid of it! Whoa! OK! The dairy cows had been sold off a long time ago, and the owners just kept young stalk at the barn now.
Matthew contacted the owners and asked about the pipe line. He said come look at it, and see what you think. Now this is really cool. It's a glass pipe line! Really cool to watch the milk slug through during milking!  We needed to measure the pipe line and our barn to see if it would fit. There is more to this pipe line stuff then I knew. Never had used one before. Well as it goes, the pipe line would fit in our barn perfectly! The dairy barns are about the same size. So we paid for it, and a week or so later my husband and his brother went and took it out of the barn and brought it home! On a trailer no less. Wrapped in blankets and strapped down and ever so carefully it made it's way across town. Yup. This pipe line was just a few miles up the road from our farm! Pretty cool eh?
Well I think so.

 This is the set up in the old dairy barn, not ours.

 Again, the old dairy barn and pipe line. But this barn looks a lot like ours!
We had one huge part of the puzzle to begin.
We still had a ways to go, but we were happy where we were at. Things were looking good!

fences

Boy let me tell you what. This was to be done before we could do much of anything with the fields. We had miles and miles of fence to be taken down and fence posts and those stupid fiber glass poles to be taken down. This was a family project. And no joke it took us 3 days to do this huge task. I only got a couple pictures because we were so busy right after we moved in.

What a mess. Wire everywhere, and buried in the grass that had grown over it. Deer that had gone through the fence and took it down.
We were glad to do it though. It gave us the opportunity to walk the land and see the old fence lines that have been over grown with neglect and it gave us some ideas on how to bring back the fields and reclaim them!
Well that and we couldn't do anything with the fields until this was done. What a night mare to get this stuff tangled up in the tractor and equipment! Yikes!

Here is all the poles we found and took down. The land had been used for horse pasture, that is where all this came from.
And...

Two five gallon buckets of wire holders.
I wish I had gotten a picture of the wire and the rope wire stuff. We threw all that. But have saved the poles and snaps. They are all stored for use or a quick repair or what have you for the well very near future now as I write this. Or not. Not sure. We have some planning to figure out for pasture. We have yet to get that planned out.

the cows are out

We let the cows out in a small paddock that we moved around a few times. It was late in the season but they were happy to be out in their new fields and seemed to settle in, and munch on the grass, after kicking up their heels for a few minutes. We kept them in the barn for a few days and fed them in their stanchions so they knew that was were home is. They settle down and eat, and are happy.

Sweet Belle the farm dog. She loves to help, and keeps an eye on the cows too.

moved in 1

Well the cows had water and our 12 at our home were now moved into their new home. Now we can move into our home. It was a busy couple of day. We only moved 3.9 miles to our new home, but moving 6 people takes some trips. We didn't think we had that much stuff, and we weeded out a lot as we moved it out. Ahh! feels good to throw stuff.
 I'm not a super sentimental person, and can throw a lot out. I have one thing I tend to hang on to. Pictures. Here is a little tit bit about me, the author of the blog. I love to scrap book. I just really love to go through our family history of 32879285789 pictures and put them in a neatly organized photo album. Then when I'm old I can look through them and remember our lives. They are short and fleeting. Especially with kids. Oh man do the days drag on when they are little, and you think you'll be changing diapers forever. FOREVER! But nope. A blink of the eye and it's gone. Now my kiddos are older and well, I'm so blessed. But time is not on my side. I don't have a lot of down time to spend hours, ya, hours working on albums. But someday, when I'm older....... hardy har har!! No, in all reality I know I will make many more albums to come. Rabbit trail over.
Back to moving in. We did it, with a little extra help, but it wasn't that bad. I don't ever wanna move again. I love my home. The farm. Our life. I still drive up the road to home and can't quite believe that it's ours. In all the times and years we drove by it, it never entered my mind it would be ours.

Lest you forget my love of sunsets. Oh how I was wanting to have a sunset view. Well God heard my prayer and granted yet another yes for me. I can see the sun setting in the big ole Maine west!  I can be in the dairy barn or on the veranda and watch the sun sinking low in the sky.

till the cows come home

40 years have passed since there has been a cow in this old dairy barn. We brought life back to it!

Our original 12 are home. Happy. Eating. Drinking. Pooping.
The man who hauled the cows over snapped a photo and sent it to the man that grew up on this farm and showed him the cows in the barn. He almost cried he was so happy to see cows back in the barn again.

the work begins

Before we could move into our new home, we needed to have water in the barn. No cows had been in the barn for 40 years. So it was a job to get it done, but all in all not too bad. Took some time though.
 I think the slow transition to moving in was good for all of us. We were at the farm everyday cleaning, and working, and eating meals. But at night we went home. We got used to being in a new place without  moving in right away. The kids started bringing over their stuff and putting it in their rooms! That was exciting for them too.
We tried to get the old water lines to work, but quickly found out they they were too far gone and rusted so we went with pex instead. So much easier and quicker and way easier to fix should something break. And my husband is quite handy in the whole carpentry aspect of building. So we did it together.

Was fun to work together on something we waited so long for.
We only needed to get water on one side of the barn to get our 12 home. So we did. Then we could work on the rest of the barn.

Then the day came. Just like that! LOL. Not really but sounds good. The cows were coming home! We were really excited too. A local dairy farmer said he would haul our cows home for us!!
And the day came for the girls to move over to the new farm!!

Here they are on the truck on their way to their forever new home!
All 12 of em. Took 2 trips to get them too. 

this is us

Never despise the days of meager beginnings.