Moving Story, Church Brag, & Near Death ( Part One of 3 part story)

Part One
~Moving Story~

Ok, so I've been absent for awhile....
And while I started this almost 3 weeks ago and fully intended to have it up at that time...
It became a rather lengthy post, especially with all the pics I wanted to add, so it suddenly occurred to me, why not break it up?!
Great idea! So here goes:

"We've been busy"

But it's the truth!

 I get these post ideas in my head, especially when I have pictures I wish to share, but I never get to writing them down...

I will blame it on our latest project.

Earlier this year we agreed to buy a small farm 6 miles from where we were/are renting. Let's just say it has turned into a HUGE job.

The previous tenants have a LOT of STUFF. And getting them to get their stuff out proved to be really difficult. They "moved" just around the corner in December and this is what the house looked like inside, the beginning of February - after they had moved a little more out since we first saw it the end of January:

After repeated deadlines to get it ALL out so we could start working on the place, and failing to do so, we ended up hauling the entire rest of the house to a pile in the yard the day we had a cleaning day, a Thursday in March. Guess what?! They had it all sorted through before the weekend! Worked great! 😁

That cleaning day.

Ugh. I seriously pitied the poor souls who came to help.

This house looked to have been uncleaned in years (how could you with it full of so much??) including chickens in the basement, birds they raised (parakeets??) and a lot of rodents who had full reign of the place. We're still suffering while it airs out. 🐀 Even after painting nearly every room.

The mud room/entry way/make-shift laundry room was so crowded with stuff and STUNK. I soon discovered why.

Yes, that's a dead rat.

Then came repeated deadlines to clean the garage out, for real. I think by then he had stacked his "valuables" in one corner after some other deadline, not exactly what we meant but anyway... No go.

So, a quick text: "We need the garage cleaned out by (whatever date it was) or it will have to get piled in the yard." We get there the day we wanted to work on the garage and it was "empty" (of what he was keeping)!

Oh, wait. It's all piled in the barn instead!! 😭😭

Another twist to this story is their turkeys, chickens, and ducks. 🦃🐔

The barn was FULL of foul. They had even had them in a room in the basement of the house! 😷😣 The entire milkhouse was makeshift cages. It was rat city like you've never seen.
(Please excuse the quality of these pictures. They came from another phone and wouldn't come thru clearly for me 😕)

 The milkhouse, next 2 pics:

Monty tried all kinds of things to get them out of there. Even told him he had buyers for the turkeys. He almost bit but then decided he couldn't do that, they're some kind of special breeding stock. 😐 Long story short on that one, sometime in April all but 3 turkeys, 2 ducks, 2 roosters and 2 hens were out of here.

Also in April, during one of the many Saturdays we had a work day, the guys loaded up the stash in the barn, in several trips, and hauled it over to where it belonged. We'd been working around their junk stuff for a month and a half, what do you do? It was sore tempting to "take care of it" for them... 🙊 They told him that day it was on its way over and he was sputtering about it when they got there. 

Finally! We could burn the rest and start cleaning this place up!

At least we can laugh about it now. 🙃

It was one of (or the first) work days we had that the guys began cleaning the milkhouse out. When they started putting water down the drain, out came pouring rat after rat! Talk about a frenzy among the guys that started!! Before the day was over the death toll on the rats was something like 42, and that didn't include the ones that drowned somewhere down there.

We've been cleaning this place out, and up!, and remodeling for 6 months now. And we are weary of it. 😐 We moved into the house June 19th but are still plugging away at the barn here and milking at the other place. We hope to move the cows "soon", that's a relative term. ;) At least all the calves, heifers, dry cows, and Doretha's critters are here now. That gives us girlies something to do here and only milking and feeding cows over there. And inspection is suppose to be next week so we are really hoping cows can be moved that same day. 

Stay tuned for part two. 😆