A family meets after smoke damage to their house to plan restoration with insurance and cleaners. They sort what to keep, tackle electrical upgrades, and spend considerable time reorganizing meat into a chest freezer while juggling homestead projects and an upcoming move.
Restoration company is here restoring our smoked up house.
Did you ask them what they thought the timeline was?
The jefe isn't here. Oh, dang it.
Did you talk to them about cleaning certain things?
No, I haven't talked to them. Come on, Lily. Anything you don't use or wear anymore, you're gonna throw away, okay? Textile's coming. They don't need to wash anything that we don't— that we're not gonna keep.
Yeah, like old toys and junk.
I know this.
Our Normal life has been severely disrupted. I figure the more attention we can put on this, the better. Get it over with. Here. And we could get back to normal. Do you understand? Oh yeah. Like the granny quilt, leave it. We want that. Gideon, do you wear this shirt anymore? Yes. Okay, then we want it. This is kind of good because we're gonna move over there in a couple of months anyway. We're gonna move back home. Forcing us to clean it out. Okay, go get behind it.
Peepee socks!
Worth washing? Not worth washing. We're gonna replace it. Gideon's room down. Overwhelmed yet?
I've been overwhelmed.
Josiah's working on his room. Y'all's room's so much better. Gonna wash every single one of those Legos? Oh, I like that. Let's get that washed. Guess we're getting new mattresses. We don't want to risk having the fire extinguisher dump on it. Hey, Minnie, you got no idea what's going on, do you? What's going on? So there's some talk from the insurance people to mine talk from the cleaners, 2 weeks. I hope they're right. Bless her, she was— she's just bouncing from cabin to remodel. Annie! And I could give you a hug. You already took the door off.
Well, I've had help from Aunt Anne.
Good.
And she just went down to go get Randolph. Miss Anne was thinking, um, we should check the voltage to make sure this house can power without you all shorting out stuff if you start the dishwasher or something.
All right, back to some homesteading stuff. Stud muffin's coming any minute.
Hey, and I went to check with him about running the fridge on your circuit box here because if it's gonna snap it— okay, yeah, he said he could put a new circuit in if you need it. Yeah, and then he also said that if you're only wanting one here at your house, you should be all fine. Yeah, and then he said he could run another one for you down there if you need it.
Oh, that's good.
So he said you could hook it up. No, your father distracted me. Okay, so is it— oh, that's— wait, it's gonna be two. It's only— it's one to two with you. You got one of me.
Get rid of the rice, Jamaica. We don't need it. We never used it. We got to make room for stud muffins. We might not even need that freezer down there. We can put ground beef in here. You want to put just one of one type of thing, so In a chest freezer, you don't want to be looking for varieties of meats. Let's move all this over to that freezer assembly line, then we'll have a whole stud muffin freezer. I like this, it's like they got it. Oh yeah, we don't even have to do anything anymore. All right, we got a whole stand-up for stud. We consolidated all our lamb and ham. We got a half a chest freezer. And good news, Our house is getting painted. It's like 28 degrees out here. I guess they don't care. And I reckon we got rid of 5 trash bags of junk, so we're getting ready for the move. There's good things happening.
And then here would be the seed time meeting.
We have some bunching onions to plant. Thank you for making lunch, Lily. Well, they want our natural light over here, huh? I got you, I got you. Going on my afternoon walk. Grandma and Grandpa will be coming down this road any minute with Stud Muffin. I'll catch you right— there he is! Oh wow, whoa! All right, I'll get in the back. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 coolers, 2 baskets, plus the whole back seat of an F-250. Here you are. Were you building this Mountain bike course starts at the pond. Is it a downhill? Yeah. Oh, we got a lot of stud. You ready? Put the patties in the chest freezer. Did you know there's a whole back seat? Oh, look at this beautiful brisket. He might be minimum 600 pounds frozen here. He was 1,100 pounds hanging weight, so maybe 700 pounds. We're gonna up our beef intake 20 pounds a week. 5 weeks would be 100 pounds. Times 7, 35 weeks. I don't think these bones should go in here. They got to go to a different place. We got that pool. Did we get everything out of the front of the truck? You got to put a weight on it. There's some ribs. Yeah, short ribs. Look at these gorgeous short ribs. And this is really fatty chuck roast. I might have made a mistake keeping them. They look too lean. Well, we can make them not tough by cooking them low and slow. Maybe cook them for 12 hours. That size of that beef tenderloin. We can consolidate this This a little bit better, Jonah. One freezer slap full. What, shut? It shuts. We added more to this one. It shuts nicely. We did it! We can get that freezer out of the farmhouse. Oh boy, just how you're gonna need them to help. This afternoon, a little Homestead Builds work for our Homestead Builds book. Chick brooder is coming out soon for those who backed the Homestead Builds project. We're including the builds for these dirt traps. It's 2 foot by 2 foot. I'm gonna get this info to my co-author, engineer carpenter Chris Slattery. Ellie, how are your horses? She just rode her horses. They don't care if our house smoked out, do they? Come on, boxing man. All right, we gotta go get dinner supplies. I'll hold you. This smells so much better. They're wiping every single thing down. Thud muffin liver. Instead, nothing. Meat looks delicious, Lily. Oh, Stud's gonna be top-notch. We're back in the saddle again with the very pot that started it all.
Let me be free.
If I had to start my Homestead all over again, it could only pick one animal… 
