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Welcome to the February Homestead Hangout! In this monthly series we give a glimpse into our own homesteading activities. February highlights include a big milestone in Julie’s cancer recovery, visits from a bobcat, and finally starting our farmhouse guest room makeover.

Below is a transcription of the video

Introduction

Hey there neighbor Welcome to wild homestead living. I'm Kevin &. Julie and this is our February homestead Hangout, a series where we give you a little glimpse into our own homesteading journey. It's been cold and wet here on the homestead outside so wildlife has been pretty quiet. But we've been busy inside working on a project that's long overdue, as well as celebrating a milestone in Julie's cancer recovery. And we're excited to be able to share this with you all. Let's get started

Planning & Mindset

This is a very exciting moment that I wanted to make sure we got on film because it is time to take off my final surgical tape from my latest breast cancer surgery. And I'm really hoping this will be the last cancer related surgery I will ever have for my entire life. So taking off this tape is exciting and symbolic in many ways and I wanted to share it with you. So firstly get take this off because in my last couple of surgeries I actually had to have my belly button remade so they did some work here. So take this off the belly button and then take off the big one.

Outdoors & Wildlife

February was our slowest month yet for wildlife viewing on the homestead. The month brought with it a mix of very cold and very rainy days with the local wildlife was moving around less and spending long periods. Of Time Out of sight and whatever shelter was available. At the end of the month, the seasonal wetland and our lower Woods was full. This is good news for the many amphibians that lay their eggs in these waters in the spring, but it certainly made navigating the trail through the woods a little more challenging for both us and the wild mammals in our area.

We even had a couple of new wetlands pop up next to our green house and garden shed. These were less welcome and will be dealt with in a future homestead improvement project.

Our trail camera that is situated behind the house was only triggered a few times in February and only by blacktail deer that were strolling past it.

The cameras in the forest at the bottom of the property had a little bit more variety. Coyotes were seen quite a few times out on the perimeter of the property, mostly at night, or sometimes in the early morning before sunrise. But we did have one coyote that was moving through after the sun came up.

A bobcat was the real star of the trail cam showed during February though making regular appearances mostly under cover of darkness. Apparently he's using a salmon berry twig as a scent post as it can be seen marking it in this clip.

The cat has been seen on both the perimeter trail cam as well as the central trail. And in this daylight clip on the central trail you can again see the cat stop and make a scent mark before moving on. Later in the month the bobcat was seen sniffing around for quite some time in front of the central trail cam.

We wondered if he could smell other animals that made appearances during the month like this northern flying squirrel. This squirrel was also interested in the same area. So was this Norway rat, which is the first we have seen using our trail.

It's fascinating to get these little glimpses into the lives of the wild animals with whom we are sharing our homestead. We feel a deep sense of responsibility to do all that we can to prevent coming into conflict with them and to preserve habitat to allow them to live their full natural lives. We have a few ideas in the works to make our homestead even more welcoming to wildlife. Stay tuned in the coming months to see what we're up to.

Home & Construction

you may recall we had a setback with the exterior makeover House in January when heavy snow took down our new gutters well pro roofing Northwest the company that installed those gutters repaired them for free in February stating they had use screws that were too short in the initial install. Needless to say we were impressed and other companies could learn a lot from this display of integrity.

The next step in our farmhouse transformation was to switch up the porch lights. The old lights went to a different homestead in our valley. We were pleased them with simple black barn lights that mimic the kind you can find on barns that have been in our region for 100 years.

Inside we finally started our guest room makeover project. You might have seen the video we made over a year ago about beginning this project. It was delayed because of my surgery. And as well as having to put on a new roof and a new siding which we hadn't anticipated. We're finally coming back to this project with a little bit of a revised scope. In order to keep costs down we are not going to take the carpet out and replace it with wood floors. And we're not going to replace the window at this time.

We are going to focus on bringing in the farmhouse feel through other details starting with the ceiling we're going to be putting on beadboard trim and new light and fake beams. This was a great opportunity for us to get out our power tools and practice some new skills. We've been following the guidance we got in a step by step article in handyman magazine. But since this is something that we have never done before, it remains to be seen whether you can follow our instructions as a how to for your own homestead or whether this is going to turn into a how not to do it. Well we haven't completed the project yet we've been pleasantly surprised with how well it turned out so far. Stay tuned to see in a future video whether we can actually get these things on our ceiling.

Wrap Up

Well, there's what we've been up to on our homestead here in February. As mentioned earlier in the video, we're new to a lot of this remodeling work so as this develops, it may end up being videos of either here's how we did it or here's how you shouldn't do it. Or I guess maybe both.

And if you liked this video, we would love for you to give it a thumbs up and subscribe to our YouTube channel. And that way you can stay tuned with us and see how things unfold. Thank you so much. for joining us. We'll see you next time.