Diving Head First into Sap Nation

[Klegrand37]

My dad and I talked about making syrup a few times... neither of us have we've watched others backyard operations and one close friends larger commercial setup. We live on a small hay farm and have been trying to come up with more ways to utilize the land. On November 3rd we broke ground and over the next few weeks we have created a small hopefully accomplished sap shack. There were a lot of ideas threw around in that time and we fought over each one. We used rough cut lumber from the woods on the property to make the framing and left over block and brick from stock of my uncles company. All together we spent $3800 to build our shack. We have no way of knowing what the season ahead will bring for sap or how well our old antiquated syrup pan will preform, but we hope for the best so we can move forward on a new pan to go with our new shack.
10036

[BreezyHill]

That is a Great start!
My first suggestion is to fight less and laugh more. There is 364 days in a year, 24 hours in a day and 60 minutes in an hour. So that makes 525600 minutes in a year, if you sleep for 1/3rd of those minutes you have 346,896 left another third is spent doing work...173,448 are left. Oh ya you said you have a farm...that is a second job so we take away another 100,000 minutes...leaves 73,448. We all have to drive to the store for food, supplies, tools, etc...that's a good 3 hours a week, then there is a few yours a week on the PC, call it 5/ wk. Honey do list that gets me for at least 3 a week, I have three sons playing sports spent 8 days this season going to college games, The other two boys had 16 season games for travel time and games it averages around 5 hours, then there is spring soccer, summer soccer, tapping trees, pulling lines, boiling sap , bottling syrup, delivering syrup to stores, sales visits to stores, that all is like 33,000 minutes. Oops I am over by at least a couple hundred minutes already.

Nope no time to waste fighting...better to let Dear old Dad have his way...then some day when it is all yours you can change it and say just like I did..."So that is why he did it that way".

Remember to take loads of pics and to spend at least a few minutes every day laughing together...that is priceless.

Good Luck and Great Job!

BY the way the previous number are only estimations and in now way reflect a normal persons life...but we are tappers...nothing normal there

[unc23win]

Nice Job in a short amount of time for sure. Welcome to sugaring and good luck! I have to say that I like the block work and definitely applaud the effort.