A Plump Wife and A Big Barn

"A Plump Wife and Big Barn Ne'r did any Man Harm!"

Previously posted at my old blog in January 2008 - (I warned you all I would be posting backwards since I started this blog way late into the journey!)

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Jan 2008 -- I am starting to look at trees in a new light! Trees have always just been trees to me and not something spectacular though if I had stopped to think about it -- they are a wonderful creation of God for our world.
Now trees are very special to us as they are providing the siding and interior for our new home. My husband purchased a TIMBERKING sawmill back before the year's end and I am thrilled to say it arrived in one safe BIG piece and is now all set up in our big barn!

The house was completed to be IN THE DRY before the fellas began the hunting season in earnest.  It sat patiently waiting some more work all these autumn months and I am thrilled that work is once again humming right along every spare minute on the HOUSE.
The sawmill is proving to be a huge blessing.  We have a TIMBERKING 1220 (inquring minds want to know!)  You can view one if you have an interest in sawmills at http://www.timberking.com/

It is a 2 man job but we have been blessed with such wonderful helpers -- our boys!! -- so with my CARPENTER and just one 'bigsize' boy they can cut about 100 boards a day.  This is a full day's work of course and so this only gets accomplished on his day's off from the work at Organize It. 
The house 'in the dry' has become the new storage area for drying the plank boards.  The rooms are filling up fast!  The planks will take about 3 months to cure and dry and then hopefully we can start seeing some boards go up as exterior siding!  Whooohooo!
It has been thrilling to have calls coming in from all over -- "hey! we have trees we need removed or cut - come and get em!"  So far we haven't had to pay for a tree yet, but have been able to salvage from power line areas being cleared, land being cleared for construction etc.  Each tree of nice size yeilds up to 30-50 boards so you can see why I am starting to LUV TREES:)
I have patterns for porch furniture ready for the boys to begin building me some adirondack chairs, rockers and swings as soon as Spring rolls around.  We have huge 10 ft wide porches that wrap the entire 4 sides of the house so lots to build boys!  Can't wait! for a handmade rocker by my boys from wood my husband cut and made on the sawmill...that will be GENUINE HOMEMADE stuff, eh? (This has yet to come to pass - the job for the summer of 2011 is to finish the wrap porches and fill them with rockers!)

Home at Last!

The lights are on at our house!  We spent our first night in our home on March 31st!  We had a birthday supper for our GRAND who turned 8 on that day and I had my daughters in my kitchen with me (I Love having my daughters in my kitchen and us cooking together!) Little Levi (GRAND - 2 y.o.) kept running from room to room saying "Here is anuver one" - he must have climbed up and down the stairs 15 times exploring all over.  The front door in the photo came later.  Carpenter got all the doors built and installed

this past few weeks.  Every morning we wake up and still feel like we are living in a dream.  We are far from finished as there is much still to do including all project for all summer finishing the wrap porches....but we are finally home!  I've been so busy unpacking and settling in - not much time to blog but I have been taking lots of pictures to share with you as the days come and go! 
Thanks for all your kind wishes, house warming gifts and blessings. 
Here's a wish for you:
"May there always be work for your hands to do;

May your purse always hold a coin or two;

May the sun always shine on your window pane;

May the rainbow be certain to follow each rain;

May the hand of a friend always be near you;

May the Lord fill your heart with gladness to cheer you."

Bedroom for Ezra

Ezra's room is one of the nearly finished rooms. The door was built last week by Carpenter and he will finish hanging it this coming week. For his decor, I started with 2 shadow boxes of maps & nautical miniatures. I've been saving these for about 8 years - all packed away - as they were given to us by someone wanting to redecorate who no longer wanted them.  We had them in his room when Pastor Tom was over cutting some lumber - he saw them and offered Ezra another large shadowbox that matched them he had owned for years with sailor knots and a map backing.  YAY! We are coming along.

  I choose this fabric for the window valance trying to bring in the water-blue aqua and keep in some of the black accents of the hardware and ceiling fan and also bring in some of the colors of the maps. 

I made the curtain from natural canvas twill and we used metal holdbacks.

I found the mattelasse fabric and it matched just right and so was able to

make him a wonderful spread for the bed.  Neighbors were discarding the

furniture for something new - so we were takers! It goes great in there.

Now we are finally finished and have rearranged the furniture a few times (a woman's perogative!)

 Curtains are finished - and I am making fabric blinds (his are hung and ready) for all the windows as I long ago decided 47$+ per window is too much for the budget since we have 40 windows! And I despise $3 mini blinds! Will post in another blog post on how to make them for under 5$ each!

 Time to rearrange - we like this set up better - it really isn't a big room so this suits better.

 He decided to display some primitve weapons my dad had given him from his years in Asia to complete is decor of "Old World Travels".

 Measuring for curtains and valances!

 We had a large map and didn't really have wall room to hang it so Ezra decoupauged it on his dresser top! Love it! The huge elephant is solid teak wood and was hand carved in Bangladesh and my dad gave it to us.

Time for Ezra to move in his own space!

Bedroom for Luke & SamAsher

We are moving in bit by bit - but as the days go by each room that gets attention gets looking more and more finished!  Here is a peek at the younger boy's bedroom.  I had a fiasco-of-fiascos making these window treatments.

I bought the fabric about 3 years ago at a close-out fabric sale - so I bought the whole bolt of homespun and it was just enough to make these curtains. Upon completion I decided to perk them up before hanging them with some "homemade spray starch" [3 cups warm water and 1/4 cup cornstarch mixed well] and a good steam pressing. The fiasco hit when I had a "haste makes waste" moment and put my homemade spray in a very clean & thoroughly rinsed out "Windex glass cleaner" bottle. What I hasted to do then was to NOT rinse out the mister I attached to it - which DID NOT come from a windex bottle but was from a cleaner bottle that apparently had some bleach in it but was affixed to the empty Windex bottle...oh yes...one nice squirt from my make-do bottle filled with homemade starch turned these curtains a ghastly sunflower yellow!!
After a few Indian style war hoops coming from me - I took a deep breath and realized it was only the top 13 or so inches...so that was choppped off - and some little remnants of same fabric pieced and put together to make another panel -- all of that is now hidden under the pretty valance of John Deere Patchwork - and no one will ever know but me and all my blog readers! Shhh!!! Do not tell!
Their room is filled with cute farming Tin Signs! Oh I love them!

 Their dirty clothes hampers are wicker bushel baskets lined with natural canvas liners I sewed.  I also made this canvas from using a picture from our family album of my husband with a bunch of the children on our old John Deere (circa 1980) and changing it to a sepia tone and then transferring it to the canvas with Epson Iron On Cool Peel Transfer paper.

As you can tell - they are already curling up in their room and mussing up their covers - I've been trying to teach them proper bed making techniques [almost hopeless with a boy of 12 years old?]

I showed Luke - the way to tuck sheet corners in neatly "Military style" - he was impressed - he says "Wow! Mom! How did you figure that out?" ;)

Big Memory Cans

I drive my Chelsey crazy...I save lots of things...I can just imagine needing it or using it or recreating something with it...some day....so I save it!  I have been hanging onto these "faux" milk cans that held a very big bunch of sticky sweet caramel corn purchased on a holiday aisle and given to inlaws of inlaws a few years ago. One of my children saw them empty and ready to go to the trash after the holidays as someone had thoroughly pigged out on all the caramel corn inside and of course sweet Erica thot of me.

So this week....as I was sprucing up and organizing my new kitchen in the new house preparing to 'inhabit' the house soon...I had this big empty space under my kitchen sink. I just despise closed cabinets that could hold creepy crawlies under sinks...so I had Carpenter make all my sinks "bare" in the new house.
I'm thinking...big space...under sink...perfect for those milk cans reclaimed from trash!

They had tacky plastic labels on them but upon closer inspecition I was able to peel them off. I grabbed my handy spray paint and gave them some squirts. They were fire engine red! ewww! a little too bright and shiny for me!  So on went some "mousey brown"  Apple Barrell paint with a damp paper towel.

Then I have this love affair with modge podge and suddenly it came to me that I could enjoy my momsy's vintage GOOD HOUSEKEEPING magazine (circa1944) all the time instead of having it collect dust on a shelf somewhere - so I got to clipping everything in it that made me smile. This was the only vintage magazine she had in her stash and I got it when she left all this trite earthly treasures behind for eternal ones...I know she really liked this magazine. I'm expecting she bought with some very hard earned savings from her piggy bank around the time she was just out of high school.  and.....I love the idea of being able to enjoy these same pages of her GH magazine (now so vintage) everyday - oh oh oh - some of these old ad-ver-tis-ments were so cute!

All I needed was my modge podge and some scissors and the magazine from yesteryear my momsy loved and treasured.

I now have 2 great big tin cans perched under my kitchen sink. 

I'll use one for cleaning rags - don't you just cringe when someone cleans up a big puddle of chocolate milk on a dirty floor with a bright checkered fairly new dishcloth!?!?  So the clean up rags will be handy - all the uglies that still have lots of good use in them and the other can will hold dish suds and dishwasher detergent.

Kitchen is almost done...still no cabinet doors but Carpenter put in my so long wished for Rev-a-Shelves so I won't have to crawl inside the cabinets and search for long lost items! love it!!!!!

Everyday Humdrum ho...ho

December danced by, January jumped past, February definitely is not floating by and we are still "camping".
I say that tongue in cheek as we definitely are blessed with this mobile home - it is just "squished in here" with all that we have going on in our lives.  We are do-it-yourselfers and have lots of projects going all the time, they boys and Carpenter are all into archery and that means equipment and equipment takes space! We run 5 home businesses from here and that definitely takes space!  But again the lessons in patience just keep coming.   The weather of snow like we have never had in these parts for a long many years and lots of rain have basically destroyed our winding driveway up to the new house.  It is slushy, muddy, deep with ruts and very nasty to be blunt!  It would take many 1000's of $$$ to make it nice and even many more 1000's$ to pave it....I am not asking for paving...I would just love it to be driveable.  It really is one of the main hinderances keeping us from actually moving up there right now!
Once again, the Lord has cared for us and provided us huge mountains of large rubble from broken brick and blocks only 3 miles from us and with the owner who is head of the demolition of the old mill wanting to just find anywhere to dump this rubble - we are jumping up and down saying, "ME FIRST!" -- after about 3-4 weeks of no phone calls being returned and not being able to reach the owner - we have the word from him that he will deliver and dump up to 50 rounds (20 tons per round) for us on our acres so we can put a good firm base on the driveway for literally pennies of what it would cost to buy large stones to give us a firm base!  Then son # 1 who is a skilled grader and can work some heavy equipment will come put a nice covering to that base and fix us all up.  I'm just waiting for the day.....snow is on the way again and more rain last nite...so I continue to wait....and I'll be posting just as soon as it comes to pass! We have such a beautiful driveway (if I can say primitive too) when it is in "good shape".  We have suddenly had the enlightenment that it must be the reason nearly every household sits right on the main roads -- who wants to go thru the expense of maintaining a mile long driveway?  I guess for us - we are so set on having our house in the middle of the wild acres that we are willing to take the bumps that go along with a mile-long drive! (9/10ths to be exact!)
Our long driveway when it was in better shape!

Moving Days

We are not moving like most folks move! It is bit by bit!  It is Dec 2010 and in Dec -- 9 entire years ago -- we were packing up to move out here to "camp" in a repo mobile home trailer until we could build our home....today Dec 1, 2010 we moved a little bit closer to that goal....the entire family (the ones left at home 6/11ths) and Carpenter and I worked all day.  We hung curtain rods, installed and set commodes and sinks, mopped the brand new tile floor that was finished yesterday, put in some furniture, hauled off construction trash and just had ourselves a grand time!

To top it all off ATT began working to get phone services up there...the technician said the line digger/installer was going "to love this job"!  It is up and down from the main road thru ruts and crags and woods and gulleys and hills -- he surely won't be bored! 

I am determined to spend my first nite up there before 2011 shows her face! I don't know if I'll be able to sleep from the excitement though!

Here is a peep at some of our movings -- the stone tile looks like it sort of melted off the pine walls and turned into stone! We are slowly getting used to it ;} Carpenter did such a good job and we are grateful to our friend, Zac, who allowed us to borrow his very nice tile cutter!

 

 

 

SAMUEL way up there scraping off manufacturer stickers from the windows.

Ezra's curtains partly done and hung...wheat twill panels to come.

 
These adorable silhouettes were scarfed up

from a thrift store by my sweet friend

who knew I would love them in my new house!
This is the hall-guest FACILITIES.

I've set up temporary sewing headquarters in a back bedroom

 to sew up all the draperys, coverlets, window shades and upholstered cushions.

Wish me happy moving....