A Teaser

When we went to Colorado, A. stayed home to take care of the animals. He also took the opportunity to completely demolish the children's bathroom. There were leaks in the tub, toilet, and sink that were causing the floor to buckle, as well as forming an unwelcome swampy area under the trailer. The toilet only flushed with help from an extra bucket of water, and the bathtub was the original avocado-green plastic fixture from the seventies.

It was way past time to address it, is what I'm saying.

So while we were gone, A. pulled out the toilet, the tub, and the entire floor.

The old tub out the back door, awaiting its trip to the dump.

The new plywood floor. Delightfully solid underfoot.

With a great deal of hard work, he managed to have the floor and toilet installed before we got home. Then we chose some peel and stick vinyl floor tiles to cover the plywood. Since these tiles are going in our 1970s trailer-with-additions, we definitely do not need to worry about resale. So we chose exactly what we wanted.

And what we wanted were Moroccan-style tiles in blue.

We're waiting on the tub and shower fixtures to be delivered this week, and then A. can finish putting in all the plumbing. 

I'll post some pictures when it's done. Stay tuned.

Real Tradwives of the Country

Happy Fourth to all my fellow Americans! Have a totally random post, with no photo, in celebration of our great nation.

Although I am definitely an Internet dinosaur--having a personal blog just for fun is pretty much obsolete these days--I do still see a lot of what goes around online these days. And one of the things I see a lot is discussion of "tradwives." 

If you are not familiar with this, it stands for "traditional wives," and so far as I can see, is supposed to be something like June Cleaver crossed with Ma Ingalls. 

A tradwife makes sourdough bread, grows a big garden, keeps an immaculate house, cares for animals, has many children, and does all of this in a white cotton dress and cute boots.

This seems to be tied to the rise in "homesteading" as a lifestyle choice, and has quite justifiably created a backlash of mockery.

As anyone who has ever lived a "homesteading" life can tell you (and most people are living a very light version of that life, myself included), a woman cannot do all of that. She cannot care for everything perfectly, keeping everything and everyone in her orbit perfectly manicured and photo-ready. It's just not possible.

It's a dirty life, and it's often not pretty. It's muddy, or bloody, or smelly, or full of maggots. Because that's what life is like if you live anywhere close to the natural world.

I was thinking about this yesterday when the children and I were cleaning out the truck bed.

I had not planned on cleaning out the truck bed yesterday. I was actually on my way to go gather apricots from my neighbor's tree in the pasture across the road. Picking apricots and making jam from them is a perfectly acceptable tradwife activity. It's even possible, I suppose, to do those things while wearing a sundress.

I, however, was still wearing my running shorts and t-shirt from my early-morning run, because I had been so busy in the garden and kitchen that I hadn't showered and changed yet.

I was going to take the truck so I could bring the ladder and rake to reach the high ones. But when we got to the truck, we saw that the truck bed was covered in a layer of hay and sand that I had meant to rake out to mulch my tomatoes.

Okay, I thought. I'll just do that real quick.

Ha ha.

Forty-five minutes later, I had filled the wheelbarrow with noxious hay; removed the incredibly heavy rubber truck bed mat that had been harboring a truly disgusting layer of soaked and fermenting hay underneath; raked, swept, and hosed out the muck from the truck; and flipped that giant, heavy mat twice to scrape and wash it off.

I did all of this wearing my running clothes, plus A.'s muck boots. I got liberally splattered with foul muck, and was drenched in sweat by the time I finished*.

This is when I went into A.'s office with the rake in my hand and told him, "I'm ready for my tradwife photo shoot."

Because that's what it really looks like to be a traditional wife: Sweaty, dirty, and tired.

A. asked me if I actually wanted him to take my picture. I did not, because I wasn't feeling very photogenic, so there's no record of this particular moment in our "homestead" life. 

It's just one of many through the years, however, and I'm sure it won't be the last. 

* It was a very dirty and tiring task, but also quite satisfying, which sums up our life in a nutshell.

We Have a Floor!

Or perhaps more accurately, we have carpet on the floor.

I am speaking, of course, of the floor in my bedroom. This is one of the rooms in which a window broke all the way through during our Severe Weather Event in July. It is also the only room with a blown-out window that had carpeting in it.

That carpet got completely saturated and I had to pull up the soaked part of it. This left an area of particle-board sub-floor at the entrance to my room that was . . . displeasing. To say the least.

Yeah.

The carpet itself was no great loss, as it was a very ugly brown carpet from at least the 1980s. But having part ugly old carpet and part sub-floor was worse.

It still took us until now to get it covered over, though. I am not good about making decisions for things like this, so I spent more time than I should have figuring out what to put in there. 

Laying down actual carpet is pretty tricky, and we have no experience with it. The nearest place that does it is 100 miles away. So I decided instead to try out the carpet squares that are peel and stick.

Many of these are very institutional looking, of the sort you would see in a school or doctor's office. That was not what I wanted. I wanted something that looked like an actual carpet, with some pile to it. 

Most of the options for more carpet-like material for home use were in shades of gray, which was also not what I wanted. I am not into gray, and its ubiquity in interior design things lately is irritating to me. But I finally found some that looked like carpet, were a shade of light brown, and weren't too expensive. 

I had A. do the measuring of the room and the figuring of how many boxes we would need, because I am hilariously bad at such things and would certainly have messed that up in a big way.

I ordered them from Walmart and went through that situation so common nowadays of frequent e-mail updates on the status of my order, culminating in an e-mail two weeks later telling me the order was canceled entirely. I got a full refund, but still. Annoying.

So then I got to do it all again, but this time with Amazon, who actually delivered what I ordered. (I got these, in case you were wondering.) 

And then the boxes of carpet squares sat in our living room for . . . a long time.

It's like an extra table! I guess.

They had to be in the living room because they couldn't get dirty/wet/hot or otherwise messed up, and there was nowhere else big enough to put that many boxes.

So they sat there.

In our defense, I REALLY did not want to try to do this project with all four kids at home. The interruptions and general chaos would have been too much. 

Just feeding them all with all of this surrounding the dining room table would have been a mess.

That meant a Tuesday or a Thursday when they were all at school, but A. and I were both home and didn't have anything else to do.

This confluence of events has not happened much in the past month or so, what with sick children home from school, surgery for one, me substituting at school, A. getting hay, etc.

But finally, FINALLY, I declared Tuesday to be The Day of the Carpeting.

And so we did it.

Well, A. did the carpet part. I did all the cleaning--there was a lot of that--shifting of things, finding of tools, fetching and carrying, and general assistance.

A. did all the demo of the remaining carpet, removal of padding, pulling up wood strips with tacks around the edges of the room, and taking out staples. Lots of pulling and prying that required hand strength that I do not have.

He also did the actual laying of the squares. The reason he did this was because the laying down of these squares, while simple in theory, actually required quite a bit of figuring and cutting to get them to fit snugly up against each other so you couldn't see the seams, and also to fit around closet doors and corners. 

Another thing I would be hilariously bad at. Visualizing shapes has never been my forte. Just ask my geometry teacher in high school.

Anyway.

The instructions for installation on the back of the box were actually sort of complex, recommending snapping chalk lines and moving out from the center of the room in a specific pattern and all that. A. did not do any of that. He started at the door and worked his way through the room from there.

Because we weren't working with all one big piece of carpet (and because we didn't follow the installation instructions), we didn't have to move the biggest furniture out of the room. We did one part of the room, then shifted the bed over onto that. Then we continued until we got to where the dressers are, shifted those onto the squares already in place, finished up, and moved it all back.

Here's a side-by-side in-progress of the new carpet and the old. Ugly brown on the right is the old one.

From the time I started moving furniture out of the room to the time I got it all back in, vacuumed, and everything cleaned up was almost exactly 7.5 hours.

It was very tiring, but I am SO HAPPY to have a real floor in my bedroom again.

A vast improvement.

So! The final verdict on the carpet squares? Recommend.

A. did all the work with them, and he kept saying what a great product they are. Not easy, exactly, but certainly easier than a big piece of carpet that requires laying padding and tacking down and all that. It was very do-able for someone handy like him. Even I probably could have managed it, albeit not as quickly, neatly, or efficiently.

I was sure they would smell terrible to start with, but there was no chemical odor at all right out of the box, which was a nice surprise. Nothing shifted when I vacuumed them after installation, either. I was a bit concerned that the corners or something would pull up, but no.

Two cons I will mention, however. 

A. did an excellent job setting these against each other to make it look as much as possible like a single piece of carpeting. But, if you're looking very closely, you can see a couple of seams in the room where the squares abut. This doesn't bother me in the slightest, especially because 80% of the floor is covered in furniture. But if you're a perfectionist and you're using them in a more open room, it might bother you.

Also, my children, who spend a lot of time flopping on the floor of my room, complained that there isn't enough padding now. There is actually no padding except the bit on the back of the squares themselves, because the squares are laid directly on the hard floor. I guess I can tell the difference when I walk on our old carpeting in the hall and so on, but since I'm just walking on it, not lying down on it like my kids do, I don't care about the small difference in padding.

I have no idea how these will hold up in the coming years, but for now, I have a nice carpet in my room. And that makes me very, very happy.

A Woman of My Word

I said I would paint the children's bathroom yesterday. I did it.

I am very proud of myself, yes. And I'm going to post lots of photos to revel in my accomplishment.

Although I may most kindly be described as a slapdash painter, I did actually take the time to tape the electrical outlets, towel racks, and so on before I started.

Using some very colorful masking tape that I think my mother gave us.

I also put down the most redneck drop cloth ever.

It's made from a cut-up chicken-feed bag. 

Even with the drop cloth there, I still managed to get drips of paint all over the floor while I was painting. Slapdash, like I said. This is why I always keep paper towels on hand when I'm painting.

Anyway.

One of the things I was happy to paint over was this little wall drawing done by an unidentified child some years ago.

No one ever confessed, but I have my suspicions.

Another thing I was very happy to paint over was the border of flowers all around by the ceiling that was put up by some previous occupant of the house.

I love my sunflowers, but this is not to my taste.

Because I just didn't care that much, I didn't bother scraping off all of this floral paper. Instead I just painted over it. This is what that same area looks like now.

Much better.

I had a gallon of bright white indoor paint, and a quart of "sunshine yellow." So I painted everything white except the cabinet doors. For those, I put some of the yellow in with the white, to tone down the sunshine a bit.

This is the wall with the nails that started the whole thing.

You can't even tell the mess that was there before.

I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. 

Next on my painting agenda is the adults' bathroom. It has a ceiling border of giant magnolias with a maroon background. I can't wait to cover that up.

Seeking Accountability

Today is supposed to be all about the food I'm growing in my garden, and in fact, I have many tomatoes on the remaining tomato plants, hooray! I do not, however, have many ripe tomatoes in my kitchen yet, and if this year has a theme of any kind, it's one of not counting my tomatoes before they're ripened.

So. No gardening today. Instead, I am here to ask for help.

I need to paint a bathroom today. It is the children's bathroom. It has needed to be painted since . . . well, since before we moved in five years ago. Although I did do a lot (A LOT) of painting before we moved in, I did not get to the bathrooms. 

I really dislike painting, so it's one of those things that I could always find an excuse not to do.

But then I got free paint from the school maintenance guy who was trying to clear space in the school shop. And then a certain child who shall remain nameless put up something on the wall of his room using four, four-inch nails. His room shares a wall with the children's bathroom. The shared wall is not four inches thick.

The nails went straight through the wall and stuck out into the bathroom, right over the toilet, about two inches.

It was not a good look.

Said child cut off the ends of the nails with an angle grinder, which did eliminate the sticking-out nails, but also resulted in large gouges in the wall.

Also not a good look.

So I'm pretty much forced into painting now, because I may not have really high standards for our very well-used home, but that was a bit much even for me. 

I managed to get all the various holes and gouges spackled, and the spackle sanded.

So many holes. Such a bad photo.

Today is the day. Today, as you are my witness, I will put the first coat of paint on those walls. I'm telling you this to hold myself accountable. Because if I tell all of you I'm doing it, and promise to post the after photo, then I will actually do it.

Otherwise, I can quite easily convince myself that I have more important things to do. Like bake cookies. Or clean under the bench in the living room*.

But today is a Painting Day. Wish me luck. I'm going in.

*Although that really does need to be done. It can wait, however.

La Casita Labors

Yes, we have once again flung (flinged?) ourselves into the joyous and dirty labor of renovating the old adobe house next door. By which I mean we did some more cleaning and covered ourselves in filth.

When we last left our intrepid house-rehabber (that's A.), he and his short assistants had done some spectacular and very satisfying demolition. Leaving a spectacular and not-so-satisfying mess.

That mess sat there for, um, three months.

We're working in fits and starts, okay? Although I'm not sure which are the fits and which are the starts.

Anyway.

A. happened to have his trailer still hitched up from bringing sheep to auction, so the day before a Dump Day (which are Wednesdays, Fridays, and some Saturdays here), I suggested that he drive the trailer around to the casita and we could all go over there to help him load it with detritus.

So he did. And we filled it.

This trailer sure was a useful purchase.

All of this stuff came from the middle section of the house where we tore the dividing wall out.

Looks better than the last time I took a photo of this area.

Karen. asked me last time I posted about this what the layout of the house is like, and I never answered. Sorry, Karen. But I'll answer now! 

So in the above photo, I was standing in the exterior door leading into what used to be the two rooms we combined by tearing out the wall. Not sure what they were used for when the last occupants lived there, but that very first room is one of the original two rooms of the adobe. The other original room is a bedroom, the doorway of which is not visible in the photo, but is to the left of where I was standing.

So the original house was only two rooms. And there were probably like eight kids in the family. 

And there I was, complaining about one kid in four rooms.

Okay, back to our descriptive house layout tour . . .

In the next room up, on the other side of the wall we took down, are two doors on either side leading to added bedrooms.

Through that door straight ahead you can see in the photo is the kitchen. To the left in the kitchen is a door leading to a living room, which in turn leads to the only bathroom. To the right of the kitchen is another exterior door leading to the enclosed porch that houses the rabbits.

I hope that those details are enough to enable you to visualize the layout, because I would certainly not be a good candidate for drawing it. Although . . . I could have Cubby draw it. Maybe I will.

Anyway again.

It wouldn't be a workday at the casita is there wasn't at least a little bit of violent destruction. So we let the children pound at the terrible combination of concrete, nails, and chicken wire that A. pulled down from the exterior walls. I was hoping they would be able to break up the concrete enough that we could dispose of the chicken wire.

Despite their enthusiastic pounding, the concrete remained stubbornly stuck to the chicken wire. Boo.

A. spent some time chiseling the old plaster off the adobe walls in preparation for repairing them and re-plastering.

Tedious, but necessary.

Luckily, that is a job he can delegate to his least-junior assistant, as it is neither particularly dangerous nor difficult. So now Cubby has a summer job. For which he will get paid nothing but the satisfying knowledge that he is contributing to a worthwhile project. Ahem.

So that's where we are with la casita at the moment. I'm not sure what the next stage will be, but you can be sure I will document it. It seems to be a tradition now.

House Progress . . . and Rabbits

 

So! When we last left our intrepid house-rehabber, he had pulled down the ceilings and was slowly and arduously wheelbarrowing the detritus into the dumpster parked outside the house. He also continued removing paneling from the walls to expose the original stone or plaster, revealing all the many colors the house was painted inside at one point.

He definitely filled that dumpster, which was picked up last week, but he did not quite finish the clean-up. Even absent that handy dumpster, however, the work must go on, so he started filling trash cans and old feed tubs for transport to the dump.

There are still a couple of rooms that need to be cleaned up, but it's beginning to look more like a house that can be worked on, rather than a house that should just be razed.

It's a long time before we will be inhabiting this house, but we've moved in some new tenants in the meantime.

Hasenpfeffer!

We have, in the past, discussed getting meat rabbits, but I'm always reluctant to add yet more animals to our menagerie. Unlike A. and the children, who want allll the animals. 

However, when our neighbor asked us if we would like to take his granddaughter's 4-H meat rabbits--she's no longer doing 4-H, and he's a cattle rancher, not a rabbit-fancier--I couldn't really say no. He wouldn't even take any money for the rabbits. Or the home-built hutch he insisted we take, as well. Or the half-full bag of rabbit food he likewise bestowed upon us.

So now we have six meat rabbits. Two bucks, and four does. 

Our neighbor had them all in the hutch, but we felt bad having them in such a small enclosure.

Jasper sat here by the hutch for HOURS the day we brought the rabbits home. He wasn't the least aggressive, interestingly, he just appeared fascinated. Maybe he thought they needed herding.

Rabbits can actually be somewhat difficult to keep in, due to their habits of digging and gnawing. That's why we put them on the concrete porch of the casita next door. No rabbit is gnawing or digging out of a concrete-floored room with concrete walls. 

We were originally going to separate the bucks with two does each by having the white ones in the casita and the brown ones in the hutch, but we decided instead to put a divider down the center of the casita porch so the brown ones have more room, too. A. is going to do that today.

We might have to use the hutch to separate the bucks after the does have babies, because we're not sure how aggressive and problematic the bucks might become with the young. To be honest, we're not sure about anything, because we've never had rabbits before.

We'll learn, though. And isn't that what life is all about? Growing and learning every day?

Right. Or something.

Boo! Time To Butcher a Bull!

Warning: Dead animal photos ahead.

 

Yesterday, A. made a real grocery run for the first time since August. He went because we had an appointment to get the dogs neutered first thing in the morning. So he left at 6:30 a.m. and returned home around 3 p.m. with a van full of animal feed, groceries, and two very unhappy dogs.

I was still putting those groceries away when our elderly neighbors about five miles away called to ask A. to help them with a bull they had found with a broken leg. It was going to have to be killed--large animals like that are done for if they break a leg, unfortunately-- and the vet they called had told them that if the bull wasn't running a temperature, they could butcher it. 

So they had to take the bull's temperature. And you don't do that for a bull with one of those handy forehead thermometers. No, you have to shove the thermometer into its rectum. 

A. thought this might be a dicey proposition for two eighty-something people and a large bull, so he offered to go help with that. And off he went.

Ten minutes later, the FedEx guy showed up with two big boxes of pantry things I had ordered from Walmart. I was still putting those away when A. called from the neighbors' house to tell me he was on his way home to pick up coolers and all of the family so we could all help butcher the bull.

This is what being married to A. is like, yes.

As soon as A. got here and we had loaded the coolers and made sure everyone was wearing coats and boots, we slithered our way up the muddy road to the neighbors' house.

The bull had been killed near their house, thankfully near the driveway. A. was in such a rush because by this time it was 4:15 and we were going to be out of daylight to work by in just a couple of hours. So A. dropped to his knees in the mud and snow and started skinning.

The neighbor helped some, but given that he's got more than 40 years on A., A. tried to spare him as much as possible.

A. has butchered a lot of animals, but this was significantly different because of the size of this particular animal. There's no way to hang something this big without a tractor to lift it. He couldn't hang it and gut it, as he would with a sheep or a deer. 

So he butchered it the way the Plains Indians butchered buffalo: on the ground.

First he peeled the hide off on one side and cut away the meat on that side. He started to put the meat into the coolers, but it was still steaming hot, which is definitely no good. We needed to get the meat cooled down. And how would we do that without a walk-in cooler?

I know!

The neighbor supplied some very large trash bags, which we spread in the snow so we could lay the meat on them and let the snow chill the meat.

Just chillin'. (Why yes, I do crack myself up.)

Somewhat disturbingly, some of the pieces actually twitched once they were on the snow, as the muscles cooled and contracted a bit. The children thought this was the coolest thing ever, and monitored the meat to see if they could find one that was twitching. 

Little ghouls.

My job was mostly to arrange the meat on those bags as A. tossed it on there. I spread it out and kept flipping the chunks over to cool both sides. I also pulled the bags onto fresh snow as the snow underneath melted. 

A. was cutting as fast as he could this whole time, while our neighbors continuously sharpened knives to keep him supplied with a sharp blade at all times. They have a lot more experience sharpening knives than I do, so I was happy enough just to do the meat flipping.

After A. got as much meat off the one side as he could, we needed to flip the animal. It was still hundreds of pounds, though, so the neighbor got his winch puller and put it on the bull's hind feet. Cubby cranked the winch while A. heaved on the front of the bull to flip it.

Heave ho!

Then more cut cut cutting as fast as possible as the sun set and the light faded. The last bit had to be done with some handy solar lights the neighbors had.

Spotlight on the bull.

When the light was completely gone, A. called it quits so he wouldn't hurt himself. We loaded all the meat into both our coolers and the neighbors' coolers and headed home. 

A. skinned and cut up almost that entire animal in just a little over two hours, which is a pretty impressive feat. 

We just left the coolers of meat in the car overnight, because it was cool enough to do that, but it was too warm today to leave them there. We needed to get them in the freezer. But in what? I didn't have enough plastic wrap or ziptop bags on hand to store all this meat. 

We thought A. would have to take a trip to the closest grocery store (120 miles roundtrip) to get supplies, but I decided to call the guy who runs the tiny store in the village first. I asked him if he had any gallon ziptop bags and he said sure. I asked how many, and he said he buys them by the thousand.

Oh. Okay then. 

So A. only had to drive 20 miles roundtrip to buy 200 bags. Sweet.

We hauled the coolers out and spread the meat out on top of one of the freezers to dry out a bit as we started the butchering and packaging.

Welcome to the meat market.

At this point, it was just standard butchering procedure for us. I set up the dining room table with the cutting boards, knives, bags, and large pots for stew meat pieces, along with a bucket for the dog scraps, and we got to work.

Three hours later, all that meat was trimmed, cut, packaged, and in the extra freezer we brought over just last week from the abandoned house next door. That freezer must be at least forty years old. I was sure it wouldn't work, but A. plugged it in and it started right up. So we brought it over here, thinking we might need it if Cubby gets an elk on his hunt in December.

Instead, we filled it a third full of approximately 250 pounds of grass-fed beef that we got for free. A happy Halloween indeed.

Down Come the Ceilings

 

When we last left our intrepid house rehabber (is that a word?), he had ripped out a lot of nasty old carpet and some wall paneling, and was steeling himself to pull down ceilings.

There is no way to pull down a ceiling that does not result in a literal rain of filth on top of the puller's head. He got it done, though.

He found some cool stuff while he was doing the demo. Like the original adobe bricks under the plaster in one room:

Circa approximately 1920 he thinks, although it's hard to tell here because adobe building has been in use here for so long and was still used until not long ago.

The house appears to have begun life as a two-room adobe, and then was added on to at different times over the years with different materials. Some walls are stone, some are cinder block, some are more modern two-by-fours. It's an interesting example of the history of the building materials in this area.

The fun (fun?) part over, A. then began the tedious process of shoveling three feet of detritus off the floor and wheelbarrowing it into the dumpster.

He's still working on that. And the dumpster is filling up fast.

Stay tuned for the next installment! Which will probably be A. fixing some of the big cracks in the stone walls. Or maybe gutting the kitchen of the nasty old cabinets, if there's room in the dumpster.

A Journey of a Thousand Miles

 

I'm sure you're familiar with that profound little nugget of wisdom: "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

If you aren't familiar with it, now you are. You're welcome! Also, I looked it up to see where it came from, and it's attributed to a (possibly apocryphal) Chinese philospher. 

So there's that.

The particular long journey we're going to talk about now began over a year ago when we bought the abandoned house next door. We only bought it because we didn't want anyone to move in right next door to us. We're real friendly like that.

A. had thought he might someday fix the house up, because it's a hand built adobe and stone house and A. is a self-taught stone mason, but it wasn't high on the list of priorities. 

Cleaning the house out, however, sort of was.

The house had last been lived in by an elderly man who moved out to live with his granddaughter, and quite a lot of the contents of the house were still in there. 

It was a little creepy, to be honest, what with the man's clothes hanging in the closets and personal things like poetry written by the granddaughter still on the walls of her bedroom. It was also disgusting, because all the old blankets and things had made very cozy nests for rodents. 

The kids always wanted to go over there, and they always wanted to take something out to bring home here, and honestly, it was gross and a pain. So we needed to clear it out.

FINALLY, last week, I rented a dumpster.

Here's that very first single step.

It looks like a big dumpster, I know. It is a big dumpster. There was a lot of get rid of.

Last Thursday, A. and I just dove in. 

We began with the detritus in the rooms. Clothing, papers, stuffed animals, blankets, particle-board furniture . . . 

Well. Why don't I let the photos tell that story?

Living room.

Bathroom.

Kitchen (the least cluttered room in the house).

One of the three bedrooms.

It was so gross to be touching all that stuff. My face was set in a permanent expression of disgust the entire time. 

But that was nothing to what came next, as A. started tearing out all the old carpet.

Good thing everyone has plenty of face masks around all the time now.

Getting rid of the carpets made an immediate improvement, because there are few things more filthy than 50-year-old carpeting.

That same bedroom, minus the appalling pink carpet.

The dumpster was filling up rapidly.

We are definitely going to fill this.

A. was on a roll--and also curious to see the actual structure of the house--so he then started pulling off wall paneling. It was the same kind of cheap particle board paneling that was on the walls of the living room in our current house when we bought it. And underneath, we found the same kind of perfectly acceptable walls that definitely did not need to be covered up with that nasty stuff.

In the case of the kitchen, there were actually two layers of paneling.

Right to left: The top layer of horrible grayish paneling, the middle layer of horrible brownish paneling, and the actual wall that was painted an appealingly cheerful yellow.

A. had to stop at this point, because he was exhausted from pulling up and hauling heavy carpets. But the demo was only beginning. 

Stay tuned for when the ceilings came down. Literally.

Construction by Kristin

Although there are many things I do well, building things is not one of them. Never hand me a hammer and expect something usable to come from my efforts. In fact, it's entirely possible I will end up with an unusable, exploded thumb.

But if you need something cobbled together out of cardboard boxes and duct tape? I am your woman.

Luckily for the chicks, a bigger home for them fell within my scope of building. That is, I could duct tape some pieces of cardboard to one of the old drawers we took out of the bunk bed to make the drawer higher and voila! A chick house.

I even found one of the dividers for the dogs' crates and taped that on one end of the box so that the children had a viewing end. That also has the benefit of keeping one end of the box open for better air flow.

And for better photos.

On the other end, with a solid piece of cardboard there and the heat lamp, the chicks can get into a warmer area if they feel cold.

See? Not only am I a general contractor, I am an architect. And I didn't have to pick up a hammer.

A Day of Labor

Big day around the ole New Mexico homestead yesterday, where we celebrated the triumphs of the labor force by . . . laboring.

A. worked on the stone wall that he'll be building for the next, oh, decade.

He asks us to imagine the whole property surrounded by a white stone wall in the Mediterranean style. It's a nice vision.

I spent some time in the morning peeling and slicing apples to dry out in the sun--specifically, on the hood of the Honda, which is where I put the trays--and Cubby decided he wanted to lay in his own personal stash for winter.

I tried to tell him that HE didn't have to be up on the hood for the car to do his prep, but I guess he favors economy of motion.

Charlie "found" (drew) a treasure map and dug for buried treasure.

Alas, either the map was a dud or someone got to the treasure before he did.

Jack dug the Erie Canal in the sand filling A.'s trailer.

And Poppy got in his way. We all have our roles to play, and that is the role of the little sister.

In addition to my usual work:

Which almost always includes laundry in varying amounts.

I sanded and painted a dresser.

This dresser came from the house we bought next door. It's an old, cheap dresser, but free, and I thought it would be nice to replace the small, also cheap pseudo-dresser I got on Amazon for Charlie and Jack's room that doesn't actually have enough room in it for all their clothes.

The "new" dresser had some kind of incredibly ugly pale yellow varnish on it that I could not look at every day for the next twenty years, so I decided to paint it. First I sanded it, though, because the varnish was extremely slick and I didn't think the paint would adhere well.

I used A.'s power sander. First time I'd done that. Did not like. I am not a fan of power tools. Too loud and they vibrate so much.

Anyway. I sanded, then I painted.

Drawers in progress.

I painted it the same pale blue color that the outside of our house is painted, because Dale left behind almost a full gallon of the paint, and the curtains in that bedroom are blue, too. Yes, I used exterior paint for a piece of furniture, which I'm sure is not recommended, but hey, it's what I had. And maybe it will hold up better to the abuse that will no doubt occur in a room full of boys.

I even unscrewed the nasty-looking pulls from the drawers and painted them with some gold spray paint I already had on hand.

I was pretty proud of the egg-carton stabilizer idea.

And then one of the puppies--Jasper, and I suspect it's always going to be Jasper--apparently decided to inspect my work. I know this because I came outside about half an hour later and found that he had blue paint on one ear, one leg (the opposite side from the ear, even!), and his tail.

Despite the puppy interference, I'm pleased with how it came out.

Fancy (fake) gold pulls and all.

It wasn't a restful holiday, but it was very productive.