Living the dream....

We have been in the house for three weeks today! I am over the feeling like I am doing something wrong by not being at work phase. So far, we have unpacked and or moved half of the boxes from the front room. We have a rather large attic, so I will admit,  many of Kevin's books are up there. We have plans for built in bookcases, we have hundreds of books, but right now, I need to figure out how to find the items that would be really useful at this time.

 The house is over one hundred and thirty years old, the last few years, it has been abandoned. We are trying to prioritize the things that need to be dealt with immediately. The first is the huge hole in the threshold of the front door. Kevin cut out all of the decayed wood, and bought pressure treated wood to rebuild it. Stairs for that door would be great too, but not a necessity since more than likely any visitors we may have will come in through the porch. I bought paint for the house, it is currently white, with black doors. The doors need to be stripped and repainted. I got a shade of green for the doors. The back of the woodshed has yellow siding, so we will paint the rest of the house yellow, the trim will stay white. There are a few clapboards that have to be replaced, and the rest will be patched and painted before Winter sets in. Other things that we don't necessarily agree with is my desire to tear down all of the dirty, peeling wallpaper. I would rather look at the plaster walls than the paper. The sloping floors would be a priority for me as well, but there are other things that need immediate attention. We have to bury the water pipe running from the Spring, prepare the pads for the two out buildings coming next month, bury the cable. We also have soil testing, I have ordered the kits, testing the water from the Spring, picking a cover crop once the garden is plowed, and planting pasture seed. We will probably consult the county extension on the cover crop and the pasture seed. I know that we have timothy, common vetch, purple clover and lots of wildflowers in the pasture. Next Spring, I will have a milk cow, probably a calf, and a steer in the pasture. The guys are picking up a tractor today, a 1954 Farmall cub, with a cultivator, a mow board plow, sickle bar mower, and a snow plow. This will definitely make the field work a whole lot easier. We need to purchase a wood stove and some wood for Winter heating.


So far, we have had our electric updated, phase one, we have electric, we don't have many outlets, but are learning to make do. I bought a bunch of adapters and power strips and the power has been updated from 60 amp to 100.  We have hot and cold running water. We got a new water heater, and Kevin finally ran a new water line from the spring and the pump problem has been fixed. We have a temporary fenced in yard for the dogs, it is made of chicken wire, definitely helpful with all the logging trucks running up and down Route One. We have also scraped and primed the storm windows, we broke the glass in two of them, so they will have to be replaced before Winter.

Kevin is building me a kitchen wardrobe from a kit from Restoration Hardware. Once that is built, I can begin organizing the kitchen. We made a compost bin near the garden area. We have trapped some mice using sticky traps. I have moved everything a mouse could possibly want to eat into plastic and glass containers. They will eat anything! I bought a bag of popcorn and found it completely empty four days later. They also ate confectioners sugar, a box of cereal, bag of marshmallows, and a few other things that escape my mind. It looks like they are giving up now that they can only "window shop" my vast array of glass and heavy plastic containers. Wallpaper has been purchased for the kitchen and living room, I have peeled up all of the paper in the living room and will plaster some cracks in the plaster today as well as cover the walls with wallpaper siding. I would like to get the wallpaper up by the beginning of next week, it would be good to actually have one finished room to relax in.   

The weather is nice, crisp in the morning and comfortably warm, but not hot in the afternoon. The area is still breathtakingly beautiful, and we are living the dream....