Thanks!

Just when I thought my firewood pile was dwindling and we'd be able to see the grass again, Bill claimed a couple of trees from two sources around town. They were placed right next to the firewood pile, and it seems like the never-ending pile. Thanks! ;)

Anyway, the bigger of the two trees is a sugar maple which is rated amongst the top of types of wood that burn the hottest and are best used as firewood. It was a smart call on Bill's part. We bought a maul to split it, but first we need a chainsaw to get these logs into more manageable sizes. This could be an on-going project for some time. This wood will need to be seasoned, and just our luck---someone in town has given away two pallets that we will use to stack the wood on. It just might be a long time before that happens, though.

Shrunk firewood pile to the right, two new trees to the left.

Progress

Progress on the living room is being made. The living room is home to two projects right now. It's the room that we are hoping to paint soon and where the wood stove is going.

Work on the living room in preparation for painting has been going on for months. The walls had really old wallpaper (I'm thinking 1950s era) that had been painted over several times. With the help of my mother-in-law we stripped the paint and then the wallpaper from the walls. It took forever and created a few blisters along the way!!! Well, in the last two weeks, my husband and I have stripped all of the remaining glue from the walls using a diluted vinegar mixture. Then we washed the walls using TSP (without Phosphorous). This stuff is amazing! I am a big fan. Any glue left on the walls dissolved instantly and it left the walls super smooth. Well, they are smooth except for the gouges that took place during the arduous wallpaper-removing phase. There is also one plaster wall that is crumbling, has several cracks, and has extremely uneven texture. So, we spent a few days repairing the surfaces of the walls. My husband read online to use caulk in the cracks. Plaster cracks are due to shifting. Caulk has more give than plaster compound (aka, spackling plaster) and will not be as noticeable when there is more gradual shifting. I used plaster compound to repair all holes, divots, and gouges on the walls and ceiling.

After my up-close-and-personal experience with the walls, trying to apply plaster compound as smoothly as possible, I decided that we need to do something to, if not all walls, at least to the "ugly" wall to trick the eye. So, my husband and I went back to Lowe's to look at paint options. Because we did not want to spend much more money on paint, we decided to do rag rolling, which only requires two colors of paint. We had already planned for the "ugly" wall to be the accent wall, so we were all set.

We are going to paint all the walls with a base coat of a white that has a slight green tint to it, called Gilded Endive (Valspar #7003-22). Then the accent wall will be rag-rolled with Green Tea (Valspar #6008-8A). My hope is that the rag rolling will create an illusion that will hide some of the unevenness of the wall.

Of course before we get to the step of applying paint, we still have to sand the caulk and plaster compound, wipe down the walls one final time so that they will be free of dust, and prime the walls using Valspar's high-hiding primer. I'll update you on the progress. Here are some pictures of me scrubbing the wall with TSP.





The other progress being made is on the wood stove front. Not a whole lot has happened, but it is rather exciting. In order to have a fire-safe area around the wood stove, we have to put fire-proof materials underneath the wood stove. We bought some cement board and slate tiles that the wood stove will sit on. It's going to be beautiful! So that we could put this down, Bill removed the horrid 50+ year old carpet from this room.

Please excuse the mess, this room is undergoing lots of work!

Lincoln Logs

Today I got to play Lincoln Logs. That was one of my favorite games when I was a kid. Did you ever think that you'd be playing it again as an adult without any children around?

Our house is heated by baseboard radiators. It cost us more than we could afford to heat this house since we moved in in late December. The last time our tank was filled, we paid $675 for 150 gallons of petroleum! No kidding. During the three winter months we have been in the house we burned about 200-250 gallons per month; and it was still cool in the house. You can see how expensive it can get! Well, we found an alternative that we are going to try this winter---a wood stove.

We found a very nice wood stove that should heat the majority of our house on Craigslist. I say "the majority of our house" because the house is very large (2900 sq ft) and additions throughout the years have rendered it a very funny shape. We bought a Grandma Bear Fisher wood stove. It weighs 400 lbs. Some of my husband's co-workers helped him move it to our house. What's so cute about this line of stoves is that they sit in bear feet.

These are the little bear feet that the Grandma Bear Fisher wood stove sits in.

We got the wood stove for a really good price and the guy threw in all of his remaining firewood and equipment. We made out on the firewood! I saw an article recently titled Firewood a Hot Commodity as Heating Price Climbs. Yep, not that we have bought firewood, but we are certainly part of the trend that is trying alternative heating sources.

This is only some of the firewood we got, one truckload-full had already been stacked.

I have begun stacking the remainder of the wood. I read how to stack wood in order to have a vertical edge without relying on something to support it. To form a vertical side, you find logs that are about the same height and are uniform in height across the whole piece. They form a pair. Then you stack pairs alternating directions as you go up. It works the same way lincoln logs worked.

This picture offers a visual explanation of how the logs are stacked alternating directions.

Rolling Towel

from Martha Stewart

I saw this cute rolling towel organizing idea on marthastewart.com. What do you think? Wouldn't it be so cute for this old farmhouse? It would be neat to make several and switch them out every 2-3 days. That way things would stay clean and neat. Maybe one day I'll have the time to do it. I would like to put it in the downstairs bathroom that would be used most frequently by guests.

Bargain!

Earlier in the summer, when we planted some tomatoes, I needed to get my garden hose under control because the water spigot is quite a distance from our veggie garden area. It wouldn't be that big of a deal, I mean I have bigger fish to fry, except for we pay someone to cut the grass and I never know when he is coming. So, I try to keep the hose put up at all times. I went to Walmart in great hopes of buying a convenient hose reel that makes winding it up super simple. After looking at the prices ($30+), sadly I resigned myself to getting the $10 hose holder that attaches to the house and requires that I wrap the hose around it manually. I installed it myself and it works just fine.

It's the end of the season and guess what? What's left is on sale. We found this nice hose reel with great features at Target for less than what I paid for the boring basic version (a whopping $8.24)! The picture below is of a similar reel, I think our model may have one additional feature. To wind the hose up, you use a hand crank that folds away after use. It also has a sliding track that guides the hose for easy winding and unwinding. Awesome! The reel is actually a cart on wheels, so it can go anywhere on this 1.6 ac property. Since the yard is so large, we have quite a bit of hose, and this additional reel will be so handy. It takes three hoses hooked together to reach the fence along the road (we know because we cleaned algae off the fence a couple of months ago). We also found a a ring of about 10 hose washers at Target for $0.53 and know they'll be useful in time as well!

It All Begins

After 8 months in our new home, the house is a disaster...projects started everywhere. Yes, this old house---which I've affectionately coined Butterfly Farm Manor after our two beautiful Papillons---is quite the fixer-upper. Who knows if Bill and I knew what we were getting ourselves into, but here we are. Aside from the fact that we love love love this house, with the economy as it is, there is no way we could sale the house if we wanted to.

I decided to finally commit and start a blog as a record of the little progress that we've made in our house, perhaps for no one's enjoyment but mine. I would like to have a record, including pictures of where we've been and where we are going. Sure, I'd rather do it in a journal, but in this digital age, it's substantially easier to type it than to write it, especially when it comes to posting pictures!! I love my color printer, but it's still put away from our move and I really don't have much of a place for it.