A Look Back

It's been a little over two years since we sold our lovely farmhouse. We thought we were headed back to the west coast, but we are still here in the same little town in Southern Indiana for now.

If I'm completely honest, we all miss our farmhouse that we restored -- with so much love and care -- with our own hands. But life is not always what it seems, and is so unpredictable at times. I believe we have another restoration in our hearts, which we probably wouldn't have said two years ago, but after living in a new build, as lovely as it is, nothing can replace the feeling and character of a 150-year-old house.

Here's to you, Tash Farm in Pekin, Indiana ~ favorite photos, and pictures of our finished work since the last blog post.

                                       

Happy Fall 2015!

Fall is officially my new favorite season.

This is a lovely spot up on the hill near the barn:

We are considering building a tiny house here. ;-)

How's your Fall so far?

Living Room Photos....Finally!

I humbly offer the following, real life, un-retouched, un-styled photos of our 95% done living room!

Thank you for being so patient! 

Living Room Update

I bet you've been waiting to see how the living room floor turned out! Without further delay, we are absolutely thrilled with the end result. It is very rustic and dark. It really grounds the room.

Here's our littlest making a run for the front door.

Here are some shots that really show the color of the stain and characteristics of the wood:

As for the color scheme, the ceiling is Behr Ceiling Paint -- the plain white in the bucket; the walls ended up being PPG/Porter Paint Edelweiss; the trim is Behr Ultra Pure White; doors are/will be PPG/Porter Paint Black. We have some painting to finish up but things are coming together. I can't even explain how much difference having this room in a mostly finished state makes! 

Here are some interim (during) shots of the room. You might notice the old 'mantel' is gone. I put it in parenthesis on purpose since the 'mantel' was just some pieces of wood nailed together. Our tv now sits where the mantel used to be.

Well, that's all I have time for at the moment. Both of our youngest are sick, not sleeping well, and pretty grumpy for the past 3 or 4 days.

More soon.

Hope your Christmas was Merry or whatever holiday you celebrate was blessed!!!!

~ Kevin & Ann

No Living Room Floor? No Problem!

I also thought about titling this post, "Honey, You Took Out Our Living Room Floor," but that seemed a little long...and cliche.

I suppose I should have started with a groveling apology for being away from the blog for SO long. So, hat in hand, we do apologize. Life has been wild and interesting, to say the least!

To explain, about the time of our blog post before this one, we found out we would be adding to our family, and exactly 10 months ago from today, our sweet baby boy arrived. He is a complete joy but the pregnancy was really uncomfortable for me.

That said, it delayed a lot of work on my part but we are back on track! The kitchen is pretty much done....photos will come in another post....but the big news this week is the living room.

We've known for quite some time that this room needed a major overhaul and I finally put my foot down and pushed for it. So yesterday, the old floor came out. The hubby and a nice guy he hired to help starting rebuilding today. Here are a few more of the progress today:

Some of the ends of the joists towards the front of the house were rotten, as we expected. And as the photos show, the room now has a new floor structure, adjusted to accommodate the new 3/4" subfloor and 3/4" hardwood flooring. What we took up was approximately 1" thick tongue in groove hardwood. No subfloor below, just dirt.

I'm happy as a clam because this is progress, my friends! And the chipping, lead-based paint around the perimeter of the room is gone! See all of that 'gold' paint still on the stairs and trim? All lead-based. Nothing to mess with. We've painted over pretty much all of the rest of the exposed lead-based paint, and especially with the little guy crawling, I feel much better getting rid of more. Soon, it will all be covered over with at least two coats of paint, after a good wipedown with TSP to remove the grime.

The trim, baseboards and stairs will be white. The doors will be black. And the wall color will be one of the following:

I will be putting test spots up on the walls tomorrow when the subfloor is down. Hopefully it will be an easy decision. I've done this before with 5 or 6 different colors and I still couldn't decide.

More soon. I promise.

~Ann

Lucky Bogging Doesn't Have To Pay The Bills....

I suppose I could apologize for our lack of blogging over the past many months but I think if you read back a  little ways you'll see that I've already done that a number of times.  The fact is that I've been a bit behind on my progress on the house and there haven't been that many changes of late.  So I said to myself,

"Well, you could go out and work on a project in the cold, windy snow... OR you could sit down and blog and tell yourself that blogging counts as working on a project and you'll get that same sense of accomplishment without the frostbite...."  Which do you think I chose??

We have had a number of things transpire in the last few months in our lives in general.  One of the biggest ones is that it looks like we are going to be able to buy the barn property next to our house.  For those who don't know or don't remember there is a very large old barn that sits on a hill behind our house.  It was part of the original farm and we've been in love with it since before we moved here.  It has 3 levels and is just full of history and we couldn't stand the thought of it falling down one day.  The school district owns it presently but if all goes well over the next month or so we will be buying the 4 acres that it sits on along with an old chicken house that is down the hill next to our house.  Here's a picture of the barn up close:

And one from our back yard:

And this is the chicken house (not as majestic but we love it anyway):

We have 14 chickens right now and will be getting another 26 at the end of April so this chicken house will be filled to capacity by early summer.

It's always amazing to us how God works in our lives and blesses us with things that we can use to bless others.  A while back we decided to give our eggs away to local people.  We could sell them at the farmers market but it made more sense to us to give to those who would appreciate them.  The gift of the chicken house will allow us to give so much more than we presently do.  We are going to reach out to the local food bank and partner with them to share our blessings.  So hopefully we can go from 50+ eggs/week with our present chickens to 150+/week with the new flock.  Pray for productive hens :-)

It's amazing to me what becomes "treasure" when you refocus your life.  Not too long ago we were out exploring an old house and property called The Rush Farm.  It's a house that was build about the same time as ours that has been empty for 10+ years.  The property had been in the Rush family since the mid 1700's but when Mrs. Rush died it was sold and divided.  Well, when we were out exploring the house we found an old kitchen stove that was so cool and was in pretty good shape.  During the Christmas season I contacted the real estate company that owned the property and asked if I could buy the stove.  I was going to give it to Ann for Christmas... Pretty romantic huh??  Anyway the guy said "No" and that the property had sold, so I thought that was that.  But, we had an inside track that we didn't even know about.  Come to find out the property was purchased by our neighbor Mary's grand daughter and so:

There is the cleaned up and completely working early 1960's GE stove in our kitchen.  The thing was almost like new once we got the grease and rat's nests out of it.... Ok, one small nest under one of the burners but seriously it was like nothing was ever baked in it and EVERYTHING worked.  Even the clock still keeps perfect time.  It has a small oven on the left and a large one on the right with 2 storage drawers below.  And, our neighbor Troy, who brought it to us, said that Everett Tash (the last Tash to live in our house) had one like it in the kitchen when he lived here.  That made it even more perfect.  It cost us 1- half case of Bud Light, 1/2 bottle of Mrs. Myers cleaner and a roll of paper towels... What a deal!!!

The final piece of treasure we've been blessed with lately is:

A new baby calf.

  *** NOTE TO CITY PEOPLE:  The cows don't really have evil looking glowing eyes.  I took the picture in the barn and the flash caused this... DO NOT BE AFRAID***

Anyway, the calf was born about a week and an half ago and is doing really well.  This brings our "herd" up to 3.  We think we are going to keep this little one and breed her.  Sadly, the one that is almost a year old will be going away in late summer only to return to us wrapped in small, TASTY, white packages.  So if you happen to be back this way in late summer/ early fall we will feed you very well.  You will get stuff from our garden and our freezer.  Better bring some sweat pants or other loose fitting clothing in case you over do it.

Well, that's about it for me for this morning.  Not that I'm out of stuff to write but Ann will be getting up soon and need this computer to start working.  I never thought life could change so much for us in such a short time but WOW has it ever.  Right now I can hear the wind blowing outside and see the snow being swept all over the yard and there is not a car or house in sight and as much as we love the city... This place really does it for us.

And before I finish, no blog post is complete without a kid picture (Bonnie on the gate by the chicken house):

And a scenic, seasonal picture (ice on the barn):

Take care, thank you all for keeping track of us and we'll write more soon.

Happy New Year! (or A Post I Wish I Didn't Have to Write)

Hope everyone is having a good start to 2013! We have been enjoying the winter in the house with our wood stove that keeps us warm and toasty. For someone like me (Ann) that grew up in houses with central heat, this is a new experience and I have gotten many splinters from the task of keeping the stove filled up. I still regularly mess up and the fire gets too low and my better half has to rebuild it!

Here's our lovely $75 wood stove that Kevin refinished.

In the process of being refinished:

Done!

Looking at these photos reminds me that repainting the porch is #1 on the agenda for spring!

Here it is installed.

And now for the part of the post I wish I didn't have to write......sigh....

First, a few photos.

It may not be obvious, except in the first photo of the three, but we've got some gapping going on, which is disturbing to me. We assume it is because this floor has not be refinished in decades, and since the house was unoccupied for about 7 years, it is drying out. Also, I wasn't able to capture it, but near the wood stove, there is some settling happening.

What you have likely guessed by now is that this floor, which I really, really, really wanted to just be able to paint....is going to have to come up. boo hoo hoo :-(   And while we are at it, we are going to re do the office floor as well. SIGH......  Since we need the stove for heat, this work will happen this summer. 

On the bright side, we have some 'issues' with the floor that we will be able to fix - namely, bigger gaps near the front of the house.

On a literal bright note, we've been installing lighting in the kitchen and upstairs.  The kitchen is still not finished but is coming along.

Here is the back wall currently:

As you can see, we still have some work to do but it is workable for now. We will install more cabinetry on both sides of the current cabinetry and wrap it around on the left, under the new (reclaimed!) shelves on the wall. The stove will be moved to where the frig is on the right and the frig will be to the right of the camera view.

Also, Kevin determined there is wood under the drywall on the ceiling after all, so the old drywall will come down and we will paint the wood underneath white.

Well, that's all for now. We realize we aren't blogging quite enough to keep up with everything we've got going on, so our New Year's resolution is to get better about it!

Until next time, be well!

~Ann