Recap

Thanks to everyone that shared advice with me about my last post.  I'm going to give Etsy a try, God is watering my garden this week (thank you Lord) and potty training is just plain hard.

It's time for a reminder of what this blogs all about and where we're going.  Things around the house have slowed down as we've taken time to work around the property.  We'd like to have a well groomed area around the house to enjoy which has required cutting down a few trees and a lot of mowing.  The property is wooded and most of the front two thirds is so thick with woods it isn't mowable, but the area where the house is tucked away is really shaping up.  As far as the house goes, we're hopefully getting ready to kick into high gear again and get it finished by sometime this fall.  We've already got nine or ten months in the house but we've Jeff has done all the work in our Jeff's spare time with the help of friends and family.

This was originally the look I was going for...

Bora Bora.

but it just isn't happening. 

I couldn't convince Jeff to haul in a bunch of sand and flood the place with salt water.

Here's what it still looks like on the outside minus the building debris and the kids zip line.

Things haven't changed since the winter due to the weather and short daylight hours, but we'll be adding siding soon and a front porch that goes across the front of the house.

Amelia Park, Fl.

This has the colors of siding we want and the front porch look we want.

This little cottage is just adorable.

Lowe's Kit House

For my greatest and favorite inspiration you'll have to visit Ross Chapin's super-duper-amazing cottages.  I love the details and the efficiency of his houses.  Jeff and I have been fans of his for a few years and I get weak in the knees every single time I browse his website.  I'd love to incorperate as much similar detail into the exterior of my house (the interior details are wonderful too.)

Another big undertaking will be the upstairs.  Nothing has changed up there but we'll have two bedrooms and a half bath all clad with the wood planks on the walls like the first floor. 

The larger bedroom will have four built-in twin beds with storage under the beds and the smaller bedroom will have two built-in twin beds.  It will be all about efficiency and organization up there because that's how my kids are.  (Ha!  I wish.) 

I love the simplicity of this bedroom.  

Country Living

The kids rooms will have vaulted ceilings too.

Now, back to the first floor.

 

We need to finish things like trim, floors and kitchen cabinets and when the kitchen is done I'd like it to have a similar look or feel to this one.

Coastal Living

We'll have white painted cabinets and concrete counter tops and, of course, my blue stove.

I'd love to have a Big Chill refrigerator too, but at $3,500 a pop, I'm not holding my breath.

The bathroom is getting closer to the look I love.

Mine.

Country Living's.

And the master bedroom is coming along too.

  Right now I'm trying to decide if I'd rather have wood or carpet in there.  There are things I love and hate about both and I'm leaning toward wood, but we'll see.  We came EXTREMELY close to buying carpet for it yesterday but I really think I'd rather have all wood on the first floor and a few large area rugs. 

What do you guys think about carpet vs. wood?

Can I get your advice, please?

Busy, busy, busy!  I don't know about the rest of you, but when the days start getting longer, the work load seems to get heavier.  A lot of it is self imposed work like gardening and sewing, and other things, like potty training, have nothing to do with the season, but it always gets busier for us every spring.

Yes, my little two year old is being potty trained.

 You'd think by now I'd have this potty training thing down to an art and we could shave a year or so off the diaper wearing phase, but I figure I'll just keep her outside in a dress without a diaper and let her figure things out and if she's trained by the time she's five or six I'm doing alright.

Speaking of lofty goals, I'm considering selling stuff on Etsy.  It turns out that even though I have a cool, blue 1950's oven, I still just can't get into cooking, so I figure I'll sell stuff on Etsy, become a multi dollaraire and hire a personal chef.  So far, I've made three pounds of soap from scratch and two pennant style banners.  That ought to be enough, right?

Seriously though, I am looking into Etsy and would love to hear what any of you have to share about it.  What works, what doesn't..."don't waste your time"...whatever you have to say, I want to know.  Here's why, every month, several of the women in my family get together for what we call "craft day" and everyone brings whatever craft they're working on and we craft.  Except me.  I bring my children and I talk a lot.  Anyway, we recently decided to put our craftiness to good use and try to raise money to help a particular person who could really use the money.  Without saying too much, she is someone very dear who, as we say around here, has a tough row to hoe and we'd like to help her as much as we can by giving her some cold, hard cash.  Money doesn't make life perfect, but it can help smooth it out sometimes.  The group is very talented (like my mom) and we all have a heart to help so we're investigating ways to sell our wares as a group for her.  Do any of you sell on Etsy with a friend?  How does that work out?  Is it practical? 

Now, speaking of hoeing tough rows, my garden is complete!  Have I ever even mentioned that I was working on that?  Our dirt is made up of mostly rocks, so we had some topsoil brought in and Jeff fenced it in.  At our last house, we had some river bottom dirt hauled in that was incredible.  Zero rocks and zero weeds.  It was extremely dark brown and very easy to work with and the plants seemed to grow well enough in it.  This years dirt has some organic matter and a lot of worms so I hope that's a sign of good dirt.  I only found one or two rocks but weeds are popping up here and there already. >:[  Thank goodness for the hula hoe!

I took on gardening like everything else I do and studied up for at least an hour before I declared myself an expert and then jumped in with both feet.  This is only my second year at gardening and I still know very little about it so we made this years garden even bigger than last years.  What I lack in know-how I make up for with determination and delegation and grand ideas.  "Kids!  Go water my garden.  NOW!"  See how that works?   "Jeff!  Those trees are blocking sunlight from my garden!"  "Now let's plant an orchard there."

So do you all have any gardening plans or tips?

Don't forget to let me know your thoughts on Etsy, pretty please.

Thanks!

My latest finds and a chicken tractor

Here's a quick peek a couple of things we're working on around the house...

I've been keeping an eye out for a vintage fan to mount on the wall in our bedroom rather than have a ceiling fan.  I love having a fan on while I sleep in the summer, especially with a window open too. 

 There are a lot of these old fans floating around.  A lot of them still work just fine and most of them have a little rust, a few dings and chipped paint.  I love rust, dings and chipped paint but when I found this one, I knew it was the one.  It was still in its original box with the tag on it and all its papers and looked brand new.  It had been stowed away for the past 50 years in someones attic in Michigan and now it's back in Missouri, where it started out...where it belongs.

It's like a sweet homecoming.

The door on the barn track is another project we've got going on in the bedroom.  I found the old door at a flea market and Jeff hung it from the track for me.  I've got to decide how I want to finish the wood and put some opaque plexiglass in the window.  I'll have another door on the same track on the other side of the fan for the closet...one of these days, hopefully. 

Jeff's a busy man.

Recently he's been helping me get a garden ready and building a chicken tractor.

I, of coarse, "supervised" (skimmed through books) from right here...

for all of about five semi-relaxing minutes.  Then it was back to refereeing kids and animals, playing name that bug and 20 500 questions times four chatty children and fetching tools, drinks, sandwiches and bandaids, nursing baby, changing diapers, etc, etc.

Back to the tractor.  While preparing this post, I realized I didn't have any good pictures of the completed chicken tractor, so I grabbed my camera and headed out to snap one or two shots.

As soon as the girls (hens) heard the clickety click of my camera, they started heading over to the tractor to pose for me.  We let them roam free all day and they typically only come to the tractor to get a drink or lay an egg, unless there's a camera involved, then they're all over it.  Even Petunia, our barn cat, got into the act.

Silly cat, she thinks she's a chicken.

She was snacking on chicken feed when some of the hens spotted her and decided they couldn't let her hog the camera.

"Move over cat!  This isn't about you!"

Before Petunia knew it, she was being ganged up on by the girls and she was run out of town!

The kids named the hen on the far left Eye Pecker, and for good reason.  I'm guessing even Petunia knows about her reputation.  Chickens just can't resist pretty little sparkles, especially that chicken.  "Oh, what's that pretty sparkling thing in your face?" she clucks.  "Here, let me..."  peck, peck.  "OUCH!!  That's my EYE!"  Yep, they're not very bright.

Anyway, for anyone that's curious, Jeff made the tractor out of an old chain link dog pen.  He made an A frame from two of the panels and closed up the ends with chicken wire.  Then made a small coop at one end with a ramp that we pull closed at night.  The roof of the coop is made of left over metal roofing and is only screwed down at the top so we can lift it open to gather the eggs like so...

Every now and then, we find a kid in there, but it's usually just hens and eggs.

He can pull it around the yard with the riding mower when he needs to, hence the name chicken tractor.

Welp, that's all.

Cupcakes for my cupcake

I've been refamiliarizing myself with cooking, since I went so long with just a couple of little hot plates, and one of the first things I baked in my dreamy blue oven were cupcakes.  I bought a carrot cake mix for Jeff's birthday a few weeks ago, in hopes that the oven would be up and running by then.  It wasn't.  But that's okay because if it had been, then these cutesy little cupcakes would have never been born.  They'd have been a plain old sheet cake because what man's man would wants cupcakes for his birthday, even if he is a sweetie?

 

I've been taking on things like oven roasted chicken as well as popping some of our home grown Dakota Black popcorn on the stove.

It's not burned, the kernels are actually black.

Cooking on the blue stove almost makes me enjoy cooking!