Am I Naive?

Ok...so have you  "Googled" yourself lately all my fellow bloggers? I did the other day & was surprised that my blog came up as the first hit. Why was I surprised? I guess I thought that since I don't reveal my identity in the blog posts or profile, that it was private information. Not that I have anything to hide....but I have always thought that your name was more concealed than that. Hmmm. Try it & let me know if you find the same thing. I post on blogger. I wonder if this is an issue on other blog host sites like Word Press, etc.?

In other news...here is a picture of the medicine cabinet & mirror that we installed this weekend. Also the new color & light fixture in the bathroom.

Still need to buy a matching knob for the medicine cabinet & another LED bulb for the light fixture.

Steve has now caught my cold & is feeling pretty miserable. He was in the city most of the day measuring a job. We just got through watching an episode of "Northern Exposure" and now he is in bed. Sleep will help (and dreaming of running away to Alaska :-),  I'm sure.

I spend the day setting up payroll in Quickbooks. Still not done. We have always had the accountant do payroll, but are trying to save $$ by doing it ourselves now. Tomorrow I will call Quickbooks to get answers to a few question & then it should be all set.

Tonight before we watched Northern Exposure, I exercised a bit. Now that I can breathe again, I have some energy :-). Steve started working out last week (to get ready for ski season) and I am working out for gardening season :-). (well, biking season, too).

Well, I have to get some sleep if I am to be on the phone to India tomorrow. Yes...that's where the calls end up for customer service. Hope you all have a good night!

A Relaxing Yet Productive Weekend

We are driving through Madison right now after our usual stop in Middleton at the Mobil. Now that it is dark  on the drive home, it’s harder to sew or knit like I do when it is light. I still need something to keep me occupied while Steve is driving the busy roads home, so I thought blogging might work. Mia (our cat) has decided to sit on the laptop and but is now settled in my lap. Everyone seems to be heading home from the holiday weekend tonight. I hope you all had a great weekend with family & friends or just relaxing at home.

We are still recovering from our colds but feel much better than last week. I really didn’t expect to get much done but we did accomplish a few things. Steve hung drywall on the low wall in the kitchen where the sink & cook top will be. I hope to post a drawing of those cabinets, etc. soon.

 

Kitchen wall. The 2 pex lines in floor is the location of the sink.

Cooktop will be in the area behind the bucket.

While he worked on that, I was in the attic & the basement looking for misc. items to take back home in preparation for Christmas. Things like cookie cutters, the kid’s stockings, and felted wool to make presents. I seriously have a wool obsession.  I shop at Goodwill and garage sales for wool sweaters. At first I was making dryer balls (which I still do) and water bottle covers, but now I’m adding other items. So far a trivet and reading glasses  holder.  I can’t tell you the other items yet or it will ruin the surprise for the kids.

When Steve was finished with the drywall, he put up a temporary door at the base of the attic stairs.  We will still keep the Styrofoam at the top of the stairs. That should keep the space even warmer. I worked on putting up the last bit of blue jean insulation on the workshop wall that backs up to the new living area.

The last of the insulating on the main floor.

It got down to fourteen degrees Friday night but today was in the forties. That was very comfortable for bringing in more firewood for our next visit which I worked on while Steve went on to the next project, putting another coat of mud on the bathroom drywall. One more coat & we should be painting.

Second coat of mud.

The Subaru looks right at home at the farm :-)

At the shop, we’ve been working on  a medicine chest & mirror frame made of the same hickory wood as the vanity. We will begin working on the cabinets & counter top for the low wall in the kitchen soon. Then we can have a working sink upstairs for washing dishes. Yippee!!! Washing dishes in the basement in the utility sink works but it is hard on the back. Just not the right height.
So this was the maiden voyage for the Subaru. So far so good. I put a few bumper stickers in the windows today. One is for the local radio station WDRT and the other says “Driftless. Slower is better” . Steve’s brother Joe called the Subaru our “hippiemobile”.  We just laughed. I guess it’s better than a “conservativemobile“.  I think a lot of people think of us as old hippies. We aren’t “mainstream” that’s for sure. But who wants to be like everyone else?
We are home now, so I am copying, pasting  & adding pictures to this post. Time for bed now & dreams of the new kitchen...

Staying Home & Making a Vanity

After Steve's tiring week at work (3 days in the city, installing cabinetry) we decided to stay home this weekend. We still haven't made a vanity for the farm bath, so that is what we are doing today. We are starting with rough sawn hickory, leftover from a job we had a couple years ago. The people had it cut down so Steve could make a piece of furniture for them. They didn't want the extra wood so now we get to make something from it. It will be a mission-style vanity with a laminate (left over from another job)top. We purchased a sink for $5 at a re-use it shop in Elgin. I did order a new faucet though. We couldn't find one that we liked used. Here is the hickory.

Steve is cutting it as I write. I will help him sand it & apply the laminate later.

It will be so nice to have a working sink in the bathroom. We use the basement utility sink for all of our washing right now.

This week I emailed & talked to Center Stove & Fireplace out of Richland, WI about getting the wood stoves moved before winter. We bought a used soapstove stove last fall. We have a soapstone one in the area we live in right now & want to use that one in our new living area. The used one will go in it's place. We will be building a base for the stove after we get the electric run in that area & should be ready for the wood stove then. We will probably wait for spring to put stone on the walls behind it.

The windows we ordered came in this week. We now have enough to do the whole barn. We were going to wait but there was a great sale so we went ahead with the order for all of them. Maybe by winter, we'll have the front ot the barn done. It will look so nice!

We have also been discussing what to do about heat when we aren't there. Right now we have 2 hot water solar panels that take care of the needs for the house. We would like to have radiant floor heat too but don't want to spent the extra money right now for 2 more solar panels. We are talking about using the existing panels for the floor heat in the winter & switching it back to the water heating in the summer. We have a hot water heater so that shouldn't be a problem. We'll have to talk to Johnny Murphy from Greenhome Solar .
He put in the other panels.

Tomorrow we hang out with family at my brother's house for my niece & nephew's birthday.

I'll post more pics when we get the vanity done.

Have a great wekend!

Living the Dream

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the before & after of the room we are using now in the barn. I thought I would look back at what has been done on the other side of the barn. This is a before look since we haven't made it to the "final" after yet. Slowly but surely it is changing.

Earlier I posted pics of how it looked when the Amish lived here. The following pics are from the time we closed on the farm until now.

This is the room that all the machines were in when the Amish owned it. There is another room (on the west side) that was also used as a sewing/bedroom. The wall you see divides them.

This is the view facing east of the same room.
The doorway you see is what is now our living area. It really is a huge space. The barn measures about 38 x 66. With three floors, that's a lot of square footage. Since we have the custom cabinet business, that will take up a big chunk of space. Our living area will only be around 900 to 1000 square feet on the main level with guest bedroom/craft area upstairs. Until we get the upstairs done, the room we live in right now will be for guests. Here is our son Shane, tearing down the dividing wall. Having no electric in the barn made it easier since we didn't have to worry about wires. The power tools we used were run by a generatorThe wall is down. It really opened up the room. We were also working on the windows.
They needed painting & some were warped.

That day, Shane built some walls for our "bathroom". Steve made a sawdust toilet that worked fine for an indoor toilet. It was an adjustment getting used to that but it wasn't all that bad. It had a regular toilet seat & was at the same height as a "normal" toilet. Better than going outside to an outhouse when it is cold outside. Now we have indoor plumbing which was celebrated by calling our kids & flushing the toilet so they could join us for the momentous occasion! The oval object on the wall is a solar light.
A small panel is mounted outside the window.Blue jean insulation was added to the wall adjacent to our "living room".
We only have heat from the wood stove in that area so we made it as warm as we could.The only way to get to the basement was by the stairs that were under a heavy door on the floor. They were pretty shakey & I always worried about the door falling on my head. Here we had already taken down the basement stairs & were using a ladder.After many hours of planning the layout of the living area that we wanted,
Steve started working on the new basement stairs.It was spring & was warming up, so we turned our efforts to outside projects & the garden. Then the accident kept us from traveling to the farm for a while & we had a lot of mowing, weed pulling & tending to the garden when we did get back to the farm. In August, Steve put up the bathroom walls. By October, we had plumbing.
After a year and a half of using a sawdust toilet & a solar shower,
having a real bathroom is HUGE!
And that brings us to the new picture window & French door.And finally the stairs.
This is where we are now in the process. Last weekend we set a couple new support posts & this weekend we hope to put up some 2x4 walls in the new living area. As I go through all these pictures, it brings back all the dreams we had that got us to this point.
We have to step back every once in a while & remember, we are living that dream.
And as excited as we are to finish the house,
we know that what we are doing now will be looked back on and cherished.