Roadtrip to West Virginia

We took a quick vacation down to West Virginia. Everything with the house was going slower than planned, and Nana and Papaw's house got like 17 inches of snow, while we got zero up here in Ohio, so we packed up, drove 4 hours, and hung out in almost no internet or cell phone hills for a week. Seriously, we have to climb a mountain or walk over a mile up the road to get a cell phone signal, and just a few years ago, it was a 40 minute drive before our cell phones picked up a tower!

Nana and Papaw's. Apparently my camera decided not to save the whole picture...

The horses up the road. There were never horses when I was little, but the girls love to walk up and feed them carrots.

The sun never really reached the house. It didn't get high enough in the sky to clear the hill until it was setting at the beginning of the road.

Building a fort!

Mr. Snowman

Our dumb dumbs... Apollo and Athena

Sled riding.

The snowpants were just as fast as the sleds

The snow lasted awhile since the sun barely hit this side of the valley.

Sunset

Finally Some Progress

It absolutely stinks to own a house that you can't live in! At this point in time, it'll probably be the end of February or the beginning of March before we actually move in, meaning that we will have owned the house for 3 months before actually spending the night there.

But we have progress... the gas company finally came out and installed the propane tank, and today they are filling it, which means that tonight or tomorrow, we should be able to stay warm in the house! This is what the contractor has been waiting for. He has a lot of drywall mud work to do, and mud doesn't stick to well to the wall when it's frozen.

Yay for heat!

We also gave our mailbox an update. I never really cared about the mailbox on the porch when we lived in town. You could barely see it from the road, and people rarely came to the front door. In the country though, mailboxes at the road define that there's a house somewhere around there, and I wanted something fun. The problem is that all 4 girls wanted to paint something on the mailbox (and I wanted to as well), so we decided to just do handprints, simple yet colorful.

Other things going on the past couple weeks include drywall getting put up in the kitchen, getting a wood burning stove for the shop and running the pipe for it, and moving our Taurus and 1 Fiero from dad's back yard to the shop. We still have 2 Fieros sitting at dad's place, along with a bunch of stuff that we kept outside when we lived in town. It's mostly outside toys, so it's not a big deal if they don't get moved until spring.

Our hope for this week is to have the furnace running, and start putting up drywall mud in the 4 bedrooms upstairs as well as the bathroom. We are so glad things are starting to move forward!

Knocking Out Stairs...

It's some dirty work. With a 3 day weekend, why not tear something up? The furnace guys are supposed to come sometime next week, and the contractor is going to start running water lines on Tuesday, so we decided this weekend would be the time to knock down the attic stairs. We finished most of the demo work yesterday, and today we are buying the pull down stairs, and we'll try to get it put in. We also pulled up a lot of the masonite in the hallway, which means we only have the front loft bedroom left to do upstairs, and then we will begin to patch walls in the 4 bedrooms.

This is what the upstairs hallway area looked like before. The attic stairs are above the staircase, where the smoke alarm is hanging.

 This is what the attic stairs look like. No thanks, those things bend every time someone steps on them. Super creepy, and they look to be original to the house.

Here's the hallway area after knocking it all out. We still have a stud hanging out, and there's a wire running there as well. We need to figure out what that wire actually runs and get it moved!

 

Of course no attic is complete without finding some curse in the stair walls. We found a Christmas ornament or two also, but yeah, napkin curses and a snake drawn on leather/suede. Fun times!

Hopefully we can get the pull down stairs done this weekend, and rip out more flooring. I'd love to have the upstairs finished except for lighting fixtures and sanding/staining floors in about 2 weeks. Let's see if we can get it done!

New Year's Resolutions 2016

With the new year inching upon us, we have quite a honey-do list around the homestead. I realize that we won't get everything we have plans for done, that this will be at least a decade long process to get the home completely finished, and have everything set up the way we want, but I'm a list person, so we will do the obligatory New Year's resolution blog post!

Homesteading Goals for 2016

1. Move in :)

2. Plan and plant a small garden

3. Build a chicken coop and get chickens

4. Start 2 bee hives

5. Fence in a pasture area for chickens

6. Start an orchard that we can add to

7. Install a clothes line

8. Mark Maple trees

The contractors should be done in early February, and we home to move in shortly after. We just finished moving everything out of our storage units into the smaller garage yesterday. I'm sure we could have quite the garden, but I have a bit of a brown thumb, so I'd like to start off small. We still have 2 chickens at the in-laws, and I hope to get more in March during chick days. We will need a bigger coop than what we currently have for that, and as much as I would love for them to free range completely, we have a lot of predators around, so building a fenced area will offer more protection. We are near some clover fields, plus we have 2 acres of woods, so beehives are a must for our homestead location. We'll start off with 2 and see how we handle the winter before thinking about adding more hives. We would also love to have a large variety of fruit trees and bushes, along with nut trees, so thinking long term, we need to start planting as soon as we can. Adding a few more trees each year will be the best financially for us. Having first floor laundry right by the backdoor is ideal for having a clothesline. We get plenty of wind coming across the fields, and plenty of sun (when it's not cloudy in Ohio). One thing we must do this year is figuring out the trees that are on the property. We will need to start drying some firewood, but I'd love to try my hand at making maple syrup, if only just a small amount, so identifying all of our trees is a must.

Personal Goals for 2016

1. Lose some weight (once I get this boot off my foot!)

2. Cook more, eat out less (make healthier choices)

3. Pay off Lexi's braces

4. Pay for Lilly's braces in full

5. Pay off our Paypal credit card

6. Pay cash for South Carolina wedding trip

7. Keep a $1,000 emergency fund in our savings account

8. Hang dry clothes at least 50% of the time

Losing weight is always on the list. I know I'm not nearly active enough, but hopefully these moon boots I've been wearing on my feet will help enough that I will actually be able to be more active without being in constant pain. I just spent 5 weeks with the boot on the left side, so I have about 4 weeks left to go on the right side. I've never claimed to be a cook, and we eat out far too often, so I'm hoping to take advantage of the kitchen and start making more meals at home. I think living out in the country will make that easier. I want to limit the amount we go running into town for something. We still have 7 months of paying on Lexi's braces, and Lilly will need them in the next 6 months, so not having those monthly payments would help out tremendously. Luke has a wedding in South Carolina the end of April, and we thought of making it a family trip. We need to run the numbers, but we also don't want to charge the extra it would cost for the whole family. Paying off a credit card is a given. I'd love to have them all paid off. We try to snowball, but right now braces are eating up almost any extra we have, which is why are savings isn't growing much either, so it's on the list too. As for number 8, well I actually would love to use the clothesline, and not just stare at it!!

Of course, everything listed here is coming from my head. If you were to ask Luke, I'm sure organizing the shop and fixing cars would be the primaries on his list, and I'm sure the girls would have a tree house and swingset on the list! In all reality, I'll just be happy to start living out there and making the 5 acres more manageable once the weather gets nice.

Happy New Year!!!