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!

Floors and Fire

The past week has been filled with work and Christmas preparations. It just doesn't feel like Christmas this year. We don't have a big tree here in Tiny Barn, our decorations and stockings are in storage, everything we bought is hidden over at dad's house, and we are going to shove the majority of their presents in bags because wrapping would just take up so much time right now!

We had a few very cold days before it warmed up this week, so Luke wanted to play around with the fireplace and see if we could make it work. It has a wood burning insert that was basically rusted shut from sitting so long, so he worked the controls loose, cleaned out the old ash, and we ripped up some newspaper and collected some pine needles to burn. After successfully seeing smoke come out the chimney, he bought a few firebricks to replace a missing one, and built an actual fire (small one) to make sure it was drafting right. So far so good, although we won't make anything too big until we do get the chimney inspected.

 

We focused on the floors upstairs, pulling the fiberboard and plywood off the floors in the back loft, and finishing off Luke's office (the John Deere room). We still have the front loft and hallway to rip up, and then the upstairs will be ready for a thorough wipe down. As soon as the heat works, we can then mud, sand, prime, and paint all the bedrooms upstairs, before tackling the floors.

There was mostly a thin plywood in the back loft instead of fiberboard, but it seems that they decided to use some glue to hold it down, so the floor is pretty messy right now.

The John Deere room (Luke's office) has a nice big plywood section in the flooring from where the chimney came up through, so we'll have to patch that up somehow.

The electrical guys have started working on pulling out the knob and tube wiring, but so far the furnace guys are MIA. We need them there so we can have heat, so the contractor can start his drywall work! We still have light fixtures to order and pick up, trim to tear off the walls, and some downstairs flooring work, as well as the upstairs floors that still need peeled up. We spent Christmas Eve working on hooking up the electrical box in the shop, and driving in ground wires. We had to go look for gifts for the hillbilly gift exchange anyway, and the shop certainly has a lot of junk to sort through. We took the opportunity to burn some cardboard from the shop too, and just enjoy the view since the weather was so warm!

Lazy Sunday, Rainy Monday

Sunday and Monday were demo days 9 and 10, but really, not much happened in the way of destruction. It's been unusually warm in Ohio for December, and Sunday it was overcast and in the low 60's. We spent a lot of time outside, making a fire, roasting hot dogs and marshmallows, climbing trees, and exploring the woods.

The girls put their fire building skills from girl scouts to the test.

 Lexi was trying to pull herself up the tree.

Lexi got to push Lilly up the tree.

And then Lilly's shoe got stuck in between the tree trunks!

They also enjoyed making chalk art all over the concrete. There's a nice patio area, sidewalks, and a concrete front porch to decorate.

Time for S'mores!!

We found a few spots full of these beetles. I did some quick internet looking, and we believe they are pink spotted ladybird beetles. They are good at eating aphids and lots of other insect eggs, so they are definitely beneficial to the neighboring fields and our future garden. 

My brother and dad decided to haul up the lawn mower, just to see how it would handle the long, thick grass that has been left to grow wild for at least 4 years. It clogged easily, so it was slow going, but amazingly enough it did cut it down.

We now have a path to the West field where the R/C planes fly.

We also have a decent pathway from the house to the shop.

 

Of course the planes had to make an appearance since we spent most of the day outside.

We did manage to work on the flooring in the spare room for a tiny bit, and pull off the door and base trim in the laundry room. A few doors made their way to the garage from upstairs as well. The doors all need a good scrubbing, and they'll just be in the way when we actually get to the point of sanding floors, so we might as well just take them off now.

Today isn't much of a workday either. We went up to the house over lunch today and pulled a few staples out of the floor, and quickly took off the doors to the kitchen cabinets.

 While we were there the trash guys came by with another dumpster since we filled the first one over the weekend.

The girls threw a few piece of paneling in the new dumpster before we left.

 

Progress is going to really slow down this week. Luke has tons of work to do for both his day job and photography, so he can't keep taking half days to work at the house. Hopefully the electrician gets finished up this week enough to get the power turned on, then we'll be able to go up in the evenings.