Firewood

JP, being finally cleared of his 10# lifting limit following surgery, decided to spend the weekend bringing in firewood. I started the first fire of the season in the wood stove on Friday. After nearly smoking out our guests for Tea, the warmth became contagious, and JP has kept a fire burning ever since.



He purchased pallet fork attachments for the tractor, then used them to carry 6 trees up beside the garage and cut them into 18 inch lengths with the chainsaw. I even tried out the chainsaw for the first time ever. I'm surprised JP trusted me with that, when I'm clearly a menace with kitchen knives and other sharp objects!



After that, we used the splitter to get about 4 trees worth of logs split and stacked. It's a good start, but not enough yet for 2 households for the entire winter! I vastly recommend doing this on a sunny November afternoon, rather than in the midst of 2 feet of snow while feeling desperate to provide heat in the house!

L came up to me with a sad look in her eyes. "I don't care about winter," she said. "What I care about is nature. You and Daddy should NOT be hurting those trees!"

It took me a long time to convince her that we did not cut any trees down, that these trees were already dead and lying on the ground.

Eventually, she and J got busy building a Mega-Super-Fantastic-Polly Pocket-Play-Land, and all was forgiven.



We were invited to my parent's house last night for desert and to watch part one of the Great Migration series on the National Geographic channel. I expect it will be the first of many such visits...they are planning to move into their house this week. I've been quite remiss in posting pictures of their progress. I will try to get a few up soon! It will seem quite quiet and empty here for a while, but I'm sure my kids can manage to fill up any empty spaces and quiet times!

Bigger-ing

Friday was move-in day for my parents. It was a HUGE day for them: they finished emptying, cleaning and packing their house in the morning, had the closing on their house sale just before lunch, and after stopping at the Retirement Center/Nursing Home to say their farewells to my grandparents (Dad's folks), they made their way to Greene Co. to stay.

The girls have been SO excited about their grandparents coming to "stay forever". L has gotten a bit morbid the past week, and added "until they die" onto the "forever" statement. We tell her that won't happen for a VERY LONG TIME. The girls designed a "Welcome Home!" poster to hang up on the front door for them.

On Friday morning JP commented that he felt like he did the days I was scheduled for induction for both of my babies: anxious anticipation...knowing our family would change, and not knowing exactly what to expect! That seems to be a very apt way of putting it.

This weekend has been the beginning of the adjustment for all of us of living in a multi-generational family home. We worked on bigger-ing everything...the dinner table, the meals, the hooks in the breezeway for coats. (Also bigger-ing were the dirty dishes, darn it!) We have tried to condense things in all of our storage spaces so that there will be room for Mom and Dad's things, and they have tried to condense the last 40 years of their lives into our extra space and the PODS unit, due to arrive next week.

Mom helped this afternoon to make my secret ingredient applesauce. We ended up with 23 containers to freeze and some extra for dinner tomorrow.

Dad just mentioned that tomorrow is the first day of the rest of his life, and wants to talk about our expectations of things, so I will need to sign off for now. Soon, however, with his help, we should have another bathroom, and the breezeway to show case, and (drum roll please) the cars in the garage!!

Emptying the Garage

If you have been following this blog at all, or know us, you'll recall that we stored about 75% of our belongings in our 3 car garage over the winter while we resided in a 600 square foot apartment in town. You also might remember that the garage became infested with mice because I shortsightedly left some pecans in a box that I packed, and then the mice moved into the house (along with their pecans). Since we moved into the house back in June (and chased the mice out), we have been trying to clean out the garage of stuff and mouse residue in order to use it for its intended purpose: to park our cars there. It has been slow going, in part because it started out like this:

...and in part because the contractor is still finishing up around here, and has stacks of stuff both in our basement storage area, and in the garage.

This weekend, due to a forecast of several clear and sunny days in a row, we decided to bite the bullet and clear EVERYTHING out of the garage. This is what that looked like.

Then we thoroughly cleaned the garage, including scrubbing it with Simple Green and water.

After it dried, we (JP) painted the floor with 2 coats of Quikrete 1-Part Epoxy Garage Floor Sealer. This was to protect the concrete from salt in the winter and oil all the time.

While that was drying, we took 2 more storage shelves downstairs, and some more things that belong down there. I also separated piles of recycling (which I took out this morning), and Thrift Store donations (which I still need to log and load into the van). Then, after a delicious dinner of Greene County trout, fresh corn on the cob, roasted potatoes, and fresh tomato slices with drizzles of Balsamic Vinegar last evening, we set about to return things to the garage. This is what it looks like now...much more like a garage.

We still need to organize things in there, and we have plywood up above the rafters to screw down as flooring for a storage area up there, but we definitely made progress! In the process, we realized again that we made an error on the plans. The single bay is meant to be a work shop for my Dad, but instead of putting the walk-through door on his side around the corner to the North, it is next to the garage door. We will have 20 feet in which to park our 2 vehicles, which measure together 13 feet wide. (If we had relocated the walk-through door, we would have 3 or 4 more feet of space.) When JP was explaining this to me yesterday, I thought he was saying that we would be unable to park both of our vehicles in the garage, which made me want to rearrange the wood shop space a bit. I now understand that it will just be a close fit, and I'll have to be extremely careful when parking the whale of a minivan! I also see need to have a shed for the mowers and other yard care equipment down the road some day! It will still be a while until the wood shop is entirely set up, meaning that we can use some of that space for storage for a little while longer.

The other step in this process before we can park in the garage is just that: a step.

We need to get some driveway work done, including some gravel in front of the concrete so that we can get the vehicles up there and we don't end up with whip lash injuries every time we try to leave (the driveway is bumpy enough...no need to add to it!)

So, thank you Mom for all of your assistance with the carrying and cleaning this weekend, it was a HUGE help! And sorry, Dad, that we weren't able to sit and chat more...we'll save that for this winter when we are all snuggled up in the home on Poplar Ridge during a snow storm!

Girls' Rooms

We finally got mattresses for the daybed in the girls' playroom yesterday evening at the Friends & Family 20% off sale at Big Lots, so we could finally finish the girls' rooms. They are very "girly"...decorated with flowers, butterflies and fairies.




I showed a picture earlier of the double pocket doors between their rooms. For now, these are open most of the time, but when they are older and want their own rooms, they can keep them closed. One of the rooms is basically a sleeping room, with bunk beds and dressers for the girls.

The other room is the playroom/overflow guest room. L calls the area under the canopy the "rain place", but J thinks it is a "sleep-over/fairy bed". JP also managed to unearth the hopscotch rug that has been in storage for over a year.

I will post more pictures later of the girls hidey-hole under the stairs when it is finished.

This morning I woke up to this out front:

...and this in the back:

Now it looks like this:

They will pour another section of concrete later this week to make it into a giant rectangle. Then JP will at last be able to set up his Basketball hoop. They had to pour it in 2 steps in order to have a way to brace the roof over the door.

This weekend we did some more clearing in the garage. JP pulled out all the deck chairs and I scrubbed them. I also cleaned some more mouse dirtied things: sleeping bags, and the extra parts for the pack'n'play. JP was looking for bug spray, and found the bin it was in had something leak during the winter, so we had to clean all that up too. SIGH...I am really looking forward to the time when "moving" means hanging pictures, and NOT cleaning up mouse poo and pecan shells!

We put the deck chairs and the picnic table (that we used for a dining room table in the apartment) out on the porch. The girls had lunch there today.

Polishing the Silver

I felt quite hoity-toity today putting away the china. This was JP's mother's set, and is very pretty and delicate appearing. It has been in storage for a long time: some of the pieces were wrapped in newspaper from Oregon in 1976! In any case, the china is seeing the light of day again, and has a new home in the built-ins in our great room. I am determined to use it too...if it's here, it has to be functional...that's my new rule.

But I diverge...I opened 5 boxes of china and other fragile doo-dads today, and put most of them away. This means we are to that point of dealing with the not-so-necessary things, the finishing touches: we're polishing up the silver. Hooray!

The building crew is finishing up too. Over the past several days, they finished up the trim on the beams in the front of the house...

...and the porch. They also cleared a truck load of stuff from off the porch and out of the garage.

The trim is finished up on the garage too, and a new light was installed by the door. Today they worked on leveling out the area in front to ready it for the concrete pad that should be poured the beginning of next week.

I finally got around to transplanting my tomato and pepper plants in 5 gallon buckets, which have been in abundant supply around here lately. They are finally blooming, so perhaps we'll even get fresh tomatoes and jalapenos this summer to make salsa.

The central vacuum was installed today. I used it downstairs, but haven't had a chance to use the hard floor attachment up stairs, or to try out my "vac pan" in the kitchen to suck up the stuff I broom up. This is the unit in the garage. The clearish bit underneath is what we will empty every couple of months. There is even a hook-up here, along with another hose and attachments to use on the vehicles in the garage!

Tonight, we watched fireworks from our deck...a late celebration! And now I plan to go to bed before midnight for once, and finally use my beautiful new shower in the morning.

We're Here!

We rented a small U-Haul on Wednesday and made 2 trips out to the house. After cleaning the apartment on Thursday night, we decided to spend our first night at our new home. It isn't perfect...we have no air conditioning or hot water in the kitchen and 2 out of 3 bathrooms, but we are slowly emptying boxes and making it feel like home. J commented this evening, "When we REALLY live here, we'll have a table!"

We've had a number of interesting experiences already, including washing dishes with rain water caught in a 5 gallon bucket. More later when I can add photos...just doing wireless with the laptop at the moment.

Finally...Countertops!

I took 2 van loads of stuff up to the house today. At noon, they were still waiting on counter tops, but assured me that they were on their way. After dinner, the counter tops were in, along with sinks, cook tops, faucets, etc, etc.

The refrigerator door opens now, as you can see in the picture above. When the fridge was plugged in, however, it made a terrible racket, so now we need to take it back to Sears. Problem is, with the counter tops in, there is less than 33" to get the 33" fridge out. Why can't something just work right the first time for once?

The built-ins on the window wall of the Great Room are finished, and look sharp!

These bookshelves have the old oak mantel on top, and line the hip wall of the stairwell.

This is a shot of my craft area in the mud room. I can't wait to take advantage of all the storage and have room again to leave my scrapbook pages laid out! I've had to work on a TV tray table lately, which is not particularly conducive to coherent thought.

Tomorrow is U-Haul day, and Thursday the phone and DSL should be transferred, so my next post should be from the new house!

Father's Day and Rodent Wars Part Deux

We had a pretty productive weekend out at the house. Unpacking a few boxes today worked wonders on my mood. The closet in our bedroom is GREAT! We have built in shelving, and 2 clothes rods a piece, plus there is room in the back corner for John's 800 lb. gun safe. I put shelf paper on over half of the shelves today, and we unpacked about 4 boxes. We also got our bed put back together, but couldn't carry the King mattress ourselves.

Out in the garage, we unearthed another nest of mice. This one was in our sofa. I vacuumed up everything I could, but there is still a stain in the corner of the cushion. This sofa will be getting a good steam cleaning before it goes into the house!

John managed to catch one of the offenders in the craft/laundry room, so there is one fewer fuzzy, germ infested critter roaming the house!

Downstairs, we fit some of the carpet remnants into the space under the stairs. This has an opening on the family room side which will eventually have a door, and connects all the way through into the closet in one of the girls' rooms. We fit 2 small bookshelves in to make our little game closet, and after some panelling on the inside to cover up the insulation, the rest will be a secret hiding area for the girls.

The girls were beside themselves today when we opened up a couple of boxes of their things. They even left some of their favorite toys behind at the house in order to bring a couple of toys that they haven't seen for months back to the apartment!

We spoke to the builder and architect this weekend about the refrigerator problem (I really would like to be able to open the doors on the fridge!). I think we have decided to take out the pocket door (ouch) into the pantry, and widen the doorway to allow the fridge door to open up into that space.

At some point we will have to get creative with 70's beads or something to close up the space.

My Neighbor is NOT a Totoro

We are big Miyazaki anime fans. A favorite one is "My Neighbor Totoro", which is about a family with 2 little girls who move to a house in the country. Their home is near a forest which is inhabited by Forest Spirits named Totoro. In the movie, the Totoros leave acorns through the house, and give gifts of acorns. Here are some pictures of the girls with their stuffed Totoros.

For the past couple of weeks, we have been finding pecans (in the shell) in the house in random places: in a closet, in the cup holder of a folding camp chair, on a shelf in the garage. We were hoping that we were being greeted by friendly neighborhood Totoros. The nagging worry, however, was that the bag of pecans given to us by JP's cousin at Christmas was discovered by some nasty rodents who then spread the love. I don't think pecan trees even grow in our neck of the woods!

This weekend, we began phase 1 of the final move. We moved the boxes from the garage into the correct rooms in the house. Now the furniture is accessible for moving in later this week (phase 2). We have to be out of the apartment by Friday morning as the new tenants are moving in that day.

The last row of boxes revealed pecans spilled out on the floor behind them. The very last box was the problem box, there was a hole gnawed in the corner.

I pulled everything out of the box while still in the garage since I didn't want to unintentionally take mice into the house. The bottom was littered with droppings and empty pecan shells.

Next, JP picked up one of the camp chairs which was folded in a carrying bag and heard scampering noises. He ran out of the garage, shouting "IT'S MICE!" One jumped out of the bag on the way out and scurried away, and another scrambled up his arm. The last one succumbed on the driveway. JP shook more empty pecan shells and a nest out of the bag. I would have much preferred a Totoro!

We were quite disappointed that the counter tops weren't in yet...they were supposed to arrive Thursday or Friday. So...we still don't have sinks, and therefore no running water. We do have toilets in the house, they just aren't installed yet, so the girls will still have to do their business in the woods for a few days longer.

The newest issue is that the refrigerator doors do not open when the fridge is installed in its proper area. I've consulted my brother, the architect, who is on another job out of town this weekend, so he won't be able to look over his blue prints until tomorrow night.

Penguins, Paneer, Pixar...and Packing

It's been a stellar weekend.

The Penguins won the Stanley Cup on Friday night.

Saturday we took a load of stuff from the apartment and the storage unit up to the already packed garage. We cleaned the floor in the Library (again) since it is basically finished and spread out the rug for the Great Room that has been rolled up and in storage since last summer. It isn't quite like we remembered it, but I really like it none the less.

This morning, we drove down to Morgantown and took the kids to see "UP", the new Pixar movie. I especially liked the relationship between the main character, Carl, and his wife. Afterwards, it was just a hop, skip and a jump to the Cafe of India where we ordered take-out (can't eat at Indian Restaurants with the girls, they just whine and drive us crazy): Lamb Saag, Chicken Vindaloo, Paneer Masala and Nan. We'll have left-overs this week, oh goodie!

I've packed 4 boxes of books and magazines from the apartment, and we still have more to go (just the kids' ones and cookbooks). It's hard to believe that we brought that many along, but we did use most of them!

At this point, Plan D is to move stuff from the garage next weekend, then move from the apartment the middle of the following week after getting the occupancy permit. The counter tops are to arrive by Thursday this week, so we can get the water hooked up. Basically all that is left to finish up in the house besides that are the built-ins in the Great Room, where we will incorporate the 12 foot oak slab that used to be the mantel in our old house. The breezeway needs to be finished. There is a bit more siding to go up outside, and they have to finish the soffits. Oh, and the garage isn't finished, but we need to empty it out a bit first.

I couldn't find a picture of the mantel from the 5+ years we were there. This photo is from when we were looking to buy.

This evening we took another load of stuff from the apartment up to the house. The girls kept themselves occupied while JP and I washed and vacuumed out the windows and installed the screens. We left all of the windows open for awhile to try to air out the carpet and paint smells. It was lovely to hear the birds, and NOT hear traffic! We managed to get the 23 windows down low done, but skipped the 5 up near the cathedral ceiling.

On the way home, we breathed deeply of the honeysuckle. It's been a great weekend!

Strawberry picking we will go

Well, our moving date has officially been moved back to the end of June...somewhere around the 25th or 26th. I'm very disappointed, but not surprised. I'm trying to think of the positive aspects of this new revelation, and I've come up with a few:

-J has a couple of extra weeks to practice bike riding on flat ground

-I will now have time to go pick strawberries at Simon's Farm, make jam, and freeze some berries

-I'll have 2 more weeks to be right next door to the Farmer's Market

Today, at the house, they finished laying tile in the Master Bathroom shower.

This crown molding in the Master Bedroom tray ceiling will hold indirect lighting.

The shelving in the Master Bedroom closet is started.

The Library bookshelves are stained and sealed and drying out on the porch.

The pocket doors are installed in the girls' rooms. Look, it can be one room...

...or two!

I signed the girls up for swimming lessons in July. Summer...here we come!

Jam Packed...

I'm finally back from my extended moving break. The move ended up being possibly the worst EVER...rivaled the one where the moving van wrecked. It rained, sleeted or snowed EVERY day, and we kept finding random STUFF in the backs of closets that had to be taken SOMEWHERE. It ended up taking every bit of a week to get out of the house! Now we are squeezed into our 600 square feet here in town, and quite comfy, actually. I realized that I have way TOO much food, so we've been eating a lot of beans and things with tomato sauce in order to get everything to fit in the cupboards.

These are the moving men. They were AWESOME...thanks so much!

Today is the first I've been up to the building site since taking the last load to the garage around the 19th. I haven't missed anything.

The garage is finished except for windows, but they are boarded up, so we are able to store our MOUNTAINS of stuff there. (Hope nothing important freezes!)

They finally got the power lines up our hill...you can barely see them if you look closely at this picture.

Good News & Bad News

The Good News:

-The garage floor is poured

-3 Allegheny power utility trucks up on the hill today with cables...lots of workers, there's a chance we might get the electricity connected finally!

The Bad News:

-Still no doors or windows on the garage and the concrete still looks a bit wet...hmmmm....we wanted to start storing things there YESTERDAY!

-Muddy, muddy, muddy up on the hill...so nice for slogging through while unloading moving vans!!!

I will not be assured of internet access for awhile, which coincides with the week off the builders will need to complete their last project.

Signing off for now...

Here Comes the Sun!

It is a gorgeous day out today, cool and clear with the bluest of blue skies. We did venture out to the building site in between sleet showers on Monday but without a camera. People were working diligently and I almost (almost) wished I could tell them to go home and get warm. I do want to be able to move in this house by Spring, so I refrained!

The first floor forms are pretty much done. I believe they are planning to pour concrete yet this week. We walked around inside, and it still looks small. I hope it grows on me...literally!

The block is finished in the garage. It actually does look big enough now. We plan to start filling it with things that are not essentials for the winter so that our move to town for the winter can be as small as possible. (Try explaining to a 5 year old and a 2 year old what is and is not essential for 6 months!)

It is super muddy out here after all of the precipitation lately. At least we remembered to bring mud boots this time! The trusses have arrived for the garage. Hopefully we should see the roof going on very soon.

This is a view from the garage to the house. There will be a small breezeway between this door and the door to the mudroom/laundry room/T craft room.

That's all for this week!