A Deadline and A Discovery

Did you know that when we bought this house we were planning on leaving everything as is for the Winter so we could get settled in? What were we thinking! My husband and I both LOVE fixing up and working on houses. We had been waiting, semi-patiently, for 6 years to buy our own house. Like we were going to be able to wait to make it our own. Plus, I have not mentioned this yet, but you may already be figuring this out, the hubby Can't. Sit. Still. He likes to work. To stay busy. Be productive. It is a good thing though since we had just taken a wall down and started some major demo just a little bit before our Thanksgiving get together.

After the wall was removed the remainder of the carpet had to come up. Remember the old wood floors? Those were in the old bedroom thing/ new living room too. After exposing the rest of the floor, he started on the walls. Our hopes were high and fingers crossed that we would find wood shiplap underneath. We had a few clues that there was, but you can never, ever, ever be sure that what you think you saw is actually what is there in an old house.

So far, so good. Timothy always has lots of help. Here is a close up of our 12" wide rough sawn discovery. It was better than I had hoped.

The thing with demo is that while it is very exciting and necessary, it is also very, very time consuming and labor intensive. And dirty, super dirty.

But oh so worth it! Remember the log wall we exposed in the kitchen? We exposed the other side of it so we can enjoy it from the new living room as well. 

At this point, which took a few late nights to even get to, we decided to leave the ceiling as is for the time being and button up the room for guest to start arriving in a few days. Don't get too comfortable there you old, characterless ceiling, your days are numbered.

Come back in a few days to see the trim we chose and what we are starting to do to the walls!

There Was This Wall....

That is no longer. Oh happy day! The weird bedroom with no light and oversized, useless, wasted space of an entryway are gone! The two have become one.

The entry alone was 8.5 ft. x 14.5 ft. of nothing. There was nothing we could use the space for. There were 4 doorways coming off the one room alone making it a very high traffic and blah space.

Sooo after a nice morning at church and while we had some of our best friends over we decided, logically of course, to take a wall down. Might as well, it's not like we were having a nice visit or getting ready to host some friends on Thanksgiving or anything.

Again, sorry, not a great before picture. See that brown wall? Way in the back? Yep, that's the one.

It was a very dinky wall. A few studs, a little bit of drywall and no electrical or plumbing running through it. Oh yeah, this baby was calling to be torn down. You are welcome wall.

Things are staring to feel opened up. We are starting to see the vision. A little tearing here, a little kick here and there and TA DAAAA! One huge room!

This last picture is taken from the original living room looking into what will be the new living room. See that doorway on the left? That goes directly into the kitchen and dining room. Now our living room is right next to the kitchen where it belongs. The Great Room remodel is officially under way!

Showing Us the Love

This little house of ours has really been showing us some love. Every carpet (so far) that we pull up, every layer of wall we take off has just been so fun! So far we keep finding what we consider treasures. Shiplap under the walls. Extremely old real wood floors in pretty good shape. No weird wiring or other hiccups... minus The Flood of course. I know I may be jinxing ourselves, but between me knocking on the wooden arm of the couch I am sitting on and my husband pounding and pulling up a floor in the Dining/Kitchen are I think we are safe. Oh yes, right now another floor is coming up.

But I am not here to talk about my kitchen floor. I am here to talk about our, what will be, new living room floor. We aren't finished yet, this remodel has about 587 phases to it, and that is just the great room remodel.

Here we go.

This is the carpet before. This is in what was the entry way. I don't have many before pictures, because we rarely plan when we will start our projects. They normally happen spontaneously when my husband has a shorter day at work or we are board.

See that brownish wall in the back? Through that doorway was a weird random bedroom thing? That didn't even have a light, but it did have an awesome old swing through door that we have saved for another project.

Under the carpet pad we found this weird brown vinyl, tile look alike made out of compressed board. This was a bugger to get up! It was nailed down EVERYWHERE causing it to only want to come up in tiny pieces. No fun. Atleast for my husband. He took up the floor, I kept the dogs and children off the tack strips and nails. It's all about teamwork;)

Aaaannndddd finally under the tile stuff we found.....

This beauty! We love it! It is old, it is worn and it has a history. It is not perfect, it needs some work, but it is an awesome blank canvas of sorts. We love this little house. I love the people who built it way back in 1910 and if I could I would give them a big hug and say thank you.

Better Late Than Never.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Why yes, I am serious.

And yes, I do know it is December 1st.

You should probably just plan on my Christmas post hitting the blog around Valentines day.

Here are a couple pictures of our simple Thanksgiving decor.

We had some of our awesome friends over after the BIG get together  to play games and drink eggnog. We make our own eggnog and it is way better than the store.

Do you want the recipe?

Good, because it is at the bottom of this post.

I hope you all had wonderful holiday.

If it was anything like mine it lasted Thursday-Sunday and I am using today to recover.

And by recover I do mean write a blog post, drink coffee and eat leftover pumpkin pie instead of doing my dishes and laundry and every other productive thing I should be doing.

Eggnog

Ingredients 

1 C. Cream
1 C. Whole Milk
4 TBS. Maple Syrup ( it has to be real) or Honey
2 TBS. Vanilla (also needs to be real, not that imitation junk)
2 tsp. Cinnamon
1/2 tsp. Fresh Ground Nutmeg
1/2 tsp. Ground Cloves
1/2 tsp. Allspice
4 Egg Yolks ( these eggs MUST be fresh and high quality since they are left raw. We get our eggs from a farm just a few minutes from our house)

Put everything in a blender until completely combined.

Serve warm or chilled and try not to drink the entire blender full by yourself. At least share it with one person.... If you have to.

That's it. Super simple, really delicious and perfect for this time of year. Not to mention how much better for you it is than any of the cartons of it you can find in the store!

Hope you all have a wonderful Monday!

Hour 25, The Flood

Our first 24 hours in the new house were exciting and uneventful. We all just walked around looking out all the windows saying things like I can't believe this is really ours, Is this for real, Did we just buy a house?

We moved in some more furniture, put a few things away, and then....

Hour 25 hit.

It all started when we were rearranging the small kitchen to be more functional. Which meant moving the refrigerator over next to the range for the time being. We have future plans that don't include this set up, but for now the fridge and range needed to be best buddies. Everything fit... Almost. The range stuck out less than a quarter of an inch too far and we couldn't open up some drawers. We looked at each other. Then looked at the wall. And at the same time we both say something to the extent of, "you know babe, that old 80's paneling is probably about a 1/4 of an inch thick.... if we just take that off..."

So we started taking off a little piece to see what was behind.

 

And then some more. And pretty soon we found something that we were pretty sure was inside the walls of the original house. LOGS!

We were very excited! We started in on full on demo mode to remove the layers that were over the logs. It was not a pretty job. We had many layers and tons of mouse dropping.

At some point Timothy said that we will need to replace a fitting on the hot water tank (which is also in the kitchen, for now) because it had a small drip. We put that on our list and he continued to tear down while I take loads outside.

While I was outside I heard a weird noise and turn around as Timothy runs past me and yells over his shoulder, " The water shutoff is in the pump house, right?". I run into the house to see the hose from the hot water heater spraying gallons of water out all over our kitchen, wall debris and mouse dropping on the floor. We had officially flooded our brand new house that we had been living in for 25 hours.

Thankfully, my husband and I do not fight in stressful situations, we are those weird people who can laugh in the midst of chaos. 

We got a hose hooked up the the tank so we could drain it into the yard and not our kitchen. Did I mention this all happened on a Friday night at about 6:30? And that we live in a small town that closes down at 6? We decided just to turn the water off. And keep taking off the layers of wall. Rational? We thought so. What we got was beautiful... you know after we sucked up all the water in a wet/dry shop vac. And took out many loads to our ever growing dump pile. And after we weren't able to take a shower after all that nasty demo, because we wouldn't turn the water on for fear that another flood would happen. I would say that it was definitely worth it. Plus, we have a one of a kind story. 

Here is the exposed wall of the little cabin built in 1910 that we now call home. What do you think of them? 

Oh and buy the way it took from Friday night to Monday night, calls to 3 plumbers, 2 burnt out heating elements and finally 1 new hot water tank that the hubby had installed in less than 45 minutes before we had hot water again. 

Oh well.... Now we know.

Home

It all started about 3 months ago...

There was this house. 

A little red house. 

That came on the market.

With a little bit of land.

It was a little out of price range.

It was better than anything else we had looked at, which was alot of houses.

I drove past it everyday.

I fell in love.

We were convinced it wouldn't work out.... So, so convinced.

And then a month and a half ago, we called the realtor. Just to see what she thought.

She thought it was great and would work out just fine.

We called our mortgage guy, he was very optimistic about it.

We made an offer, they accepted.

We spent 45 days doing paperwork. Jumping through hoops and doing anything the underwriter asked.

We got the call on Wednesday morning, it was a done deal. He asked when we could close?

We said anytime day or night.

He said how about tomorrow?

We closed that Thursday afternoon and moved in that evening.

We are HOME!

Our "Farm" In Progress

HavenRock Farm is the home of my dreams.

Let me describe her to you. It is an old farm house nestled into a meadow,  you can get a peek of her just past the bend of the Aspen lined curving driveway. Once you are down the drive you can see the big barns. The overgrown cottage style gardens. The lovingly tended animals.

Sounds wonderful doesn't it? At least if you are anything like me it does.

Before you get too jealous... Let me stop you to say... This is not my home.

Not even close.

It is my dream, certainly not my reality.

My reality is a run down rented house. On a T.I.N.Y. shared lot. It houses my husband, our two children, two dogs, rabbit, guinea pig and myself. We squeeze a garden in where we can. Surround ourselves with free flowers that we have scavenged for and brought back to life.

It is not our dream, but it is certainly sufficient. We even enjoy it! Even though it is nothing like our imagined farmhouse, except that our current house is old (which I love).

I invite you to join me on this journey to my dream. A journey that I am starting and have no idea where it will take me.

I do promise that it will include cooking real, old fashioned, nourishing food. Eating homemade pie. Drinking coffee with raw cream. Gardening through trial and error. Stay at home mothering and homemaking. Maybe even a few rants...

Go ahead and put the coffee on and sit down for a good visit.

Welcome to HavenRock Farm!

Laura