Busy Hands Homestead

Our house looks pretty much like it always has. A drab white exterior, peeling paint on the windows and trim. Over a year of home ownership has passed and we are the only ones that know that things are changing ever so slowly. It is a constant balance of doing those things that need to be done and doing projects that are temporary but increase the immediate functionality of our house . While Adam had in his possession a borrowed sawzall, which he was using to cut through the old steal sewer plumbing under the house, I casually suggested that this might be the perfect time to cut away the wall of our closet. The opening into our bedroom closet was less than twenty inches and those clothes that hung in a neat row in it's confines simply stayed hanging.  It was too much of a pain to retrieve anything. The ceiling panel was a mysterious few inches lower than the rest of the ceiling and I had long decided it all had to go. The wall went, the ceiling panel went, the old layer of f...

The rain is pattering on the windows. It is dark outside. I set the alarm early and reluctantly crawled out of bed. If I want a few moments to myself I need to take them before the kids wake up and we embark on our get ready for school routine. Routine. My life suddenly has routine: a set bed time, a set up time, a set dinner time, a set we have to be somewhere time. There are weekdays and weekends and Thursdays are early out days. Ivory walks out of the big red brick building at two instead of three. There is an extra hour of sunlight. A precious extra hour of warmth and light in our day, and our days have already been getting so much shorter.  The sun late to rise and early to set and it is only September.  It will get so much darker yet. Last Thursday we walked among tall grasses, spied the bright red berries of wild asparagus, and admired the yellow of the first fallen leaves. It was warm, and sunny, and almost summer. The river was cold and lazy....

Sharing Blueberries and reading Richard Scarry's "Cars and Trucks and Things that Go.  Folding a Weeks work of Laundry..  My Sunday Routine.  Pomegranate Pork and Red Wine for Dinner..  Ivory painted that Candle Stick. 

After breakfast and dishes I sat down with these fabrics...    to turn them into curtains... so, our living room looks like this: Our Sunday Snap shots.

Our world is winter white and cold. The high today is 13 degrees Fahrenheit. I am somewhere between washing the dishes, folding 4 loads of clean laundry, sorting all the things that have collected on the bathroom shelves back into their spots and sledding. Sylvan is napping.  Ivory has, not one or two, but four puzzles spread out on the dining room floor.  Two and a half puzzles are completed.  Adam is trouble shooting the waste oil furnace in the shop.  It shut down yesterday for no apparent reason. I spent Saturday and Sunday cleaning.  Moving furniture and mopping everything from wall to wall. (When I say mopping picture this: crawling on hands and knees scrubbing the floor with a rag.  I don't actually own a mop.) Adam sealed up house envelope gaps here and there that were pointed out to us during our Energy Audit last week. We winterized a few windows (in our unheated back room - our washer froze.  That was a first.) In the past few wee...