He's making it attractive!

We're making trellises today, although we hadn't planned to.  So like us, really.

And so much better than what used to be there.  I like the casual formality of it all.  Besides, there's a certain grace about the fact that the raw materials were gathered from our spring prunings.

And Now You Know The Rest of the Storage

Remember this story about storage under the stage?  Paul hadn't finished it yet when I posted it, so here's how it turned out:

The rounded part of the stage is an addition to the original, so the floorboards never matched to begin with.

Using a good friend's suggestion and an old piano hinge, Paul turned what had originally been a plan based on pull-out drawers and made something fabulous and immediately vulnerable to stashing.

Someday we'll get more serious about organizing it, but for now it works great.  Especially when we can keep the cats out of it.

Cat Fur fer Kitty Pants

Whenever Grandma didn't want to bother answering my "What for?", she would reply, "Cat fur for kitty pants."

I don't think I ever thought to ask who made these kitty pants and if they were sewn or knitted from homespun cat fur.  I suspect that was beside the point, but if I were to make kitty pants today, I would prefer to sew them.  However, as I'm sewing them, I could also collect the cat fur from the project fabric and spin some cat fur yarn with what the cats leave behind.

As you can imagine, I haven't been overeager to set up shop where the cats are ever looking for that novel surface to lie on.  Until...

We weren't using the cracker jar in the kitchen.  Perfect!  Now I can decorate with the pretty fabrics I'm sewing together even as I keep them safe from the cats and their kitty pants.

I'm very happy with the solution.

No Smoking, Please

While the weather forecasters were predicting a cold, snowy season, I was praying for a mild winter.  For some reason He saw fit to provide us with just that.

Even so, it gets cold around here.  The building is poorly insulated, and it would be irresponsible of us to set the thermostat for our casual comfort.  So instead of relying solely on our 60-year old furnaces, we turn to our soapstone wood stove for some zone-specific heating.

However, the ridge on the roof is impossibly high for getting a good, consistent draft in our chimney.  Far too often the smoke would either refuse to go up the flue or it would play nice for awhile, then wait till we were asleep before it would retreat out of the wind and into our living space.

Choking on smoke and smelling like stale smoke has a way of making a person feel impoverished.  So I urged Paul to purchase an electric motor draft inducer which is installed directly on the chimney pipe.  It's visible in the picture above.

What a great thing!  Aside from occasional user error, we no longer have smoke billowing where it oughtn't.  It's wonderful!

When he installed it, Paul made a couple modifications to our set-up: instead of hard wiring the draft inducer to an electric box, he attached it to a cord with a 3-prong plug.  This allows us to plug it into a timer so that the fan can be turned on and off at regular intervals when we're not attending to it ourselves.

Paul also connected the wood stove air intake to a piece of conduit that he fed through a freshly bored hole in the concrete wall.  Now the fire consumes cold air from outside instead of drawing from the warmed air inside.

A homesteading book in our library speaks well of newspaper logs.  Rolled tightly and held together with wire, they burn much like wood logs.  We appreciate how they help make the wood stretch, and the post office always has a nice stack of newspapers for us to take.  We have giving friends, too.

The door to the 3-H is on the left, and the door to the basement is on the right.

The bright green balls are osage oranges placed there to supposedly repel the bugs.  We really don't need them to come in with the firewood.

One man's trash is another man's treasure, and we treasure the cast-off wood that we've gleaned from our friends.  Fred needed some trees removed from his property, and Bill and Patsy had some demolition wood from their kitchen redo.  So did our new neighbors who just bought the property across the street.  God has blessed us with wood enough for our needs so far, and we haven't even considered buying any yet this year.

Of course, all of this is just to get us by until we can replace the furnaces with something better.  I have an idea, but I'll save that for a different post.  =)

From the Floor to the Table

Remember the stack of floor boards that had been left behind when we moved in? Measured and counted, they rested along the side of the nave. They served well to contain the plastic bowling ball for our New Year's Eve 5-frame bowling tournament, but other than that, they've just been in the way.

Over 17 feet long, they couldn't make it down the stairs in one piece, so in the interest of making the most of what wood we had, I needed to decide how short or long each piece would need to be for us to make, in this case, the tops for our tables.



For this, I turned to my print publishing software. After creating a scale model of each floorboard, I was able to cut and assemble them over and over until I had them in the right dimensions and configuration to create four of the six matching, modular tables we have in mind.

The wood is pretty rough, and while I'd love to retain as much of that character as possible, I do need the surfaces to be smooth so the tables can function as a place where we can write, eat, and sew, to name a few essential activities. And they need to be easily cleaned up.

So now that they're cut, we'll have to plane them down, rip them to equal widths, fill in the holes, and glue and clamp them together. By then, perhaps, we'll have figured out how to make the table base. This is the look we'll be aiming for:

Camden Trestle Table

Restoration Hardware

And oh yes, I cut them all myself. With the help of my handy hubby, of course.

Decorating for Christmas?

Even these leave-behinds have been useful, but not because we love post-Thanksgiving light-up reindeer in the yard. No, you see, it gets very dark in the country when the lights are turned off, so these little guys have been casting a warm glow of security into our grand sleeping quarters, faithfully pointing the way to the bathroom if needed.

Today, however, the kids stripped the reindeer of their lights in the hope of using the strings of lights in an effort to decorate for Christmas, and indeed, the way to the bathroom is now lined festively with little white lights. Overall, however, I think the results disappointed them somewhat: they couldn't help but notice that I'd tossed the wire carcasses of the gentle reindeer into the dumpster.

Sit Down for This

What shall we do with leave-behinds such as these orphaned chair backs? Use them for towel racks in the bathroom and kitchen, of course! A cheery red chair back already aids us in drying our dish towels in the kitchen. It's so fun!

Kitchen Drawers

In this glimpse of the kitchen, you can see a set of drawers that Paul cobbled together from a broken leave-behind desk and one of our laminate bookcase's doors. Even though there are base cabinets on the opposite side of the room, these are the only drawers we have.

Good thinking, Aelsa! Nice work, Paul!

The Bathroom Vanity To Be

The dresser is a leave-behind. We have the broken-apart drawers missing from the picture above, but the drawer faces are too broken to be usable. Our plan for this piece of furniture saved it from the dumpster. Instead, it will become our bathroom vanity for our country farmhouse bathroom.

We'll have to cut down the legs to put it at a comfortable height, and after treating the top with some polyurethane, we'll mount this vessel sink with a complementing faucet. Then, having adapted the top drawers to accomodate the plumbing, we'll add a shelf to the bottom and add hide our stored items behind an eyelet curtain.

I couldn't have made this style work in our inner city house. I'm looking forward to it now.

The "Before" Bathtub

We are salvaging the bathtub, despite the astonishing level of damage it has suffered. The vintage claw foot complements my intended vision for the room, but we're using it mostly because fixing it, especially since we'll be doing the work ourselves, will be less expensive than the less charming alternatives.

I'm not sure what color we'll use on the exterior, but I'm pretty confident it won't be lavender shown chipping off above.

Using What God Gave Us

This morning Paul and the boys worked on measuring and moving these planks while Aelsa made a record of their lengths. We'll be using these leave-behinds for the counters on our office workspaces.

Trash and Treasure

When we first looked at the property, the nave looked like a flea market booth, and it still looked like a flea market booth when we came home to it after closing. Countless wooden chairs in all states of disrepair leaned against each other for support. Unnumbered wooden floor boards lay quietly behind piles of mismatched molding. Supposedly original pews sat religiously upright in the front of the church. Armies of old wooden doors stood at ease against a tacked-on room in the corner.

We knew there was only one thing to do: call our handyman friend to see if he thought he might make some treasures out of the trash that the owner had left behind. He drove off with quite a load, and we're grateful. Thanks, Kevin! We look forward to seeing your finished projects!

As it turns out, we're keeping the floor boards for our custom-made office counters. That alone will save us a lot of money down the line. We're keeping the chairs that have all their pieces, while some of the orphaned chair backs will become towel racks in the bathroom and kitchen, and the dresser with unrepairable drawers will become our bathroom vanity. So all those extras really are a blessing.

Is anyone interested in a couple of ugly lamps?