Ringing in the New Year at The Swallow's Nest

New Year's Eve, and some of our family's best buddies came out to play games, eat food, and ring in the new year with us.

What a great time we had together! Five-frame bowling with plastic bins, Uno Flash, Euchre, and theological discussions. What more could a person ask?

Oh, yes! Actually ringing a swinging bell by pulling on a thick rope! Watch the faces in the video, and then imagine yourself joining in the fun next year! We'd love to have you!

(It's not easy to hear the bell until the door has been opened.)

Peering into the Cold

At some point in the building's history, the basement was extended, an interior staircase was added, and a sort of bathroom was installed. The view shown here is from the basement door, looking along the southeast side of the church and toward the front.

Our plan is to enlarge and replace the windows to capitalize on the southern sun exposure. Between the windows we hope to plant a salad garden, using cold frames to extend our growing and harvesting seasons. But unless we can figure out how to prepare and serve cactus, we'll have to figure out the best way to dig it out of the ground; somewhere in there lurks yet another cactus patch.

Building the Bathroom

The new walls are framed in, the door has been rehung, and old chipboard has been temporarily nailed in place to give users some privacy.

The recessed lighting cans and exhaust fan are installed, and the insulation has been replaced. It's so wonderful to have all this light! And it's not quite as cold as it used to be!

Now Paul is pounding away at the concrete floor to open up a trench for the new drain line. My own John Henry aches all over, but he doesn't plan to die with a hammer in his hand.

I'll admit: this whole process is taking longer than we'd hoped. My husband is highly skilled, but highly skilled in completely different areas. He can accomplish projects on an amazingly tight deadline, but building a bathroom isn't exactly radio production.

What's unnerving is that at some point he'll have to disconnect the toilet, and at the rate we're going, it's anybody's guess how long it will take before the new toilet is available for use. We do intend to hire a plumber, but Paul also hopes to set the stage by doing as much of the prep work himself.

Well, Christmas is coming, and that means holiday travel for family celebrations as well as freelance work to fill in for vacationing broadcasters. Whatever Paul can get done tonight and tomorrow is what will welcome us when we return in the new year, and it is what we will be thankful for. Our God provides, and we are grateful.

Espaliers

We looked at the property twice before closing, once in the high heat of summer and once in its waning days. Both times Paul and I alternately fought our way through the chaos of vegetation and tiptoed our way around "dog mines" on our quest to see the fruit trees and berry patches in the backyard.

It wasn't until the ground was frozen that I decided it was safe to explore the grounds on my own, so I can't exactly wonder that I hadn't seen this espalier before the day Robin and I guarded the burn pile.

It's a curious location for this Golden Delicious apple tree, but the fascination of finding an espalier prompted me to discover the benefits of training fruit trees along a fence or against a wall. After a little reading, I'm eager to find other locations around the yard and give it a try.

One obvious benefit is that it's easy to reach the fruit on an espalier, but it also seems that it will produce more fruit as an espalier; instead of the tree spending its energy on branch growth, it concentrates more on fruit production.

An espalier takes up less room in a garden, so more of them may be planted, and even in small spaces and corners a person can reap a bounty of fruit.

Any fruit tree may be trained in an espalier, but stone fruits such as peaches and cherries are better suited for a more natural, informal pruning into a 2-dimensional shape.

It takes a few years for a fruit tree to get established, and we would have to prune off any fruit that it puts out during that time, but harvesting and putting up the fruit would be well worth the wait.

Keeping Warm

I didn't want to at first, but Paul thought we really should stretch plastic across the windows. There are storms on the outside, but the various cracks and holes in the stained glass pieces weren't doing us any favors. So on Wednesday, while Paul was working to put insulation back up in the bathroom ceiling, I climbed up the extension ladder countless times with the rolls of double sided tape and sheets of shrinkable plastic and managed to seal off four of the six windows.

I'm pretty satisfied with how they look. Time will tell whether or not this will help us keep our 40-year-old furnace heating costs down.

Beauty in Consensus

Many factors, most of them plumbing related, went into creating this bathroom floor plan, but just as many factors went into determining the flooring itself.

After sorting through the options, we decided that linoleum is the right choice for us: it's very inexpensive, it's not quite as cold on the feet as ceramic tile, it's easy to clean, and it lends a certain vintage charm to the space. The question I needed to work through was how we should use the linoleum tiles.

There are a lot of color and layout options to consider. I'd seen a picture online of a really nice border laid in a contrasting color, and I thought maybe something like that would work here. However, the layout of the room doesn't lend itself well to that approach. Besides, laying a border would also add a lot of work to my poor hubby's burden, so the border is out.

The size of the tile was an issue initially. My preference is not for the 12-inch square tiles; for laying an interesting pattern in contrasting colors, the scale seems a bit too large for the room. Additionally, they're much larger than the 9-inch vintage tiles. However, cutting them down would be wasteful, and not just wasting materials: even if each tiles were cut down into four 6-inch tiles, much of Paul's precious time would be wasted, because, as he said, he would have to lay four times the number of tiles than if we used the whole 12-inch tiles. So for Paul's sake I needed to work with the big tiles as they were.

To avoid ending up with a tile pattern that seems too large for the space, then, we'll be choosing two, low-contrast shades of the same color, probably light yellow, and lay them in a checkerboard pattern. I'm hoping that this will give the impression of design without overpowering the space with busyness, especially since I'd like the hooked rugs I intend to make to have a simple canvas as their backdrop.

Even with the subtle design in the tile layout, I still felt like a diagonal layout was almost necessary to visually unify the two parts of the room, to lead the eye from the vanity to the tub. So I was able to secure Paul's blessing to lay the tile on the diagonal. It will require some extra work, but nothing like the other ideas I bounced past him.

So I'm happy, and Paul's happy. It's a beautiful thing. Hopefully the bathroom will be, too.

Northwest Windows

From left to right: The sheaf of wheat symbolizes the bread of the New Covenant, the open Bible exhorts us to make God's Word central to our lives, and the dove with the olive branch speaks of peace and happiness such as Noah would have experienced following the worldwide flood.

Of all the kinds of stained glass windows that could have been here, I consider myself blessed that these windows feature simple, flowing lines and symbolic representations rather than ornate motives and figurative depictions. They're beautiful, and for the most part, I wouldn't change a thing.