The Kitchen Redesign That Wasn’t – Part I

About five months ago, you would have found my nose deeply buried in an appliance or cabinet brochure. Tom Builder and I had decided that it was time to officially “move over to the other side of the house.” For those of you who aren’t familiar with our housing situation, we bought a house almost two years ago that is two houses that have been built together. While we did move all of our bedrooms into the newer side of the house when we moved in, we prefer to spend most of our time on the older side of the house.

The older side of the house is where we homeschool, office, and live out our day. When we bought the house, it was our plan to use the kitchen as our homeschooling facility and storage. While we do school there, I also did all of my cooking there, like any other normal family. As a result of spending most of our time on the older side of the house, it is half way decorated and holds the most cheer. However, walk over to the new portion of the house and you will find empty rooms waiting for inspiration until you hit the bedrooms.

Why? All because I loathe the other kitchen. While it is larger, it’s cold. It’s modern with a horrible looking mach stainless steel tile backsplash, and cabinets that border on a pink glaze. They say the kitchen is the hub of a household, and that holds true for our family. I don’t do pinky kitchens. I just couldn’t imagine gathering around that pink steel kitchen and having a hot dinner together. I could go on and on, but it simply was the complete opposite of my kitchen happiness. So I worked in the smaller kitchen that spoke warmth. End of story.

But then Tom Builder opened up the door by suggesting that maybe it was time to rework the other kitchen, knowing that it would be a strong catalyst for “finishing” our move. And that was all I needed. Off to work I went locating Kitchen Design companies and looking at portfolios. In two months, we had the blueprints to a complete kitchen redesign that blew our budget by over 300%. The redesign was beautiful and involving a stack stone fireplace, windows facing the barn and fields, Alder wood cabinets, granite and all the fixings. The price was hair raising, but we were willing to bite the bullet.

I was minutes from handing the designer a check for the cabinets to be ordered, when Mr. Incredible The Cautious decided not to do anything until we saw an itemization of the demo work that was to be performed. A simple request that would take a weekend and a couple of days. A small delay. The check was never passed on. And that, my friends, is when the bottom of the market fell out. And then Obama was elected.

With the economy gutted, and a president elect who had announced he was going to tax the wahzoo out of small businesses (our livelihood) and a certain sector of the public, doing this kitchen suddenly became the most unwise decision we could make. We halted everything. Nada kitchen.

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New Carpet Vs. Four Dogs

On Friday, our new carpet was installed. Praise GOD! I can’t even begin to tell you the difference that it has made in the house. No more mystery stains and smells in the carpet left behind by the previous owners who lived with an indoor zoo. No more hee-bee-jee-bee feelings. We are finally over the hump of disaster and on our way to moving in completion. It feels good, not to mention super squishy soft on the toes.

With just over a month left to go before Baby Hope arrives, Tom Builder has discovered that I will move heaven and earth (or king sized mattresses) singlehandedly with or without his help to finish the job indoors. I will not be stopped. Unless it comes to rebuilding the closets, and then I am admittedly at his mercy. But I can make the grand announcement that nobody is sleeping on the floor anymore. After five months, The Queen’s Grace and Sir Bugga-lot have their bunk beds and can say Adieu to sleeping with mattresses on the floor.

That’s the good news in the cleanliness department. The bad news, is for ten days we have inherited three additional doggies. They’re good girls, but included in the bunch is a live wire puppy on a course of destruction through our house while my brother and his good wife are on a Carribean cruise. I’m beginning to realize how good we had it when Maggie, our beloved now in doggie heaven Golden Retriever was a puppy. Since Saturday, Ms. Sadie the Bloodhound puppy has sought out and destroyed:

1 Pacifier
3 Markers
1 Red Uniball Pen (which of course exploded all over the hardwood floors)
3 Strips of weather stripping for the doors
3 Stuffed animals (with stuffing carried throughout the house)
2 Wooden Beads
1 Window Screen
1 Baby Gate
1 Bowl of Mini Wheats

And that is only a short list of things that were left behind with a remnant for evidence. I can’t imagine what foreign objects lie within the bowels of this canine…

We’re on Day 4 or 5 of the trip. I ALMOST put them all in the outdoor shed after the Red Uniball explosion as that was the result of a third escape from the sunroom at 6:00 am. The escape was accomplished by pulling at the weather stripping underneath two closed doors, which then pulled the doors open and released the hound to do her bloody red business…so to speak. Her life would have been extinguished if she had decided to carry the ball point pen over to the freshly carpeted side of the house.

The first escape took place sometime during the morning hours of Sunday, when all three dogs busted through a window screen, and then busted a hole through a baby gated deck. Dogs are much harder than kids. I don’t know how my sister-in-law does it. But I can tell you that 4 dogs, plus 3 kids, plus toys and homeschooling supplies strewn around the house is a disaster from the get go. You just can’t win with that formula.

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Here Comes Rubble

“It felt so good to have a day off today.”

This coming from Mr. Incredible after nine hours behind either a sledge hammer, rototiller or a Bobcat. I am learning, that what my husband really wants to do in his free time is be a twenty first century gladiator. To destroy, or build, that is the question. I’m also learning he is really good at doing both.

Tom Builder has a full week with a rented Bobcat. What this guy can do with a Bobcat in thirty minutes is a wonder. On Wednesday evening, on my way to drop the kids off at AWANA, I drove between two gaudy fortress-like structures that buttress either side of our entrance to the property. Tom Builder and I have always disliked these things as they scream with their white stucco and lion topped heads “Welcome to the Fortress. Don’t touch anything.” We wanted our property to have a more inviting feel that matched our family’s personality and said something more along the lines of “Welcome to our Home. Take a load off and stay awhile.” Upon my quick return, I was greeted with “The Fall of Rome”…

The picture above was taken a day later, when most of the stucco and concrete had been transported by Bobcat to the second entrance to the property that goes down to the barn. Tom Builder’s plan is to lay all of this rubble down on the farm road, crush it, and then pile pea gravel on top of it. Meanwhile, he spent the rest of the day yesterday, smoothing out the entrance with dirt so that he can start laying pallets and pallets of sod at the entrance today. Did I mention we are also getting our new carpet today?? Did I mention that we could be watching up to 4 additional dogs for a week beginning tomorrow? The next few days are going to be CRAZY!

But as long as Tom Builder has a smile on his face, and is so loopy about driving a Bobcat that he can act goofy with his hat…it is all worth it.

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The Storm Before The Calm?

You know when you are trying your best to get organized over something, and how for a moment (or months in our case) things look even worse than when you had started? That is exactly where we are with this moving in and onto the farm process. And honestly, when you are gaining on a month away from delivering a new baby, the aisles of piles can start to make you a little crazy. I am so tired of trying to feel my way through mazes of unhung picture frames in the dark, just so I can get to the loo in the middle of the night. I should be wrapping up my nesting now for the little one, and instead I am inching my way around endless piles of wood and unfinished business.

We ARE making progress. It just doesn’t quite feel like it yet. For instance, we have made the farm safer, by having a number of giant, but sick or dead trees felled. We had a magnificent 50 year old pine growing right by the side of the barn, but it was clearly ill, and would have squashed our barn and whatever else into mere splinters if it had crashed down on its own. In addition, there were already about 15 large logs piled up on the property. The pine has been cut into campfire sized seats, but as for the rest of it, we are surrounded up to our ears in bad wood. Mr. Incredible and I have dreams of hosting an October bonfire with friends, but alas, there will be no bonfire with a burn ban that threatens to last until 2010. So here it all bakes in 100+ temperatures.

Everyday, I have to walk by this ugly mass on my way to the barn, and I’m starting to think to myself, “And who lives here? I wonder what small animals are multiplying or slithering under that pile? The very same pile that was here before we moved in, but we continue to add to it…”:

Walk around to the back of the pile, and it is a crying shame. Beautiful cedar wood from the sauna that the previous owners decided to build in our master closet. We tried to take it apart gently, but it was no use. The wood is gorgeous, and smells wonderful, but we really have no idea what to do with it in this state. And so it sits threateningly on one of many burn piles that encircle the property.

Inside the house, we have encountered an entirely new monster. Disgusting carpet and walls in need of TLC means new carpet and new paint. Sounds lovely doesn’t it? However, putting the plan into action is an entirely different beast. Everything we put away when we moved, gets pushed back out to paint.

And then, me and dreamy self decide after all the painting is done, that it sure would be nice to have the closets painted as well. “I mean, now is our chance Honey. Our closets will feel so nice! It will help me want to organize. It’s now or never.” So I talk my patient Tom Builder into “Now”, sweet man that he is, and all Closet Maid stuff has to be unscrewed from all of the closets so we can paint the walls of the closets. We were going to have to tear apart the closets anyway, to get the new carpet installed, so my pleas for painted closets weren’t entirely ridiculous. However, the interim result is the center of our house gets stacked 5 feet high with pressed wood, along with everything in every closet. But the empty freshly painted closets are beautiful. 🙂

And here we sit. Waiting for our carpet to arrive that was at our house two weeks ago, but had to be returned due to a color mix up. This really would be fine and dandy, if it wasn’t for the giant reminder in front of me outside and inside that the place is a disaster. And the other reminder that occasionally contracts into a hard beach ball, telling me that it is almost game time. Everytime I pull into our drive, I am in humble awe over the property the Lord guided us to. A tree filled treasure we now call home…even with the piles of junk everywhere. But for a moment ladies, I JUST WANT TO NEST LIKE A PREGNANT HUMAN. Instead I feel like the animal that must be trying to multiply under that burn pile outside.

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The Simple Life….NOT

There is so much going on in our household right now, it is absolutely dizzying. Thanks to my brother, sending a sweet, hardworking man and his wife our way, the farmhouse is getting a complete makeover with paint, interior and exterior. New carpet is ordered and just around the corner. Boxes are still in every room. Chickens have long since outgrown their little brooder and flap their wings about in a giant TV box in the kitchen. Nana and Papa Don have come and left. My computer is still out of commish and getting sent into Toshiba tomorrow. And lastly, our new school year is to begin again in just over a week.

Craziness.

The chickens. THE CHICKENS. Oh my goodness, they can grow like weeds! The kids and I take them out of their cardboard brooder once or twice a day to practice free ranging in our front yard. Usually we manage six chicks at a time, which is much easier to keep track of rather than twelve. I’ve decided that chicks are cheap entertainment. I could watch them and their chicken antics for hours. And as they feather out, their new little chicken suits intrigue me. Above is one of our Silkies, and below is “Ginger”, an Ameraucana, whose sproutin’ tail feathers are cute as ever.

Faith greets all the chickens with a fairweather “HI!” every day. She loves them all and carefully flat hands their heads for a friendly pet. She knows she can not pick one up or hold one, and so she follows them around the yard at time with her hand shaking above them making long grunting sounds as if they were too heavy to pick up.

The Queen’s Grace is forever asking to hold a chick, and gets a thrill out of giving them veggie goodies, which sends the chicks into cackling fits of madness and glee. I have to admit, it is really a funny site to see them go nutty over a little tidbit of this or that. The winner of any prize will quickly make her tasty treat known by all, which sends the entire flock on a mad chase after her to try and steal the prize, which eventually turns into a giant game of chicken “keep away”.

I’m getting very nervous about putting the chicks out in their coop soon. The barn cat has made it clear that she would love to get her mitts on a chicken dinner. And the animals that have been around the farm as of late really have me racking my brain on making sure all is predator proof. Just tonight I walked in on a raccoon in the barn raiding the kitty food. I watched him collapse his body through a 3 inch gap at the top of the barn under the roof. Three inches!! And not that it is a chicken predator, but this week, I also came face to face with a beaver on our property. The animals are coming out of the woodwork.

The kids are ready to be back at it for schooling, but I’m still trying to muster up the strength to start a new year. I know once we get back into the swing of things, the moving in will go even slower than it has. But Baby Hope is on her way, and I’m starting to feel the squeeze on available time, so we’ll press on, a box at a time, and hit the books in August again.

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Cluck, Cluck, Neigh

I should have been focused on the arrival of our baby chickens in two weeks. And I was to a degree. The makeshift Rubbermaid brooder still needs to be fully assembled, but I’m close. Nothing a pair of tinsnips and a few screws won’t take care of. The feed, feeders, heat lamp and shavings are on standby. The only animal I should be losing sleep over right now are chickens. But I’m not. Prepare for a raging rant…

Instead, it’s horses. I’ve mentioned before how we have given the horse boarders (who were boarding their horses with the previous owners residing here in March), the notice that we would not be boarding on the farm. All of them have heeded that notice and the last boarder left two weeks ago. We should have no animals left on the farm right? Nope. Two horses are still left. Five deadlines have been made and broken, by none other than the lousy owner herself.

Not anybody earns the name “lousy” from me. But this lady is down right LOUSY. Never returns a phone call. This week topped it all for me. Follow me carefully: The last boarder to leave (I’ll call her Mrs. Sweet), actually was the one who fed Mrs. Lousy’s horses for her. Mrs. Lousy has only shown up once in the last three months to see her own horses, and that was because of a deep wound one of her horses had incurred on the farm (lot of blood) and the vet had to work with the horse quite a bit. That’s it. ONCE.

So…when Mrs. Sweet left, there was no one to feed the remaining horses. Mrs. Lousy, knew Mrs. Sweet had left. But Mrs. Lousy never came by to feed her own horses. For FOUR days. And for THREE days I called her six times letting her know that I was growing concerned that her horses were not being fed and there was no alfalfa hay available at all. Now, of course, I’m not going to watch horses starve on my own property, so I fed them with the remaining grain and pellets. But she didn’t know that. Never once did she call back. Until today.

All of a sudden, she leaves a message on the machine that someone is coming over to look at the horses, and by the way, she was feeding the horses. A bald faced lie. But to be sure, I made sure to be down at the barn when she came by. We chatted for forty minutes after the man decided that he wasn’t interested in a sixteen year old flat footed thoroughbred and a spitfire mean miniature stallion for his wife. After some warming up, I apologized for all of my repeated calls that she never answered regarding the welfare of her horses, and then lined up the bait and switch. “We must have been just missing each other. You must have been coming by in the afternoons.” (I had been at the house almost constantly all week, but for the last four afternoons we had been on the property outside). “Yes…(her eyes dodged), in the afternoons sometimes and also at night I’d park on the street and walk down to the barn.”

Two minutes later, as she walks down to the barn to “feed” the horses, she asks, “So how are we doing on our grain level?” And I watch as she checks the four garbage cans where the horse food is stored. She sifts around, “We still have some senior equine in there, and enough beet pulp…” For a person who has been feeding her horses for the last four days, she sure did a lot of checking, and asked some odd questions. I could tell you with my eyes closed and hands tied behind my back how much of everything there was in those bins. My blood was boiling.

So here’s the kicker. She moved her other horses off of our property to next door over a month ago, but she doesn’t want to pay for the last two to go over there. So we are stuck with two horses, the owner neglects, and who rarely you can get a hold of, because she doesn’t want to pay for boarding all of her horses somewhere. And we walk this fine line tight rope of what in the world do we do? We can’t charge her boarding fees, because then we become a horse business and insurance must get involved. So she sits here for free. I am a finger dial away from calling a horse rescue place, but then their web site has a blip about how they are looking for more available stall space and has over twenty horses already listed. And I just don’t know if we can call them truly abandoned yet.

How do you make someone take their animals off of your property when they weigh hundreds of pounds? It is the most frustrating situation I have ever been in with someone. And we’re dealing with an unreachable bluthering idiot who is prone to lie badly. Tom Builder keeps telling me that he is two weeks ahead of me in frustration and anger. He still thinks the best solution is to park the remaining two horses in the parking lot of her town home. If I didn’t have a heart, I’d do it.

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Oh Sheesh It’s June Already

ACK! I hate it when I do this. I go AWOL on the blog for a few weeks, and then I feel overwhelmed about trying to get all of the stuff I went AWOL on, blogged about, which turns into a vicious cycle of avoiding the blog.

Then there is this weird anxiety over it. I tell myself that I started the blog for our family, to log in on life and capture memories that my mind would normally dismiss over time. But there is a bit of high school mentality left somewhere inside me that worries that an extended absence will discourage readers and they’ll stop visiting. Not that the place is hopping with comments. And that was never what this blog was about in the first place, but suddenly it begins to matter. And then I scold myself for being ridiculously childish, and remind myself that if I don’t want to blog, than I shouldn’t blog that day. WHAT IS THAT???

There were many factors in my latest absence including the never ending move, exhaustion, exciting travels and celebrations, chicken research, and my latest debacle…cheerios. I will be addressing all of this at my leisure in the coming week, but I do stress “leisure”. More of a forced leisure.

I so unwisely decided to bring my laptop to the breakfast table to look up some chicken stuff. And then Grace became enthralled with the chicken stuff and managed to drop a giant sloppy spoonful of cheerios and milk onto the keyboard. An hour after that…the computer has gone on strike. No computer for me. I feel like I have lost a limb. The laptop is an extension of my body for at least three hours a day. It is my cookbook, my library, my mailbox, my photo album, my news, my homeschooling tracker, my blog.

But I leave you with good news…The chickens are coming! Which is why I am up to my neck in chicken research and books. Ten one day old baby chickens will be arriving in the mail (YES…in the mail) at the end of this month. Isn’t the Internet amazing?Every single one, a different breed. And hopefully, as ordered, every single one a female. No roos please! We’ll have a rainbow of chicken ladies and eggs on the farm. How fun is that?

But again more on that later…

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