anotherbuckinthewall.com

Well, it’s been a long haul. We had the final appraisal done on Monday, and the bank has done the paperwork, so we are officially homeowners (well, ok - mortgage-holders. Whatever). We’re sorry for the lack of updates the last few months, but with the completion deadline looming, we’ve just been too swamped to put anything up. The Goddess will be posting some pictures in the next few days so you can see just how far we’ve come in the last year.

Thanks for watching!

PS: The insurance company approved our claim on the barn, so we’ll be starting construction on that soon as well. I need an excavator…

So today we finally completed a project which I have been working on for a while. When we were in Kelowna on spring break, we did a lot of thrift store hunting, and one of the things which I collected was a bunch of picture frames.

They were all spray-painted white, then I put an assortment of complementary blue photos (from Flickr, of course) in them. This morning we hung them. Many were missing hangers, so we used adhesive velcro for most of them, and it worked like a charm. I love the look- and now if I forget to bring my book to the tub, I have something pretty to look at.

The Badger’s level is at work, so they’ll be a little lopsided for a few days, but I can live with that. The whole project cost about $30- I think that’s pretty good, and I love the results.

So the weather this weekend was a monkey’s birthday, which made it hard to stain boards outside. If it was sunny, you could count on it raining in 5 minutes, and we even got some spectacular hail. The Badger hung black plastic in the living room and set up there, while I primed and painted the end of the hallway, which is a small ‘room’ and will serve as a sewing/craft area.

I also snuck time to do more yard work and gardening. Thing Two has been wanting to help me garden, and so we prepared a place for the potatoes. He raked the bed, and then helped me plant the spuds. Now we just have to wait. Other than rhubarb cake, not much tastes better than roasted baby potatoes, fresh from the garden. Yum.

As the Goddess said, the barndance was cancelled - here’s the proof:

So if anyone has a couple lifts of two-by-fours or some nice roofing material they’d like to donate, let us know!

All the peasants have fled, as Trogdor! burninates again…

Well, we’ll just be up front about things. It didn’t rain on the weekend. Which means that we did very little on the house. Instead we puttered (procrastinated) outside. The Badger replaced the bearing on the trailer and put the summer tires on the truck. He also hung my clothesline for me again, its previous location being somewhat unuseable since we tore the deck off the house last August.

I burned the septic field and cut down all the saplings growing on it with my amazing new ninja knife. (I bought a nifty folding japanese pull saw- it’s sharp, as evidenced by the wounds on my hands, and it cuts through a 2″ aspen in 3 strokes- I love it!) I also cut down a lot of other saplings which had the nerve to grow in the lawn and made a huge fire in the backyard. You know it was huge because the saplings burned. There are 4 big stumps in a pile on the lawn- remnants of some lumberjacking the Badger and my brother did last summer, and I’ve been trying to burn the blighters all winter. Yesterday I actually got the pile reduced to a mere shadow of its former self, and now the stumps are light enough to haul off the lawn if I want. I was going to work some more pyro-magic today but it drizzled all day. Which meant that I couldn’t play with my new clothesline either.

I also found another flower bed, which I cleaned out. I moved the delphinium to the east end of the house, as it got 8 feet tall last year in a desperate attempt to find some sunlight on the north side. Perhaps it will stay a more reasonable height and bloom more there. And while tidying the yard, I cleaned the leaves and grass out from under the (incredibly ugly) birch, well, bush I guess, and found wads of strawberry plants, some pretty variegated stuff whose name I forget but mom knows, and a bunch of other stuff which I mostly pulled out on the grounds that it’ll come back anyways but this way I might have room for some poppies.

Ok, this makes it sound like the Badger didn’t do much but that’s not true because he also loaded the trailer and hauled the freezer from the goat pen, and the soggy couch and chair set from the front yard (that was our fault- no room in the living room for furniture last fall) to the dump. He also used the tractor (Dad’s Steiner) to push my stumps into the fire better and to remove all the ‘decorative’ rocks from the lawn where I kept tripping on them. And put the wheel back on my barrow. So now it’s a wheelbarrow again.

But it’s back to the grind now, and he has already put the trim on the peninsula counter in the kitchen and is finishing cleaning the tool room as I type. We got a month’s extension on the mortgage completion, which is nice, but there’s still lots to do. Now if only it would be sunny later in the week so we could get some more ceiling stained…

Hooray! It is sunny! Last night when we got home from work, it was 18C in our yard, and the sun was shining. After popping dinner in the oven, the Badger and I set up to stain pine tongue&groove ceiling boards out in the warmth. The boards were drying nice and quickly, and we got enough done before supper was ready to hang the first quadrant of the master bedroom ceiling.

So now the section above our bed has a ceiling, not just white insulation. What a treat to be able to work outdoors again. It’s so much easier. Today we hope to do the rest of the master bedroom boards, and maybe even get a start on the living room ceiling ones.

With spring coming, new plants are pushing their way out of the ground, and I am still trying to get a handle on what I have where. Other than weeds. These little flowers came up by my lilac- I thought they were crocuses, but I was very wrong. Any idea what they are?

Also, the Badger and I went out looking for the survey pins the other day, and I found several rotting logs that were this odd bright blue/green. They were just lying in the bush. Anyone know why this happens?

OSOK posted this tribute today- check it out!

First pic of the newly finished (well, half finished) master bedroom. Notice the gorgeous little reading lights (with their own switches no less) and the lovely floor. The Badger rocks.