Cozy kitties

Posted on November 13, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

A giant crate had been sitting in the burn pile beside our fire pit ever since Matt and I dragged it up from the end of the driveway at the start of the summer. I kept saying, “I’m sure we can use that somewhere.” However, it was Matt that finally had the vision of where.

Slice and dice with the sawzall

He sawed it in two, filled each half with straw, placed them in a sheltered corner in the basement of the barn and, voilà, cozy cat beds.

One bed even got a canvas tarp for extra coziness.

Cross task #3–fix up some winter beds for the cats–off our fall to-do list.

Our hardy, independent barn cats are living in the lap of luxury now. Easter and Ralph have each claimed a crate and made their own nests in the straw. Although they’d probably stay warmer if they snuggled, Ralph has put her paw down at babying her kitten any more. It’s in everyone’s best interest that they each get their own bed.

Documentation of their enthusiasm for their new beds was difficult to obtain.

Pictures of Easter look like this.

“What are you doing over there? I’m going to come see you!”

Or this.

“Treats! Oh yes, please! I like treats!”

We finally got Ralph to model for us, but even she looks like she wishes she was somewhere else.

“Are you done yet? Back scratches will only get you so far.”

The crates may be a little rustic for other felines, but our pusses think they’re just purr-fect.

Sorry.

For future photo shoots, anyone have any tips for encouraging cooperation from cat models? Is there anyone else who has four legged creatures sleeping in your barn, shed or garage? For other cat owners out there, where do your kitties sleep?

Monday night football

Posted on November 11, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

360 feet: the length of an American football field (including end zones)

384 feet: the length of trim currently in our basement–all of which required two coats of paint

Matt and a portion of our 23 pieces of casing

We’re at the two minute warning on this basement renovation. Walls are painted, carpet is scheduled for next week. The next play is to install the trim.

We bought pre-primed MDF casings and baseboards, but they still needed two coats of paint–Benjamin Moore Cloud White in a pearl finish. So I strapped on my knee pads and got to work.

Didn’t you know painting trim is a full contact sport?

Me and a portion of our 18 pieces of baseboard

The task for this week is to install all of the trim. It’s team MJ versus seven doorways and five rooms.

Cheer us on as we head for the end zone!

The story of a wooden shoe

Posted on November 8, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

When I was a little girl, this shoe sat in the curio cabinet in my grandparents’ living room. It is a hand-carved, child’s wooden shoe from Holland.

During the Second World War, my Grandpa was part of the Canadian Army. After first serving in Italy, his division was transferred to Holland. While in Holland, he was billeted with a Dutch family in their home.

When it came time for my grandfather to return to his own family in Canada, the family who had housed him wanted to express their gratitude. The father took his daughter’s wooden shoe, painted it with messages for my Grandpa and presented it to him.

Painted on the shoe is “Siddeburen,” the name of the town in which they lived, “souvenier,” “good by [sic], so long,” and “MEI 1945” (May, the month Holland was liberated by the Canadians).

For many decades after the war, my grandparents stayed in touch with the family, sending letters and cards back and forth over the Atlantic. The gratitude the Dutch people have for the Canadians was made tangible by my family’s connection to this one family.

Remembrance Day is a very meaningful day for me. In addition to marking the end of World War I and an occasion to remember the service and sacrifice of veterans as well as current soldiers, it is also my Grandpa’s birthday.

My grandfather in his World War 2 uniform

A note on the back of this photo in my Grandma’s handwriting says this picture was taken at Avellino, Italy Dec. 29, 1944.

This Sunday on Remembrance Day, I will be thinking of my Grandpa as I stand at the Legion with my family.

The wooden shoe now resides with my Aunt. My grandfather’s medals are with my Dad. Every time I visit, I look at these items and remember.

It is my hope that as Matt and I work on our forever house, we can fill it with meaningful items that show the legacy and tell the story of our families.

William Wallace by way of a wet saw

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

Saturday morning, Matt’s bathroom looked like this.

It’s not just Saturday. The bathroom has looked like this for the past several months while our attention has been on finishing the drywall in the rest of the basement.

By Saturday evening it looked like this.

Beautiful tile. Finally progress!

I’ve tiled before, and I actually enjoy doing it. It’s not hard work, but it does require planning.

My Dad and I spent several hours in the morning laying out the shower floor, carefully fitting and figuring. When we finally spread out the mortar, we had a really good idea of how everything should go.

The marble mosaic hexagon tiles that we used on the shower floor are all on a mesh backing that basically makes them into 12×12 tiles. It’s important to pay close attention when you join the sheets to make sure the gaps between the tiles are consistent. Despite our best efforts, I did still have a bit of difficulty keeping everything perfectly straight all the way across the floor, but I was able to adjust the spacing on the individual hexagons, and I think it will all look okay once it’s grouted.

Here are two lessons I learned about how to work with mosaic tile:

Don’t start with your first sheet tight to the wall. Keep it off an eighth or even a quarter of an inch. This will give you more room to make adjustments on your other sheets as you progress across the floor.
For areas like the drain, remove all of the tiles that come into contact with the drain. Lay your (mostly) full sheet as you usually would, and then insert individual tiles (or pieces of tiles) into the gaps as necessary.

On the main area of the floor we used actual 12×12 tiles, which were a piece of cake to install. The biggest piece of figuring we had to do was determine where the middle of the floor was and then centre our tile along that line.

The only sour bite in our cake was cutting out for the toilet. I know other people have used dremels or other tools to get nice round circles. We used the wet saw, which only cuts in a straight line. With lots of patience, lots of back and forth and even trading off cutting duties between my dad and me, we got the tile cut on the first try.

The cut of the day

It’s not as smooth as it would have been with another tool, but it will all be hidden under the toilet. That works for me.

What didn’t work for me was the William Wallace/Gene Simmons makeup I had going on after using the wet saw all day. All of the tile dust mixes with the water from the saw and from my waist to my hairline I had a dusty grey stripe in line with where the saw blade had sprayed me all day long–attractively along only the right side of my face.

Thank goodness for safety glasses

Next step is grout and then I can move onto the walls. Who knows, someday we might even move on to installing the actual fixtures and using this bathroom.

What’s your tiling experience? Any tips for keeping things straight and even? Or cutting a curved line with a straight saw?

Saturday night love letters

Posted on November 4, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

For our Saturday night date, Matt and I primed his office–it’s an exciting life we lead, I know.

Given that we were on a date, I tried to inject some romance into the evening and left a note for him while I was cutting.

He wrote back.

It’s clear where his heart lies. He even framed his message.

Ultimately, the love letters, the bacon and even the retina searing green primer were all covered by two coats of Benjamin Moore’s Manor Green–Matt’s choice of colour. Helping your husband paint his office forest green? That’s true love in my opinion.

Anyone else have a hot date this weekend? How did you spend your Saturday night?

Growing free

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

When we had the nephews at the farm two weeks ago, the tall one and I went to work on task #10 on the fall to-do list: remove stakes from established trees and stake the new trees that we planted this spring. The first step was to unshackle the trees from the cuffs that were wrapped around them. Some were tied with rope, some had sections of garden hose, some had wire. All were snug. Some were strangling. It was quite an arboreal torture chamber we were running here.

No tree emerged unscathed. Some are simply scarred.

Others are permanently deformed.

We cut the wires and hoses and ropes out of the trees as best we could. Where we ran into trouble was the stakes. The nephew and I did fairly well on the first few trees rocking the stakes back and forth to loosen them up and then pulling them out in a coordinated effort. However, after he left and it was up to Matt and me, the rest of the stakes held strong.

We must have been missing the magic touch, because no matter how much we wiggled the stakes we couldn’t get them to budge.

In desperation, Matt went and got Wiley, and I found a rope. We tied the rope to the stake and attached the other end to Wiley’s loader. Then Matt raised the bucket, the rope snapped, and the stake stayed where it was.

I went and got a chain. We hooked everything together, and Matt raised the bucket again. And the front wheels of the tractor lifted off the ground.

We spent a while adjusting the chain, adjusting the tractor, tugging on the stake and only succeeded in bending it.

The conclusion I came to is that the stakes have been in the ground so long that the tree roots must have grown around the metal. I don’t think we’re going to get them out. Above ground, the trees are free. I can only hope they survive their ordeal and continue to grow. Matt, however, is a bit traumatized from his wheelie on the tractor, so we’re calling this job good enough for now. The rest of the stakes–removing them from the older trees and adding them to the new trees–can wait until spring.

Drac-o-lantern

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

As the winds were picking up, and the rain was blowing in, and most people were stocking up on bottled water and batteries to prepare for super storm Sandy, I was shopping for a pumpkin.

Love the honour system approach at the rural pumpkin patch. Pick your pumpkin and put your cash in the cookie tin nailed to the wagon.

Perhaps my disaster preparedness skills could use some work. On the other hand, I think Matt’s and my pumpkin carving skills are highly developed.

Do you know who this is? Pattern via Masterpiece Pumpkins.

Matt recognized him right away, but then Matt’s a huge fan of classic horror movies, and this is one of his favourites.

ETA: The most popular guess has been Nicolas Cage. I can see the resemblance, but that’s not who’s on our pumpkin. Think classic movies, people!

It’s our first Hallowe’en at the farm, so we’re not familiar yet with the local customs. We’ll leave the gate open and the lights on tonight in case any trick-or-treaters decide to make the trek up the driveway, but we’re not optimistic. I think Drac might stay in the house on the hearth where we can enjoy him.

What’s your pumpkin carving technique? Intricate pattern or classic geometry? Animals, scenes or faces? Anyone out there going door-to-door tonight? What candy are you on the hunt for? If you want to toss some peanut butter cups or Crispy Crunch my way, I wouldn’t object.

Happy Hallowe’en everyone.

Shades of grey

Posted on October 28, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

Blame it on being away at a course for two days and missing husband and home. While driving back to the farm, I decided that the best colour to paint the basement is the one that Matt liked the most. After all, the basement was his main priority when house hunting, and I’ve said that my priority is to make it nice for him.

There were six finalists in the running: two off-whites, two creams and two greys. When I asked you what you’d choose, one of the off-whites, White Dove (my favourite), came out on top with Misty Gray (Matt’s favourite) in second.

We decided to make it Misty. However, it turned out not to be that simple.

I went and bought a 5 gallon pail of Misty Gray. We put the first coat on the long room. And I didn’t like it.

The grey was so subtle that it looked to me like we’d painted the room white. As much as I liked White Dove, now that we’d chosen to go grey, I wanted the colour to be noticeable.

So we returned to Benjamin Moore with the pail and asked them to adjust the colour. The next tint on the fan deck was Bunny Gray, and that’s what we aimed for–keeping in mind that the colour wouldn’t be exact given that we’d already used more than a gallon from the pail.

There were two things I was unsure about though: I thought that Bunny might still be too light, and I was also concerned that we wouldn’t have enough paint in our pail to cover the whole basement. And with our custom mixed colour, we likely would have trouble matching it exactly if we came up short.

So I decided to order a single gallon of Thundercloud, the next shade darker after Bunny. When we got home, we dumped the remains of our Misty sample pail along with the gallon of Thundercloud into our pail of Bunny.

Misty is the light blob at the top, Thundercloud is the swirl in the middle.

Matt mixed it all together, and I crossed my fingers as I picked up my paint brush. Fortunately, I was happy with our Franken-colour, and we went to town.

Sorry for the picture quality here. It was dark by the time we finished painting, and lighting in the basement isn’t the greatest. This is the future ping-pong area in the main room of the basement.

Running to the store for the retint and being away from home for a couple of days cost us a bit of painting time, so we still have a little more to do yet. But with the colour finalized and a few free evenings this week, we’re expecting to make good progress this week.

Have you ever mixed your own paint colour? How did it work out for you? What do you think of our custom shade of grey? Given my subject matter and the title of this post, I feel like I have to ask if there are any Shades of Grey fans out there? I haven’t read it myself. Do you recommend it?

At the junkyard

Posted on October 25, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

Check another item off our fall to-do list. The scrap metal pile in front of the driveshed is gone.

Last weekend, I borrowed my Dad’s truck, so Saturday morning Matt and I loaded it up with the TV aerial, assorted poles and pipes, an umbrella clothesline, a single tire rim, an old motor, an even older fan, buckets of rusty screws and nails and our aluminum step ladder (in the rock-paper-scissors-eque battle that is ladder-tree branch-gravity, tree branch wins with an assist from gravity, hence no more step ladder. Matt’s Dad who was on the ladder with the chainsaw is just fine… as is the chainsaw).

The trailer was busy with a load of firewood (see “chainsaw” above), so we had to put all of the metal inside the truck.

It was basically a load of crap rather than scrap, but we trundled off to a local junkyard anyway in the hopes that we could make a few bucks.

In hindsight, we should perhaps have been willing to drive a little bit further to a slightly more professional dealer.

The first clue was the sign on the front of the building.

Do you see it?

The sign on the left of the building actually looks like that–no editing. I have adjusted the sign on the top of the building to protect the guilty.

Let me get a little closer for you.

Do you see it now?

Yup. They misspelled “metal.”

There was no scale, no paperwork. We pulled into the yard, one of the workers pulled the metal–or metel–out of the truck and dumped it amongst all of the wrecked cars and basically waved us on our way.

Bye bye ladder et al.

Matt and I obliged him by pulling out of the yard, but then I stopped, parked, went into the office and said, “Ummmm, when I called you said that you guys buy metal?”

They agreed that they did buy metal. Then they wandered outside for awhile, had a couple of conversations in a language I didn’t understand and dealt with another customer. Eventually they came back and one of the men took a wad of cash out of his back pocket and peeled off a couple of bills. I reached out my hand and snagged the twenty and the ten that he reluctantly extended to me.

At this point, Matt and I decided that retreat was the best option, and we scampered out to the truck where Matt said, “Go! Drive! Just get us out of here!”

So all in all, a slightly sketchy, as well as a slightly profitable, experience. The upside: the $30 paid for the pizza we ordered for dinner that night and there’s no more unsightly metal pile in front of the driveshed. Double win!

Party time

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

I booked a Christmas party. Hosted by us. At the farm.

What’s with the tone?

Well, I’m a bit anxious.

Because, you see, the party is set for exactly one month before Christmas Eve. One month from today.

And my dining room currently looks like this.

Keeping it real, folks. The drawer for the china cabinet was damaged in the move and won’t slide into place until we fix it. The extra furniture tucked in the left corner, the boxes stacked on the right and ironing board that is just outside of the picture will all go into the basement…whenever we finish the reno.

My living room looks like this.

The couch is in the right spot, but the grocery bags and cleaning supplies in the foreground of the photograph are not.

Oh, and my kitchen looks like this.

Our “island” is a metal patio table over which I have thrown a plastic dollar store tablecloth. All of my small appliances and boxes of cookbooks are tucked underneath, as I have no other place for them yet. On the bright side, we have a spot for our stash of Hallowe’en candy.

You may now realize why I haven’t shown a lot of pictures of the inside of the house.

For the past seven months since we moved to the farm, we’ve been living in an increasing level of chaos. And it seems to be getting worse.

Books, boardgames, extra furniture, sports equipment and all of the other items that will someday be in the basement are still packed in boxes and stacked behind the couch between the dining room and the living room. As we buy new things or have to access our packed items, everything gets a little more disorganized (see exhibit A above).

You can see the tracks of our footprints in the drywall dust on the living room floor (see exhibit B above).

I emptied the front hall closet, so that I could fit it out with shelves and rods and racks to actually store things in a somewhat more orderly fashion. That means our ancient vacuum cleaner, shopping bags, hats and gloves are all piled in the corner of the living room (see exhibit C above).

The good news is that we are heading into the home stretch on our basement reno.

The better news is that after exhibits A, B and C were photographed, a couple of tents, an air mattress, a camp stove and assorted Christmas decorations made their way downstairs.

No need for colour, carpet or trim in the closet under the basement stairs. Two coats of prime do the job just fine. Some proper shelves would be nice though.

I’m hoping that by party time carpet will be the floors in the rest of the basement. We may not have baseboards or much furniture by then, but if we can at least put some more things downstairs, I’ll feel a little better about our living environment.

I like hosting parties, and I don’t worry too much about my house being perfect. However, I do have some standards. A basic level of organization and tidiness is required. The current state is not even close.

Here’s hoping a hard deadline makes things move a little faster.

Oh, and to Matt’s family… we’re really looking forward to hosting you next month! Really.

Anyone out there have any tips on how to get organized? Please tell me someone else has tiles stacked in the living room, an ironing board in the dining room, dust tracks on the floors, a makeshift kitchen island and tools sitting on pretty much every available surface? Or perhaps you’re already looking ahead to Christmas. Who’s also in party planning mode already? What makes a good party at your house?