The calendar now says it’s spring, and the temperature–and as a result the farm–is starting to agree.
What’s spring looking like for you?
Author Archives: Julia at Home on 129 Acres
Master bedroom move-in
I mentioned at the beginning of the week that we made a wee bit of progress on the master bedroom makeover.
Here it is.
Yes, we have moved into our new bedroom. And obviously, Baxter is exhausted from the journey across the hall.
It’s still not done, but having our bed in the room and our clothes in the closet–and our dog on the bed–feel like major progress to me.
You may recall that this makeover started 3 months ago. Right after Christmas, I scraped the stipple ceiling. That was honestly the hardest part of the project. There’s no good reason why this is taking me so long.
The master bedroom is one of my Home Goals for 2015. One of my other Home Goals is to take it easy on the projects and not hold myself to such strict timelines as I did last year.
Obviously, I’m succeeding at the latter of those goals.
For some reason, I’m just not getting excited about this makeover. I’m hoping that will change soon though. The spring One Room Challenge launches next week. I’ve decided that finishing the master bedroom is going to be my entry.
I was super excited about the laundry room makeover that I did for the Challenge last fall, and I really enjoyed participating with all of the other bloggers.
So I’m reverting to my old ways. There will be detailed timelines, regular updates and lots of progress. (Please, let there be progress).
Until then, commiserate with me, please. Do you have a long-running makeover? Have you ever undertaken a project that didn’t seem that interesting? Any tips for pushing through?
Horsing around
Hello! Thanks for your patience while I took a little break last week.
It was a good vacation, but a busy one. I was away from the farm 7 out of the 9 days. Honestly, that’s not my favourite way to spend a vacation, but I did manage to squeeze in a little project time.
We finally made an itty-bitty bit of progress on the master bedroom (yes, that makeover still lives), and I came to some decisions about the garden. You’ll hear more about both of these in upcoming posts.
For today, though, I wanted to share one of the fun reasons I left the farm last week.
We went to, guess what, another farm to go horseback riding. Today’s post isn’t about the ride itself as much as it is about the great pictures (trust me, you’ll want to make it all the way to the very end).
Here are our two steeds: Indy on the left and Clyde on the right.
Indy was mine and Clyde was Matt’s.
Our guide was Adrienne (the person, not the horse).
Here’s a view I don’t usually have during my hikes.
Matt and Clyde had a special bond. He (Clyde, not Matt) keeps his mouth open a bit because he likes to have his bottom lip tickled. You’ll notice his (Clyde’s, not Matt’s) tongue is sticking out in the photo below.
And then Matt found just the right spot.
Clyde certainly knows how to smile for the camera.
And there’s your funny Monday. You’re welcome. Hope you have a great day.
Help plan the vegetable garden
I’m starting to think about my vegetable garden.
You may recall that this garden does not exist yet. Even moreso right now since everything is still buried in snow.
However, that’s not stopping me from thinking about layouts and plants and dimensions and fencing and fertilizer and trellises and… and… and…
The garden is my one and only outdoor project for this year.
Would you help me with planning, please?
The objective is to turn the patch of burr bushes behind this little picket fence…
Into a bucolic oasis like this.
Source: Country Living
No sweat, right?
Here’s what I’ve sorted out so far.
I’m going to dismantle what Matt calls the “goat ring” (I think it’s a longeing ring for horses) to get my fencing.
Under this mound of snow, I have a stash of wood posts that I can use either for fencing or for edging the garden beds.
I’ve collected a few rolls of chain link that will be helpful to keep small hungry critters from munching on my produce.
Aaaaaand that’s about all I have so far.
Next week is spring break. I’m taking a vacation from the day job, which means a little more time at home to work on projects. One project is starting to map out the garden.
I don’t think I can do much more than that until the snow melts.
I’m going to be taking a break from the blog for the week too. While I’m away, I’d really appreciate it if you could offer your suggestions for the garden.
What should I plant? How should I organize the garden? What dimensions are best for the individual beds? How big should the garden be overall? What’s the best way to get rid of the burr bushes and prepare the soil? Do you have a garden yourself? What grows best for you? Are there any garden blogs I should be reading? Thanks in advance for your help.
Grandma’s locket
It’s been awhile since I’ve done a treasures post. Last week, I wore one of my most precious treasures, my grandmother’s locket.
Like most of my treasures this is inherited from family. I don’t know the exact heritage of this locket but I can see its history just by looking at it. The back and front both have several dents.
My Mom’s memory is that my grandmother was wearing this one day when she fell down the stairs while carrying my Mom. My Mom was tossed through the air and somehow ended up landing on a pile of towels in the linen closet. My grandmother was also alright, but the locket was dented.
Inside the locket, I’ve placed my two favourite photos of my grandmother: one from Matt’s and my wedding and one from when she was a young woman.
I always wanted a locket, so I was really honoured to inherit this one from my grandmother. When I wear it, I find myself opening it every so often to look at the photos and remember her.
Laundry room rug – Ikea hack
I finally found a rug for the laundry room… or rather, three rugs.
It was hard to figure out the exact dimensions that would work in this room. With jig and jogs around cabinetry and laundry machines and the drying rack, the rug could only be so wide. But it was a relatively long room. Did I want the rug to go just in front of the washer and dryer? Just in front of the sink? All the way from wall to wall?
I eventually decided that it made sense to have a rug in front of the sink, the washer and the dryer.
But then came the question of material. I liked the idea of a natural jute rug, but I wasn’t confident I’d find one that met my measurements for a price I was willing to pay. I’ve seen some great antique and vintage patterned rugs on other blogs, but, again, price was a factor and availability is always challenging
Then, during an Ikea trip, I came across Signe.
It was a fairly natural tone with pops of black and red, two accents I used a bit in the laundry room.
Plus it was cheap: $2.99.
The downside was it was short. One rug was less than 3 feet long. But for $2.99, I could buy three.
At home, I laid them out in the laundry room. This just might work.
After an afternoon spent ripping off fringe and some time spent with my sewing machine, I had a runner the exact dimensions I needed–8 feet long by 22 inches wide.
I used a wide zig-zag stitch to join the rugs end-to-end, doing my best to match the stripes.
The result was the right colours, the right size and the right price. It’s a nice finishing touch in the laundry room.
Blog-iversary 3
Holy cow, this little blog is three years old. It doesn’t seem like it’s been that long. It’s pretty cool to look back through the archives and see a record of our lives since moving to the farm.
Every year at this time I also like to look back at some of the blog’s stats and some of the landmarks from the past year.
It’s partially about having a record for myself, but also about sharing some of my numbers with other bloggers out there.
Blogging is a community and a pretty diverse one. Blogs come in all different sizes, but readership and viewership stats aren’t something we talk about all that often… at least not that I see.
This post is not about comparing one blog to another, and it’s especially not that bigger is better. I have to admit though that I’m often curious about how my blog measures up.
Mine truly is a little blog, and I like to share some of my numbers in the hopes that my experience might encourage some other small bloggers. There are lots of us who are not in it for the daily page views or the advertising dollars (for a fabulous example from a not-so-small blog, see this post from DIY Diva). I blog because I love it. I’m in it for myself and for all of you reading.
So the first thing I have to say as I celebrate my third blog-iversary is thank you to all of you. Thanks for reading and following along on our adventures.
And now on to the numbers. (And by the way, WordPress, anytime you want to go back to the classic stats page that would be alright with me).
In my third year of blogging, my little corner of the internet had 58,681 views and 29,132 visitors. My average daily views heading into year 3 now sit just over 200. Here’s how things have developed over the past three years (WordPress didn’t track visitors in year 1):
The top 10 countries got a bit of a shake-up this year–or at least bottom half of the list did. The U.S. and Canada still lead the pack, but Europe came on strong bumping India, New Zealand and South Africa out of the top 10.
- United States — 36,757
- Canada — 14,025
- United Kingdom — 2,684
- Australia — 1,248
- Germany — 725
- France — 452
- Switzerland — 422
- Ireland — 262
- Netherlands — 256
- Denmark — 216
Visitors came from 135 different countries in total.
I also celebrated some blog records this year.
- On Dec. 4, I reached the milestone of 100,000 all-time views.
- Just this week, I received my 1,000th like.
- On Nov. 6, I had my most visitors and views in a single day ever thanks to the One Room Challenge. The previous record of 543 views in a day (which was set way back on July 23, 2012) was supplanted by a new record of 603 views and 357 visitors.
- The One Room Challenge was also responsible for the most comments on any post–44 (although half of them are me replying to people’s comments)
- November’s views record only stood for a few months before it was broken on Feb. 9 by a new total of 631. Interestingly, the visitors number that day was pretty standard for me–119. My conclusion is that I have a new reader who binge read basically the whole blog in one day. Whoever you are, welcome. I’m glad you liked my blog.
And that brings us back to all of you again. I blog for myself, yes. But if this was simply a personal journal, I’m not sure I’d have kept going for three years. I really like knowing that there are people out there who enjoy my writing and like reading about our adventures. Thanks for being part of our life.
A bit of spring
Just a wee peek of spring today. My Mom bought me a beautiful bouquet of these tulips last year, and I’ve been saving the photos–apparently for a moment just like this.
After about 40 straight days of sub-zero temperatures and the coldest February since 1875, we finally made it to March–the month of spring. Never mind that we had snow and freezing rain all day yesterday, and it still looks like winter outside. Today we’re supposed to hit -1ºC. That’s positively balmy!
Have there been any signs of spring where you live?
Farm-iversary
Ummm… hello? It’s March. How did that happen? I was going over the calendar planningwhat I was going to post on the blog in the coming weeks. All of a sudden I realized that March was imminent and it was the THIRD ANNIVERSARY OF WHEN WE BOUGHT THE FARM!!!
Sorry for shouting, but holy cow. We’ve been here for three years!
The farm has been pretty momentous for me. I love who I am here. I love the lifestyle that Matt and I have. I love the atmosphere I’m surrounded with every day. If I could spend all of my time here on the farm with Matt, Baxter and Ralph, I would be quite content… Not that I’m not happy already. It’s just the dang day job that pays for the farm keeps dragging me away from it.
But anyways… as Matt would say, “I digest.”
(Translation, “digress” … just in case you didn’t get it).
Anyways…
In celebration of the day I found myself, also known as the day the farm became ours, I like to look back at the past year and reflect a little bit.
My word for this year is “progress.”
Thanks to my Home Goals and a relatively strict monthly schedule, we made some significant progress on transforming the house into more of the home we want it to be.
We spent some time in the basement, which hadn’t received a lot of attention since year 1. We redid the doors, patched the foundation and finished off the last remaining untouched space: the laundry room.
I loved participating in the One Room Challenge for the first time. It pushed me to think about all the details in the room and bring it all together in a limited amount of time. The result–a beautiful, fully-decorated, completely made-over laundry room–still thrills me.
Also thrilling was the progress we made upstairs on the main floor. I took a baby step into making over my office by setting up a little command centre in a previously awkward nook. You’ve also seen recently that we’ve started on a master bedroom makeover.
The space that saw the most progress over the past year was definitely the living room. This room basically got a complete makeover with fresh paint on all the walls and trim, remade bookshelves, additional furniture, a growing family photo display, some really special art and, of course, our beautiful fieldstone fireplace. It is so amazing to have the fireplace working finally. It’s a total show piece for the room–heck, for the whole main floor.
Outside, we were not quite as progressive–as usual. We’re three years in, and I’m still learning that landscaping the farm is a mammoth task. The area that saw the most progress this year is the one where I can claim no responsibility–the fields, which produced our first crop of soybeans.
The landscaping will continue to be a theme for years to come, I expect. Probably an infinite theme.
Another theme for my annual reflections is animals. We’ve had our usual sightings and hearings of birds, deer, coyotes, turkeys–and as much as they’re usual, they’re still novel. Like last year, we also experienced a few more losses. The robins, Harold and just last week the owl. Death is a part of life, a fact that is made even more real here at the farm.
On a more positive note, Ralph and Baxter continue to thrive. The best word to describe Ralph is constant. She presides over her barn and keeps everybody in line. You know that saying, “dogs have owners and cats have staff”? Ralph has hired all of us onto her crew–including Baxter.
Baxter, the most easy-going guy ever, takes life as it comes. We had an extra focus on training this year through classes with a really great trainer, a hiking group and ThatMutt’s #ActiveMutts challenges. As much as I can’t imagine my life without the farm, I also can’t imagine life without Baxter.
This year we branched out beyond the farm too, participating the #ALSIceBucketChallenge and weighing in on #Farm365.
Time is flying. As much as I can’t believe it’s already March, and already our third anniversary, I also have the feeling that we’ve always been here. Thanks for coming with me on this wonderful journey.
Owl
Like so many of you this winter, we’ve had a few incredibly cold days over the last little while. The nights have been even worse. Last Friday, shortly after the post about the birds that have been visiting our feeder was published, I saw a new bird for the first time–a little owl.
Unfortunately, the sighting was a sad one. The cold had been too much for this little guy. He was dead.
He was a beautiful, fascinating creature–his multi-toned feathers, his pointy ears, his curved beak. I wish I’d been able to see him alive. I’ve heard owls around the farm, but I’ve never seen one.
I was surprised how small he was. His feathers were so fluffy that they deceived me into thinking he was much bigger than I realized. However, under his feathers, he was truly a very little guy. No wonder the cold was too much for him.
Home on 129 Acres 