Baxter and I would both appreciate it if you’d click over there to read today’s post.
And for That Mutt readers who are dropping in, welcome. My husband and I live on a 129-acre farm in Ontario, Canada. I blog about our adventures in country-living and DIY renovating, which of course includes our favourite furry fellow, our dog Baxter.
Jan. 2 is always a special day for us. Three years ago today, we finally found our farm.
It took us a long time to find our perfect farm. The search started about a year and a half before our forever farm even came up for sale.
I still remember the very first property we saw. Want to see it?
Ummm… yeah… it didn’t look like that when we saw it.
At the start of our farm search, we were looking for an empty piece of property. Our plan was to build our own house from scratch.
So when we went and looked at this farm, it was a rocky cow pasture. There were no buildings, there was little grass. As we stumbled through the rough field, I realized that building from scratch was going to be a lot of work. We’d have to put in a driveway and a well and hydro and never mind actually building the house!
Well, two years after we passed on the cow paddies, someone else built their dream home. I can’t say that this is anywhere close to my dream home, but I do have to give them a bit of credit. They built the barn first.
(And for scale, that’s a full-size barn behind the trees to the right of the house. This place is massive.)
Because our search went on for so long, we saw a lot of properties. Since we looked at them, a lot of them have gone through renovations or even complete rebuilds. It’s kind of neat to retrace our steps sometimes and see what people have done to build their own forever homes. Fortunately, we’ve found our own forever farm, and it’s so nice to start another year here.
Have you gone through a long real estate search? Or what about a really short one? Do you ever go back to your former houses, or houses you looked at and see what’s been done to them? Are you in your forever house yet?
Hey there, everyone. Did you have a good Christmas?
We’ve had a nice relaxing break so far. In fact, the holidays are continuing for us for a little while longer. Matt and I have another week before we have to go back to work, which is a wonderful gift. So I’m still going to be taking it a bit easy as far as the blog goes.
For today, I thought it might be fun to look back at some of the most popular posts for the past year–the ones that got the most visits from all of you and then a few more that are some of my favourites.
Top posts of 2014
The One Room Challenge brought a lot of new visitors to the blog this fall. Four of the posts in the top 10 were about the laundry room makeover.
I hope you enjoyed this look back at the past year. What were your favourite posts? I’d love to know what you most like to read about. Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you like best or what you’d like to see more of as we head into another year.
This weekend marks the one year anniversary of #IceStorm2013. Parts of it were neat. Parts of it were really challenging. Moving out of my own house over Christmas was memorable, but something I’m hoping not to repeat.
A friend at work sent me this meme last week. I probably found it funnier than it truly is, but I can see Baxter trying this logic on us if he ever finds himself in this situation. It’s been years since we’ve had a Christmas tree, and he definitely won’t get the chance this season.
I discovered a new blog, Finding Home, last week. I love their story and their style.
I’ve been able to work from home for a few days over the past two weeks. I rarely work from home–I like the discipline that comes from being in the office–but I have really enjoyed my days at the farm, and I’ve been pretty productive.
A thoughtful post on the evolution of a blog and finding your niche.
I donated blood this week. I was a regular donor for years and years, but then I fell out of the routine. I restarted donating earlier this year, and it feels good to be back. Are you a donor?
We have lots of family activities happening this weekend–a real kick-off to Christmas. Can you believe Christmas is here already? I have one more day of work left and one more blog post for you next week before I take a little break.
Now it’s your turn. Were there any exciting happenings for you this week? What are your plans for the weekend? Has Christmas (or whatever holiday you celebrate) “started” for you?
Maybe it’s because I don’t drink wine. I’m not feeling it for marsala, Pantone’s colour of the year announced last week. (Admittedly, it could be some of the weird photography on their site. More on that below–all in good fun, of course).
This muddy, dull red seems old fashioned, but I don’t know what era I’d put it in. I don’t see myself putting too much of it in the farm.
Sarah Richardson used some muddled marsala-like tones as accent pillows in the living room of her farmhouse, and they look great. I’d love to do a bunch of jewel toned velvet pillows for the couch in our living room. But jewel toned means brighter and deeper to me. Marsala is just too dull.
I think marsala’s best hope is as an accent colour… or fashion or makeup. Or Sarah Richardson. She can make everything better.
What’s your opinion on marsala? Do you see yourself using it anywhere?
And just for fun, because I truly am puzzled, what story do you think Pantone’s trying to tell in the Tasteful Hue section on the marsala page?
My theory is a love triangle between a stubbled florist (his apron doesn’t say chef to me), an oblivious tipsy strawberry blond and an apparently headless person wearing a marsala-toned bow blouse.
Work on the fireplace continues. Our mason originally expected this to be a one-week project, maybe a day or two over. But it turns out our fireplace is large. After two weeks of 9+ hour days, the fireplace is not yet done. But we’ve come a long way.
Last week, the fireplace looked like this.
Now, it looks like this.
You heard a little bit about the hearth stone on Friday. Before I get into the other activities from the week, Baxter has a video to share with you about carrying in the slab.
A few other things happened before we were ready for the hearth. First, the chimney went up both inside and out. As you may recall, the old chimney was pretty much the whole reason for this redo. It’s surprisingly thrilling to have a big, solid, proper chimney. My Dad and I still have a bit of flashing to do, hence all of the wrapping.
The cinder block rough-in was completed, and then the firebox was constructed. That’s what our mason was working on in this photo that you saw on Friday where he’s sitting inside the fireplace.
The second most exciting part of the week was installing the mantel. When he was building the structure of the fireplace, our mason installed four pieces of rebar. The bars went back into the block about 2 feet and were securely cemented in place. They stuck out on the face of the fireplace by about 1 foot.
My Dad and I drilled carefully placed holes on barn beams that matched up with the pieces of rebar, and then Matt and I slid the beams onto the bars. Voilà, mantel. Or half a mantel. This photo shows the first beam in place. The second beam goes on in front of this one and hides the ends of the rods.
This weekend, I gave the mantel a few coats of clear varathane to protect it and bring out the quality of the wood a little bit more. I’m giddy over this mantel. The rough barn wood is just so beautiful.
If the mantel was the second most exciting, what was the first, you ask? Absolutely the most exciting development of this whole project was seeing the face stone going on. I picked the stone fairly quickly, but then I doubted myself for the past three weeks. Had I picked the right stone? Would it look good in our house? Would I like it once it was installed? Should I have made more effort to source other options?
Well, I love the stone. It’s exactly what I was envisioning. Rough field stone that looks like it could have come from our own farm.
Here’s another montage of how the fireplace has progressed from the start up to now.
We have at least a few days yet to go. By the end of the week, everything should be done (although I can’t promise the post-reno clean-up will be complete).
I was super happy when our stone supplier was able to source a single piece of stone for our hearth. No seams! Score. 🙂 However, now we’re at the point of installing the hearth. Moving a who-knows-how-heavy stone! Not so score. 😦
The stone is 10 feet long by 18 inches wide by 2 1/2 inches thick. Every time it has moved up to now has involved a forklift. However, we face two problems:
We do not possess or have access to a forklift.
A forklift will not fit into our house.
We are relying on people power. Pure brute strength.
I do not have good photos to illustrate the scale of this task because, you see, I really didn’t think ahead to consider the scale of this task.
So here’s the hearth at the far right peeking out from behind the skids of stone back when they were first delivered two and half weeks ago.
And here’s our mason sitting inside the fireplace, just to give you an idea of the size that we’re working with.
The plan was that Matt and I would get home from work a bit early last night and together with our contractor we’d move the hearth into place. Well, I made it home, but Matt got caught in a snowstorm and spent two hours on the road. Our mason and I tested moving the stone on our own. Not gonna happen.
New plan. The three of us would reconvene this morning at 6am before Matt left for work.
Matt and I did a test last night when he finally made it home. His verdict? “Woman, I don’t know if this is gonna happen, even with three of us.”
So we did what you always do in this situation: call Dad.
So the new, new plan is a stone moving party at our house this morning at 6am. There will be Matt’s Dad, the mason, Matt and me. Baxter will be here too, though he probably will not be very much help.
Wanna join us? It’ll be a special way to start your day. 😉
I realize most of you will be reading this after the stone moving party has ended. However, we’d still appreciate if you could send your good wishes. Heck, send levitation charms. Send muscle enhancing drugs. We’ll take all the help we can get!
Update: The stone is in place and is still in one piece. Yay! Full fireplace update to come on Monday.
A neat thing about having a blog is that people know a lot of what’s going on in my life. Sometimes it weirds me out when people start talking to me seemingly out of the blue about something that I mention on the blog. Most of the time though it’s a neat way to stay connected with people I don’t get to see all that often. When Matt’s aunt came to our house for our annual month-before-Christmas party, she brought a perfect gift for us: some fun additions for the laundry room–these wooden sock forms. Matt’s aunt is an avid vintage and antique shopper. Fortunately for us, she’s also a regular blog reader. So when she saw these wooden sock forms, she thought of our laundry room makeover and decided to give them to us for Christmas. They fit in perfectly with the rest of the eclectic art in the laundry room and echo the wood accents we have elsewhere. Something else I like is that these feet aren’t a pair. One is a bit bigger than the other, so there’s basically one for Matt and one for me.
What are some favourite vintage pieces you’ve used in your decorating? Do you decorate your laundry room? Who else has relatives who shop for them?
It’s time for the first official update on the fireplace project. You got little tidbits last week, but today you get details and photos.
For a reminder, here’s what the fireplace looked like originally.
And here was the plan.
To make this plan happen, we had to start over.
There was no liner or flue in the chimney, so if I wanted a true–and safe–wood burning open hearth, we had to build a proper chimney. That meant starting on the roof and taking everything down.
Wiley was very helpful during demo. I pulled him up to the edge of the roof and raised the front-end loader so that I could throw the bricks into the bucket and then drive them around to our rock pile.
Of course, even tractors get tired. All was going well until Wiley decided that one load was too heavy. No tractors or drivers were harmed, but it was definitely an anxious moment.
Once we made it inside, it was more of the same: jackhammer, rubble and dust… lots and lots of dust. I’ve concluded that masonry dust is the worst kind of dust. Worse even than drywall dust. My hair has never been as stiff as it was on Monday night (no picture of that, sorry).
It turns out there’s a reason for everything. The fireplace is where it is and is the size it is because it’s a chase for pretty much everything you could think of. There were two chimneys to vent the old furnaces that we used to have. There was the fireplace insert and its wonky chimney. And then on the far left, there was a heating duct and cold air return for the pool room.
The bump-out that I hated so much was actually there for a reason. It wasn’t just decorative. It was concealing the heat run to the pool room. Since we’re not using the pool room yet and don’t need to heat it, we just capped off the duct. When it comes time to redo the pool room, we’ll run heat some other way.
After demo came rebuilding, which started a bit slowly. The wall behind the fireplace had to be insulated and then drywalled for fire protection, the duct had to be capped, the hearth had to be expanded, the base had to be laid. But by the end of the week some really good progress had been made. This fireplace is huge, so it takes a lot of time to put it all together.
Here’s how the fireplace progressed day by day.
We made some really good progress on the mantel yesterday, and we should be able to mount it by the middle of the week likely. I’m not sure that we’ll have everything finished this week, but we’re still on track to have fires by Christmas.
