Because ... It Feels Like Spring!

So much is happening on the farm right now because it's about 80 degrees (for today, anyway), and one must "make hay while the sun shines," right? While I was gone to West Virginia, Adam and Julia painted the dining room a lovely pale blue.

This house is nearly 100 years old, and the walls and floors are wonky. Plus, the walls were in bad shape with tough wall paper to be removed and lots of prep work. There's still trim painting and touch up to be done, but the basic paint job is complete, and I love it! It's so cool and calming and clean.

Outside, the big news is that we (once again!) have a new dog. Her name is Baby. She is a mix and we adopted her from some friends of Julia who could no longer keep her. We think she's a mix of Rottweiler and hound ... maybe. She's not quite a year old. She makes a good companion for Ned; they play all day long.

Baby will be outside only and sleep in the barn office with Ned.

Baby on the left; Ned on the right

The Japanese magnolia is blooming now.

And the camellia bush is heavy-laden.

I'm thrilled to say that at long last I spent my first blissful morning in the hoop house. Adam got my shelves up. These are taller than last year, so please note the blocks under the legs:

 He brought me a massive tub of his very own homemade soil!!!

 That's made of worm castings and compost. Lovely stuff.
He brought me buckets of water too.

 I put lots of heirloom tomato seeds in dirt first, plus some luffa gourds, and (just to experiment) some rosemary. I've never tried rosemary from seed before. I've heard it's hard to do. But I had grand success with my other herbs last year, so why not?

Some of those tomatoes are Brandywines, Beefsteaks, Matts Wild Cherries, Small Red Cherries, and Mortgage Lifters.

Into the garden beds, I sowed these items: spinach, two kinds of lettuces, radishes, cabbage, and onions and Swiss chard that aren't pictured here.

All the seeds above (plus more) were given me by my sister-in-law Anne. Wasn't that kind of her?
I put all these coldish-weather seeds into one long bed. The peas (which are already UP!!!!) are on the far end where those posts are.

Did you notice the spinach package above, in "seed tape"? Here's what it looks like.

It's easy to lay into the bed, although I don't find regular seeds very difficult to do either.

Here are a few of the peas that are already up in the sunlight.

I made one more grapevine wreath today (which was a nice chance to sit down and rest), and I'll take three of them to the market in the morning for sale. They look quite nice.
I moved the two cayenne pepper plants into the hoop house too. I figure they'll get better care there, since I'll be watering at least daily, and they'll be moved into a garden bed in March. I'm itching to get my lemongrass plants into the ground too, but must wait until the real chance of frost is past. That's all for now!

Hibernation Work

We're hibernating. We're staying indoors because the weather outside is frightful! It's 97 degrees with an extreme heat warning and a heat index of 115 degrees! Yikes on bikes (as Peter would say)!!!

But unlike the bears, we can't sleep the summer away. So this afternoon we started an indoor project: refinishing the dining room floor. Oh my! Do you remember the nasty green carpeting that was in this house?

Old and stinky. The linoleum floor underneath it in the dining room was equally ugly.

Thankfully, nobody was trying to force me to pick between those two equally evil floors. We were dreading this project because we've pulled up lino before, once in a bathroom in Mississippi and once in a kitchen in Alabama. Underneath was a thick sticky black adhesive, nearly impossible to remove. It was back-breaking work involving horrible chemicals and a massive floor sander. We lived with the ugly lino for nearly a year. But ... today was the day! And how happy Adam was to discover that this linoleum was quite easy to remove.

 

Instead of the black adhesive, evidently they used a kind of roofing paper between the pine boards and the linoleum. This paper sticks to the wood in a few places, and you can see where its black glue has adhered a bit. Adam pulled it up in big pieces, and in a matter of minutes we had lots of wood showing.

You can see the line indicating where the floor was painted,
and where it was not.

In one corner of the dining room there's a beveled wall. Behind it is a chimney and some sort of fireplace, we guess. All four rooms that meet at this juncture have this type of corner.

The linoleum didn't go up under the baseboards in the rest of the room, but it did go under the baseboard in this one corner, telling us that the fireplace was covered up after the lino was put in.
Adam was so tickled, that we drove to the hardware store, bought a paint scraper (for stubborn black spots), a sander, and sandpaper replacement pads.

He's been scraping away all afternoon.
This part hasn't been worked on yet. It's near the fireplace corner, and the black paper was much harder to remove there. We think perhaps the heat from the fireplace made it stick to the floor.

 Here's where he's been scraping. Doesn't it look good? I love wood floors, and I don't need them to look brand new, picture perfect. I mostly like them to look like wood and have a sturdy polyurethane coating for protection.

 Here's the line between the dining room (bottom) and the living room (top). They must've had French doors here with a threshold. We'll need to do something about that leftover threshold stripe.

In both rooms the floor was painted brown around the four edges, like a mat on a picture. I don't necessarily want to take off that paint. I feel it's part of the house's history, at a time when that was a fad. We'll have rugs down in both rooms, so I don't know how much that wood/paint delineation will show, but it's an interesting feature to retain. And you see the white paint splatters on the living room floor? I'm sure whoever did that thought, "Nobody's ever gonna see this wood floor again, so what does it matter? Who needs a drop cloth?" Phooey.

So much for today's hibernation! I don't know how people survive this who have to work outside. And the poor plants and animals! It's survivable in the shade, but only barely. Y'all stay cool out there!

Cleaning without Water

When Anna and I cleaned that first day, the water wasn't turned on. So I took a couple gallons of water along, plus all manner of cleaning supplies -- anything we might possibly need for a very dirty house. I started with the galley kitchen.

I'm tickled to say that the sellers, who'd come to empty the house, did clean the refrigerator!! I was so thankful -- it was truly, loathesomely disgusting. Now it is clean and fresh-smelling. But I put a box of baking powder in there anyway.

The stove was awful, and I gave it a first cleaning. I think it will require two.

The sink isn't too bad, and I'm thankful there's a large window right there for day-dreaming while doing dishes.
You can see how many cabinets and drawers there are. I'm thrilled. I hate being short on cabinet space. So although it's a small house, the kitchen storage should be quite good.

This may sound silly, but I was so happy to see that the range hood has a real, true exhaust through to the attic. I've had ones before that just blew back into the kitchen!

The sellers cleared out just about everything, but they left a cabinet full of wine glasses of various shapes. I don't need them, so I put them in a basket and took them to the thrift store.

I do not like the kitchen light. It's dim and copper-colored, and kind of '60s, I guess? Not my style at all. It will go away.

All the drawers and cabinets were lined with this ugly green stuff. I pulled it all out. Underneath was this alternate design:

I mostly pulled it all out, down to the wood. Then I wiped out all the drawers and cabinets with a sponge and straight vinegar. Vinegar is a fine cleaner, a good option when you have no water, and it kills germs. And considering this house smells strongly of a camp cabin being opened for the first time in June, the aroma of vinegar was quite welcome.

The fellow who lived and died at this house was a Frenchman, and I left a little note on this particular book of his, asking that it be left for me if possible. Well, they left it :) Brillat Savarin was a gastronome. MFK Fsher, excellent writer, food-lover and chef, and a favorite author of mine, was a fan of Savarin. I'm looking forward to reading this book. Correction: This book is NOT by Brillat-Savarin! I'm very sad. It's written by some 20th century gastronome who assumed the nickname Savarin because his friends in France thought he was almost as good as the original genius from the 18th century. I don't think so! Grrr. I might peruse the cookbook anyway.

The back, smallest bedroom has built-in shelves and drawers against the whole back wall. They left the desk/chair for us too.
I'll tour you through the living and dining rooms, and that will be it for this post. First, here's a simple blueprint of the house:

Here's the front door. Not wild about the oval glass, but I'm glad to have a door that lets in light.

These windows allow lots of light into the living room. The one on the left faces the front porch. I removed all curtains from the house today (also not my style) and donated them to the thrift store.

From the front door, looking through the living, dining, and into the kitchen at the back. We've stripped all carpets from these rooms.

Standing in the dining room, which is in the center of the house, you see the kitchen on the left rear, and the bath, in the rear center. Anna cleaned in there for us today! She's a superb cleaner.

The dining room has the nicest, largest windows. This is on the southwest side of the house. I'll put our dining room table in front of these windows for peaceful views while we eat. I want a ceiling fan in the dining room, so the chandelier will be going bye-bye too.

Next time I'll take you through the bedrooms and bath.