A Few Move-In Photos

A quite important piece of furniture is in place. It's been years since it had a front-and-center location in the home.

The cluttered table is not bolted down yet (top to legs), but it's been eaten on!

The red couches make life comfy in the evenings. Don't notice the crumbly drywall dust and mess that still muck up many surfaces in the rooms.

The kitchen's looking homey and is getting lots of use at last.

The house had an old stove and old refrigerator, but they both work fine enough for us. I don't believe in throwing big appliances into the dump if they still work.

Adam installed a new ceiling fan in our room Wednesday, and that makes for lovely sleeping!

This light fixture came from Julia's ceiling. She'll get a ceiling fan too, and this lovely piece will go into the kitchen. I LOVE this style -- simple like a pill-box hat.

When the contractor moved the A/C return vent into a kitchen cabinet, he left me a narrowish space perfect for my cookie sheets and pizza pans. Lovely!

It's now Friday morning. Adam came back in from raking and piling grass cuttings from the pasture, and putting it around his beehives to keep down weeds there. It's 8:30 AM. He's a morning bird, always has been. He's eager to get this property up and viable -- he views it as unemployment insurance :) Those of you who've done farming in the past may giggle at that. But a man must have a dream and a hope and a plan, and it's nice to watch. He loves his pastoral work very much, but someday we will need to retire, have a place to live, and have something we can to do make a little income in our later years.
I set about cleaning the back porch this morning, dragging the nasty rugs outside, sweeping it well, wiping off surfaces, and putting in a second bookshelf for more storage. You can never have enough storage.

 Those wonderful built-in bookshelves in the office have freed up many of my other bookshelves for other purposes.

Every surface needed scrubbing, but it looks great now.

Adam installed new closers on the back and front storm doors.

 And a new handle on the back door, since the old one was broken.

 Adam's other chore today was to install a clothes line for me. I don't think I've had a clothes line since we lived in Iowa, many years ago. Our goal is to cut costs and live simply and from our land (when possible). A clothes line will slash electricity costs. It drives me crazy to dry sheets and work clothes in a dryer -- what a waste when there's good sunshine and breezes outdoors!

(Now it's Saturday afternoon and I WILL click "publish" on this post before I find any other photos to post!)
So many people seem to be pursuing this rural, simple life ... and blogging about it. I've loved finding those kindred-spirited bloggers out there. Our children, nearly grown, seem to gravitate to the urban life, but we 50-somethings are drawn to the countryside like lemmings to the sea. Here's hoping that the fall into the waves is a pleasant one!!

We Are In

In fact, this will be our third night to sleep in the farm house. But we don't have internet there yet, so there has been no blogging happening. In fact, the first evening I was sitting on my bed with the two girls, who were chatting me up in a most friendly manner. I wondered what had gotten into them. They were also both reading children's books! (Anna was enjoying Bird Life in Wington and Julia was digging back into a childhood favorite with an assortment of fairy tale stories.) Strange behavior indeed, until I realized they had no internet. Sigh. Talking and reading. Is that what we all used to do?

So here we sit in Burger King at 9:00 PM, using free wifi so Adam can check online to see if our new wireless router or modem or whatever has arrived at WalMart so he can pick it up. There's some deep irony in there somewhere.

Adam moved his last 3 beehives on Monday morning early, at last. He got help from a friend who is our county extension agent and a fellow beekeeper. But when Adam was driving down the 2-lane highway, the strap holding down that VERY tall Warre hive broke, and the hive splattered all over the highway. He had to clean it up, and the bees, understandably, were quite angry by this point, and he was stung about 100 times, he estimates. It was awful. He felt rather bad all day, but did not have a reaction. He continue to tote furniture and work. But I must say this has been a rather grueling week.

I have photos of the half-put-together house interior but (of course) my computer cannot access my phone pictures right now. Adam just returned from WalMart without our wifi machine. It's in the store. It's arrived. He can see online the name of the person who signed for it. It arrived there 8 hours ago. But ... it's still "unavailable" -- i.e. nobody is willing to go into the back and dig it out for us (even though we've paid for it already), so we will go back home unsatisfied with unattached to the invisible computer world.

Our contractor is basically out of the house, so we are feeling a little homey. Must dash away, but that's all I can give you for now.

Kinda Moving In

I'm a kitchen woman, myself. I want the kitchen looking cozy and homey before any other room.
Today I put things on the counter -- stand mixer, food processor, canisters, coffee fixin's, etc. I put a couple of cutie things on the windowsill over the sink.

That was about the happiest moment of my day, setting that vase and that pitcher there. For weeks, we have gone from doing one urgent thing to the next, with almost no time for fun. I want to nest, you know? Deconstructing a house is ugly work. The rooms echo. There's nowhere to sit, nothing to eat. And we've deconstructed without reconstructing -- our boxes and stuff are in the out-building; our furniture is in the garage.
But this morning ... the piano arrived! It will stay in an odd corner of the dining room, covered with a rug, until the time when its wall is ready for it. But it's in the house!

We finally ran out of room in the garage. And honestly, since the contractor is done in several of the rooms (except they were a frightful mess and the floor was deep in drywall dust) -- I didn't see why we couldn't move some furniture into the house, instead of moving it twice. He's had the entire house as his work room for two and a half weeks, but it's not necessary. He was very obliging, and I helped clean up the living room a little. There's still plenty of that insidious white dust to clean up ... another day.

So Adam and I hauled two couches, two tables, and two chairs into the living room. I covered them.
The dogs came along this afternoon. They've been nervy and clingy. They leap in the van and won't get out. They hate being left alone. I tried to get a photo of them in the house, but this is the best I could do - haha! You get a view of the horrible floor though.

Tomorrow is church and then a 5th Sunday Sing at our church with other neighborhood churches from Oriental in the evening, so we'll be busy all day.
Adam is frustrated with moving his other three bee hives. Hasn't happened yet. The hives are very heavy, and he'll need help to lift them. He tried again this morning and tonight. Tonight one of the hives slipped a little and the bees went crazy -- attacking the tail lights of the truck like it was the Great Honey Monster. He's been stung more this weekend that he had in a while. So he's a bit discouraged by the failure to move these last bees. I tell him ... it'll happen. Eventually.