Here’s what the ceiling did look like:

The kitchen ceiling had been papered over and all that had to scraped off and the hundreds of nails pulled out, then the burned wood had to be sanded away. THEN the caulking and painting could start!

And here’s what it looks like now:

The tongue and groove kitchen ceiling, caulked, primed (twice) and painted (twice) and oh so pretty!!

Big difference, eh? And here’s what I looked like after sanding off the soot from the fire damage of years gone by:

That’s me covered in soot after sanding the kitchen ceiling and Bob covered in dust after sanding the sheetrock. Lovely couple!!

Not only is the ceiling done, but the window is in, woohoo!!! In a matter of weeks (I hope I hope I hope!!!) there will be a kitchen sink in front of that lovely window. Thank you, Bob, for making the window a priority!!

Oh, the lovely kitchen window is in, oh, I love it!

So as part of our learning as we learn to start a farm, I tried it. Bob wasn’t convinced, and now neither am I. It was too much bedding and it got too stinky, and boy, was it a chore to clean out this morning! I was almost as stinky as the bedding when I was done, I worked up such a sweat! And that was only three months of bedding. No way could we have lasted until March! I think moving forward we’ll see if we can clean it once a week. Because I don’t want to spend another morning on a chore like this again.

Now, all that said, this is a pile of future fertilizer we’re looking at, with all the bedding on this side of the fence and the horse poop on the other side. So it’s not as if it will go to waste, no way. I just would rather do this in smaller increments, I think.

This is the pile of old bedding from the chicken coop when I was only three fourths of the way through cleaning it out.

Our motley crew eating to stay warm in this freezing weather. Because the house has been so much work, we never had time to make the barn horse-worthy before winter hit! We are feeding loads of hay. And since they won’t walk across the frozen, uneven ground to get to the water, we have to bring buckets out to them. Next winter will be better!

This is the faucet for our clawfoot tub which should be plumbed soon. We are getting closer to having a bathroom in the farmhouse!

Bob is working on the farmhouse this morning while I am in town working on making money. I’d rather be doing what he’s doing, but he is sweet enough to keep me up to date on his progress. Here’s a photo that’s a very big deal! We don’t have the bathtub plumbed yet, but he installed the faucet today!

Plus I should say we had a productive weekend. We got the water heater installed (now just await the electrician to hook it up). We got some sheetrock hung on the ceiling upstairs. (Very tall ceilings are wonderful…until you have to hang sheetrock on them!) We got a coat of paint on the kitchen ceiling (only one more to go and that ceiling is DONE). We hung the planks we had left on the kitchen wall (now to figure out how to make “old” planks to match what we have). Oh, and I backed my truck into my husband’s car, breaking the tail light and putting a nice dent into his trunk. That was so decidedly not fun. Or productive. At all.

On top of all that, we kept the animals watered despite 20 degree temperatures, and thawed out frozen pipes on the trailer we’re staying in. We kept busy for sure!

But it’s that farm foto of a faucet that’s making my heart pitter patter right now.

We are getting closer and closer to our real goal, being able to start a farm!!

We knew there was some rot in the bathroom floor. What we didn’t know was there was so much rot that the entire floor and subfloor had to be replaced, as well as the wall!

You know how you get so behind on something, you dread starting on it again? Like laundry, or bill paying, or scrapbooking, or exercising…it’s harder to get going again than it is to just keep up with whatever it is in the first place.

What we started with…the rot meant we got to move that wall in, however, and that made the mudroom bigger, so that was good!

That’s what has happened here with our blog, tracking our progress as we rebuild the farmhouse so we can finally get to what we really want to do: start a farm. I didn’t write about anything for a while because progress stopped with Bob’s new work schedule and my increased workload. Plus I sometimes feel like, you poor people, you keep wanting progress, progress, progress and we are letting you down with how slow this is going!

Surprise: Siding!! That used to be the back of the house way back before the house had a bathroom!

But it has now been a year (and nine days) since we were handed the skeleton key to the front door of the 1890 farmhouse, and it seems a good time for an update. Hold onto your hats, however, because it’s going to be quite an update, since it has been so long since I updated about anything! Actually, as I type that, I realize it won’t be one update…it will be a series of, and I will try really hard to get a few posts done to bring everyone up to speed.

First, we’ll tackle the bathroom update…

Just some of the rotted boards pulled from the bathroom. Turns out the addition was done wrong and the south side was rotted out.

The bathroom some of you have seen, if you see me on Facebook. I posted photos there as we installed the beadboard and laid the tile floor. All of that was so we could finally pick up our antique clawfoot tub from the tub dealer, who had been patiently waiting on us for many months to do so. (Thank you, Steve, for not charging us storage fees!!) There was no way I wanted us moving that four-hundred pound tub twice, so I wanted to make sure when we picked it up, we were ready to put it exactly where it would go. Forever. We had helping hands lined up Thanksgiving weekend with our helper Andrew home for the break and my son Evan down to make some cash. So they loaded in the truck for town, got the tub, got it up the steps that now lead to our front door, and into the bathroom it went! Aaaahhhh….

We did manage to salvage the toilet, here installed for GOOD, I hope!!!

The bathroom had so many issues, it was ridiculous how long it took us to even get to the point where we could do the tile! And of course, not having done tile before, I learned a lot of things by doing it wrong. Does that mean I want to tackle a renovation like this again in the future to put my newfound knowledge to work? Not on your life!! But we really wanted the old style tile on the floor. Vinyl just won’t cut it in a house as old as ours!

All that work so we could get the tub in finally! Yay!

The beadboard installation was, well, H-E-double toothpicks and the first time we bickered while working on the house. But I have to remind myself: This bathroom was so rotted out, it has to be gutted to the point where it didn’t even have a floor! You could see clear down to the ground under the house! So we have come a long ways, and crooked walls and slanted floors are just one small part of the battles we’ve fought.

We have lights in the bathroom which is wonderful but getting the heater in finally will be even more so! Brrrr….

This past weekend we installed the toilet for good! We have put the toilet in five times now. Don’t ask. We also got the water heater and put it in place. We are now at the mercy of the electrician to come back and get it hooked up and give us some more light. How many times are you allowed to call, text and email a subcontractor before it’s considered harassment??

Then there’s plumbing…or lack of. We had decided to use an old dresser we already had as the vanity, to save money, you know. I took it to a friend’s and he cut out the hole for the sink with his jigsaw. Months ago. In preparation for progress that didn’t happen. The dresser than sat in the “garage” and…warped. Turned out it was all veneer and it all peeled up. Thank goodness that happened in the garage and not in the bathroom once installed, warping from the moisture of the baths!

Water heater!! Just need electrician to come out and hook it up so Bob can plumb it.

So I found another old dresser and finally picked it up this weekend. Now it waits for a hole for the sink and then there will be the plumbing.

But the bathroom is key! Absolutely key, right now, and here is why: We have rented a friend’s trailer and it is parked at the farmhouse and our goal is to be living in it, not the house in town that’s a half hour away. Living in the trailer means saving hundreds of dollars on gas because right now we drive to the farmhouse and back twice a day in order to tend to the animals. It also means being able to get in an hour here and an hour there, where right now, we have to have at least half a day to make a trip out there worthwhile.

So still no hot water, still no sink or bathtub that works, but the toilet is in for good. I hope. And it’s painted and the new window is in and the lights and fan work and it’s going to be a beautiful bathroom!! Someday!!

Chase the escape artist.

I love this horse but he gets into everything. I say he’s as friendly as a dog, curious as a cat and stubborn as a mule. Apparently he has taken up a new hobby too: escaping.

This morning, trouble here was loose for the second time in five days. On Friday morning, Bob and Jake found him in the orchard and found where he got through the fence…which they repaired. This morning Bob saw him down the street in the neighbor’s yard, but never figured out how he got out.

I think Chase is trying to tell us that we are at the point where it’s absolutely imperative that we get moved to that farmhouse, no matter the condition it’s in. He can’t speak, but he can escape, and that speaks in a volume louder than words ever could!

If someone were to ask me today how to start a farm and what’s the first thing to do, I’d say fix the fences.

Hanging out with the people who do the real work keeps me grounded. Could more city people use such a connection?

(Warning: This post might offend you. Can’t help you with that. Just sayin’.)

I just returned from meeting my husband for Taco Tuesday at the nearby bar where the loggers hang out. It’s in the neighboring town and worth the drive to be around the salt of the earth people there drinking and chatting.

It was great, and I’m not being facetious here. I love hanging out at that bar and in all sorts of places in this rural community. I love being around people who are blue collar workers: the loggers, the farmers, the ranchers, the people who work with their hands and their backs, not with their brains while sitting on their butts.

The more time I spend around people like that, the more I see how people in cities can be completely disconnected from things that matter. Take food. Environmentalists can’t have what they want to have without making it more likely that food production will become more industrialized, more chemical-intensive, and more likely to be done outside the boundaries of our own country. To save what, an owl? A fish? We screw our whole food system for that? They mean well. But they are ignorant. And their ignorance screws not only the rural communities, but all of us.

I like being around people who do the work that matters. They are grounded and being around them keeps me grounded. Don’t misunderstand. I moved here from the city and I love the city and the people who live there. But the longer I live here, the more convinced I am that city people suffer from a dangerous disconnect that affects our morality, our values and, yes, our food.

They don’t mill lumber or slaughter cows or cut hay or plow fields. They don’t drive trucks or fix engines. They don’t live by the seasons nor is their livelihood affected by the weather…and governmental decisions made from afar. They are—in a word—disconnected. Period. So the things that make sense to city people make no sense at all.

I am beginning to think that a lot of what’s wrong with our society started when we changed from a rural to an urban society and I don’t just mean our food system; I mean a whole value system. If you’re sitting in a cubicle and your sole connection to the world around you comes via the Internet, what can you really know? How can you really make informed decisions?

City people visit our farm in the making and they are distressed to see chickens and turkeys in real life. They don’t want that “connection.” They don’t want to see these animals that are known to them as featherless pieces of meat on a dinner plate starting out as real characters pecking at each other in the orchard. Instead of rejoicing in seeing food literally in the making, they bemoan seeing what these animals look like in real life.

We are on a slippery slope in this country at this time. When R rated commercials are perfectly acceptable on family TV, when our daughters are showing far too much skin, when a major government official is caught in an affair and people ask, “Why should that matter to anyone but his wife?” … when this is the state of our country, I think one of the things we desperately need is a better connection to things that matter, things like food, and heat, and running water, things like hard work. We need to spend less time connected to the world wide web and more time connected to things like, well, manure.

That was a much bigger tangent than I intended so I’ll try to get back to my point. My point is I like being around the blue collar people. I like being around people who work with their hands and their backs, whose work is grounded and real, and who seem to have a lot more common sense as a result. I think we might be better off if other city people were willing to go to Taco Tuesday with the loggers on occasion…and listen to what they had to say.

It’s not all doom and gloom. We were able to grow a dozen pretty pumpkins in our start of a garden, some of which you see on the steps here…

When we first took a hammer and pry bar to the farmhouse on December 31^st of last year, we never, ever thought that 10 months later we would still be struggling to get the house livable. We never stopped to think we’d be paying two mortgages all this time, or that we’d log on those miles on our cars and put all those dollars into the gas tank driving back and forth everyday to take care of the animals and eek out the hour here and there of actual renovation.

Why is this taking so darn long? Looking back now over these past 10 months, I can tell you what we did wrong. Our biggest mistake, if you will.

We tried to do too much.

If the house had been our only focus, we’d be living there by now. If we’d ignored the barn, left the fencing, lived with the trash and foregone the garden, we’d have the walls done and the hot water running and a kitchen and a bath…and maybe we’d have the starlings kicked out of the upstairs rooms by now.

But we didn’t. We didn’t realize the total neglect the house had suffered for decades that lead to us having to practically rebuild it. When we started, we thought we’d be living in the house last March. Three months of two mortgages? No problem! Coming up on a year of? Major problem!!

When we realized it wouldn’t be March, we thought June. When we realized it wouldn’t be June, we thought September…then by Thanksgiving. Last night I was praying we’d be there before next Easter! (Insert very, very sad face here.)

Everything just takes so long…and we are still finding rot. My poor husband, each time he pulls back another layer, he confronts another problem he must figure out and fix. As for me, I am faced with the amount of work it takes to save the little bits of the house we are trying to save, painstakingly scraping off little bits of paper, painstakingly pulling out hundreds of nails, painstakingly sanding and caulking and priming…then finally, painting.

Even the sheetrocking takes so long because—in addition to mudding and taping being an artform—you can’t finish a room because you have to wait for something else to get done first. (And I really, really suck on sheetrocking which doesn’t help! I usually end up crying when I have to hang sheetrock. I’m not kidding.)

You know that term “domino effect”? Sometimes I think we are living in Domino Effect Hell.

So all these hours spent on cleanup, livestock, barn work, fence repair and trying to put in a garden and greenhouse and compost bin…maybe we should have skipped all of that. Well, all but the barn work and fence repair. Those had to be done for hay storage and horse safety. And the chicken coop had to be built. No way were we risking another coyote attack on our egg supply!

But still, I have this sense that we weren’t focused enough on the house, that our dreams of starting a farm and all the different pieces of that kept us from seeing the realities of how long the farmhouse renovation would take.

Now it is November. We are looking into renting an RV or trailer to live in so we can live on site and lower our bills by getting down to one mortgage.

Now we will focus. The weather will make it so. Now I get it: Starting a farm means first having a farmhouse. Period.