painting projects

After finishing the kitchen, and loving it, I decided to keep moving on this whole 'paint the house' project. Saturday I went to Menards and found the paint guy who knows me quite well now and told him I was moving onto the stairwell. Ivar helped me before he went down for his nap.

The next night I got a little carried away. I finished my second coat on the bottom of the stairs, and decided it might look nice to paint the wall going up the stairs red as well. I worked fast, excited about this idea. And not until the wall was painted did I step back.

And I didn't like it immediately. It felt gloomy. And I don't do gloomy.

So Monday night I cracked open an old can of primer and covered my mistake. I might have been more annoyed, except Rory was watching Planes, Trains and Automobiles, and this made for awesome listening as I repainted two walls.

And then on Tuesday night I put down my first coat of Antique White, or Masking Tape...the same color I painted our sunny room.

Wednesday night I worked on a message I was giving at our thursday morning bible study. But Thursday night I hit it again, while listening Carrie Underwood in the Sound of Music. And that was way less fun than Planes, Trains and Automobiles...

And now it's done! Last night I taped up the upstairs hallway so it's ready to be painted next. Since I have all the paint stuff out anyway...

Currently I'm at the auto shop with the truck, hoping we can get the wiper fluid to stop leaking and start squirting. I love it here. It's quiet, they have coffee and I'm catching up on so much. I'm off today for my second Soul Sisterhood Mother Daughter Retreat and feel so ready to hole up for a weekend of crafting and cooking with moms and daughters. Happy Weekend everybody!

real life decorating

We drove home from Thanksgiving and got all fired up to spend the next day decorating the house. We talked excitedly to Ivar about putting lights on the chicken coop, setting up all of the nativity sets and hanging the advent calendars on the wall. 

We went to bed and woke up the next morning and I was in a terrible mood. Just crabby. Rory was ready to hit it, but I was annoyed that the kitchen had been hit by a bomb. I wanted to take half a day to clean the house before we added more stuff to it. And then I said, "what I'd like to do is rearrange the furniture in the living room, but if we do that, I really should just paint the walls when we have the china hutch moved out in the middle of the room. And if we do that, then we really shouldn't hang anything on the walls yet, until the walls are painted and we know where everything is going."

At this point Rory told me he'd be outside hanging the christmas lights on the chicken coop.

He walked outside and I heard what I had just said. I decided to take a timeout. A timeout for me includes a cup of coffee and putting my contacts in. I took a few moments, let the caffeine hit my system and realized I wasn't up for moving furniture either.

The miraculous part of the day is that it actually turned around. Rory came back in the house and I told him I had uninvited Crabby Becca to our Friday. I introduced him to Caffeinated Becca and it worked. She was much nicer and we actually had a second start to our day.

That, and I completely lowered my expectations realizing we couldn't do everything I wanted to in my head. I had Ivar play happily with all the decorations from one bin while I cleaned my kitchen and got a handle on my house. I was completely able to join back in the merriment.

It's funny the way life actually plays out sometimes. The vision you have in your head versus the reality of the moment. You don't ever see bad moods on Pinterest. I was thinking about Friday's events while we unwrapped our tree tonight. We had planned on getting it with Mark and Kathy again on Monday, but the forecast is supposed to be terribly cold, and we each have little kids. The awesome idea of cutting our own tree and the reality of freezing temperatures and blowing snow just didn't match up this time. So Rory went out tonight....by himself...and bought a tree at Menards while I gave the kids a bath. It's not a super inspired story, but it's real life. And the tree is beautiful. 

Anyway, I think I'm writing all of this to say that I believe I am actually making progress in letting things go. Pinterest can set the bar pretty high. And some of those things are possible, but not all of those things are possible. And sometimes the heightened expectations can turn a girl into a monster. But what I'm learning is that the girl still has control over the monster and can reset her ideals in order to make a much happier home. 

milk and cookies party

Last December we invited all of the people on our street to our house for a Milk and Cookies party. It was the easiest little gathering in the world to plan. The house is already looking festive and all you have to do as the host is provide the beverages (and clean your bathrooms).

It's a great way to see neighbors in the wintertime and an easy way to build community with the people you wave to nearly every day. This year Ivar helped me make invitations by watercolor painting the back side. Last year I just made ten phone calls and verbally invited everyone.

I wanted to throw this idea out there, because I have a feeling there are many of you readers who would totally be up to hosting something like this. And it's still early enough in the month to pull it off. Don't over think it. Just go build community! Eat cookies! And enjoy your neighbors!

hay bales and humble pie

Our field was baled this week and there was enough hay for two and a half jumbo bales. I cannot tell you how happy I was to have round bales in our field. There used to be a field on our drive to Nebraska that took my breath away every fall. It was full of hay bales, and every time I drove by on the interstate I would think, "I should risk my life sometime and pull over to get a picture."

Thankfully I never did that. But I still love a field full of bales. Even a field full of two bales...

This field has been a bit of a test in patience and has left us with great feelings of lack of control. You might remember we had to wait and wait and wait to get it planted in the first place. Due to a super late spring, super busy farmers and it's small size (four acres isn't enough to gain much interest) we had a terrible time finding someone we could hire to plant it for us.

Then when did find someone, we couldn't find the right seeds. So instead of alfalfa with oats as a cover crop we planted alfalfa and barley (on the seed dealer's advice). It wasn't cheap either (for the labor or the seeds). But we'd only have to do this once and the alfalfa would grow for 3-5 years, making a small sum with each cutting. A few days after it was planted we had major flooding in the area, and half of the seed ran to the corner of the field.

When it was time to harvest the barley, we were told it was too green. We were told to wait a few weeks. But weeks turned into months and we couldn't get the guy to come back and finish the job. If the cover crop wasn't removed it would smother the alfalfa next Spring.

It's funny to be in a place of utter dependence. It's not a common place to be. But this field left us with our hands tied. We don't have a tractor. We are smack in the middle of learning everything from scratch.

Luckily for us, we recently met a neighbor down the road who took pity on us. The same one who gave us his cattle's manure for our garden. In a last ditch effort, Rory stopped by, explained our predicament and asked for help. When he heard our sad song, he started working on our behalf. He sent his guy to come and cut the barley. Then he sent his son to come and rake the barley. And the third night his son came back to bale it. We're covering his costs and he's getting the hay bales... but we are so, so grateful for his help. So grateful!

Tonight our farmer friend came to get the two bales, he told us some terrible-but-somehow-fitting news that the barley should have been cut way sooner. In fact, barley shouldn't have been planted at all. Barley overwhelms other crops. He doesn't think the alfalfa has much of a chance to come back next Spring. He recommends tilling it all under, and starting over next year. It's too bad because we have spent so much money on this field. So much money. And we're going to start next Spring in the same place we started this year.

Except that we have learned a lot. And we have found a farmer friend who has been generous and kind.

Sometimes things don't go as planned. This field would be one of those things. But how adorable are these pictures? Worth a thousand bucks? 

We'll keep telling ourselves that.   

a lovely long weekend

We had an awesome thanksgiving weekend celebrating on Thursday with both my parents and Rory's whole family at Kyle and Lisa's (this is Kyle's awesome picture above). It was so great to have only one place to go and meant we got to partake in the "lay low" part of Thanksgiving. Lisa is an amazing host, and even had Ivar sitting at the kids end of the table with Elsie in between her two grandma's. Lisa Groves, I am thankful for you!

The rest of the weekend sort of took us by surprise. We hadn't planned anything for our long weekend which meant all sorts of things happened: I cleaned the garage a bit and then decided to paint more of the house. This time I went for the hall around the staircase and painted it red. In a last minute decision I decided to go up the wall with the red, and now I regret that. (Which means I will soon be going over the red with primer and then many coats of...antique white. So that's too bad.) We decorated the outdoors a bit and the indoors too. We drove to a quilt shop and an antique shop on Saturday and found some treasures. And tonight Rory was on a quest to make the perfect al dente spaghetti noodle. It took three tries, but he found perfection on pot number three. All in all, a great weekend.