New Life Old Farmers

All I can say is… ta da!  We LOVE our beautiful floors.  Each room has such warmth and personality now.  This shot of the living room does not do the floors justice, but I just had to catch the light on the them through the old windows before we add our furniture.

The library floors are old fir and are full of character and to us, very charming.  I’m sure you’re impressed by how many books we have in the library.  Well, now that we can finally unpack, they will be added soon.  As soon as we can find them….

My favorite spots in the old floors are where the original cut nails show through.  They are rectangular bits of history.  I’m delighted in the floors.  I love that our vision is unfolding.

To say that I’m happy that we get to unpack, stop camping and make this house our home… there are no words….!

Part of our dream was to have a place where there would be room to have horses.  Laura and I were looking forward to having horses, and grateful that Pat grew up with horses, bred horses and was anxious to have them once again roaming around his home.  Something else we were looking forward to sharing with family and friends.

We were delighted that Glory farm had potentially plenty of rooms for, as Pat says, “a couple of nags”. (No referral to his wife here.)  We agreed that we’d wait until we were settled in and established before taking on any horses.  Clearly this is where the break down in communication came in.  To me, this meant 5 or 6 months, everyone comfortable in new jobs, kids back to school for the fall, all the sheds torn down, the new bathroom in, the majority of the remodeling underway.  To Pat this meant, a sturdy fence and a big pasture with plenty of grass.

I should have realized that a man who has been checking the available horse ads for over a year was more than just a little ready to have his horses again!  I got a little suckered in by being invited to come and met Dolly.  Sheesh, that is like holding a puppy and then trying to put it back.  She seemed to have a great demeanor and to be a ‘people’ horse, friendly and interested in the people around her.  The clincher for me was seeing that she obviously needed a new home, a bath and a lot more pounds on her.  She would do better at Glory Farm and so the current count is one horse, two dogs and of course the Damn cat.

Yesterday I broke Jubal, our tractor.  I’d like to say it was a due to lack of instruction. (For those of you who actually care what happened, the trailer was hitched to the front.  I was  driving it and turning it and I managed to turn the trailer into the radiator, which then sprung a leak).  As a good friend pointed out, yesterday was Mother’s day, so I am absolved of all tractor breaking.

We seem to be doing a lot of two steps forward, one step back.  Perhaps we should call that the Glory Farm shuffle.  It is a marathon job, not a sprint.   With the ongoing floor refinishing and not being able to unpack, it has felt like we are in “moving purgatory”.  I didn’t truly understand how much having order and a reasonably clean home meant to me.  It seems that every job we do inside or out leaves us filthy.    The ironic thing is that I’ve always wanted to live in the country and on a farm, but I don’t actually like getting my hands dirty.*

The floors have reached the point that we can no longer walk on them.  This is great news!  It means that the job is getting finished AND we have had to go back to the hotel, where it is clean, cool and they fix a great breakfast!

*(May 15, 2012) I just bought my first pair of Lee jeans.  On my way out from the store was a big poster with Mike Rowe from “Dirty Jobs” endorsing Lee jeans… of course!

Patience is a virtue?  Who says these things?  I must have slipped up and accidentally prayed for patience one day.  I pray for a lot of things, but I try to never “pray” for patience, because you don’t get patience, you get to practice patience.  So for an update on the floors, this is how they currently look.  The dinning room is receiving a new wood oak floor, but apparently was not measured correctly and now the installer has run out of wood.

Yesterday, I was bound and determined to make it through our bedroom where all the furniture is stored, traverse the tiny space and get to my closet.  We had a celebration to get to and I was looking forward to showing up and looking nice in something other than my farmer clothes.  (By climbing around this couch and standing on one leg, I did get into the closet).

Spokane is just under a three-hour drive.  We arrived to my first-born son’s graduation from the Fire Academy Recruit Class.  Watched as his fiance pinned his badge on him and beamed as he earned the title of Fire Fighter for the City of Spokane.

Perhaps patience comes out of gratitude.  I am so grateful to be here.  So aware that it is these moments that really matter and that I feel blessed.  Celebrating at our favorite spot in Spokane, The Steam Plant Grill and taking in the memory.  After the three-hour drive back to Ellensburg, to the torn up house and dust piles that have dust piles, I found for the first time a sense, that we were home…. and it felt good.

The mess goes on… one step forward, two back… The floors are being tackled and the expected mess is, well, messy.  The dinning room floor which gave us such problems pulling nails, linoleum and carpet from is found to be too thin to sand to perfection.  It must be covered with new wood.  Can you say, ugh!

We will love the final results.  We love Ellensburg.  The country is gorgeous, the people are nice and there is a wonderful balance here.  We did want to move to the country, but we did not want to move to where people thought the National Inquirer was breaking news!  One of the wonderful compliments to this town is that it is the home of Central Washington University.  Originally begun 1891 as a school to train teachers.

To take a break from the work and the mess, we took off and went to the Chimposium at CWU.  Home to Washoe, a chimpanzee, one of the first non-humans to acquire sign language.  The Chimposium was amazing and we learned so much.  We were all gratified to see that the animals needs came first here.  We were entering their home and were instructed in how to be respectful.  The Chimposium fees go completely to supporting the chimp family.  We were very impressed that they willingly accept volunteers to help, that students can take classes and participate as well at all times putting the needs of the animals first.

I know I will be encouraging our visitors that come to Glory farm to go and experience the lecture and Chimposium.  The experience was more than I expected and I doubt I can do it justice here, but I am so grateful we went.

For more information http://www.cwu.edu/~cwuchci/index.html

The proper term is ‘irrigation boots’.  I picked these because they were blue with a jaunty red stripe.  I didn’t think we’d need these until we had horses, to muck out horse….stuff.  I was wrong.  Remember what they are called… irr-i-gaaaaa-tion boots.

We had an irrigation leak and were springing up new “ponds” all about the farm.  As the official plumber’s assistant (not the plumber’s “helper”), I offered to go into the ‘box’.  I am a bit more limber than the plumber, so I got to find out right away, that my boots do NOT leak as I was standing in 6 inches of water.  Same picture – different view.

Things I learned today – bailing, plumbing clamps, a new bad word, and that I do not like plumbing.  I also think that if you live on a farm and want a sense of control, order and accomplishment, then you should write down all the stuff you got done at the end of the day (which is always a lot), then write “to-do” on it with today’s date.  This way you will have gotten all of the items on the list done.  So far doing the list first is really not working.  Oh, yes, and now one more leak is fixed!

We are still in ‘camping mode’ here.  Our kitchen is a shell.  We have a box of plastic forks and all of our plastic spoons have come from Dairy Queen, thanks to the teen’s ability to drive through for a Blizzard on her way home.  Our cooking options are limited, a skeleton crew of pots and pans, no can opener, no ice cream scoop and no microwave.  We did find, however, that you can reheat left over pizza by putting the toaster on its side!  An electric stove to boot as we do not have gas here (yet).

We wanted to thank our new neighbors for their warm and welcome kindness to us.  Luckily, Pat can cook.  So we handed him the most important ingredients.  Butter, sugar and heavy whipping cream.

(Don’t you think Fred Meyer or Kroger should pay me for this great advertising?)

Butter and sugar in equal parts and stirred away until it turned the color brown, then the cream and stirred more and more…..

Jars filled with the instructions – “great on ice cream and it doesn’t keep, so just eat it”.  The  jars were delivered with the sauce still warm.  We then zipped through Dairy Queen to grab some vanilla ice cream, stock up on spoons and rush home to enjoy this heavenly sauce.

When the first layer of linoleum was laid over the fir floors many years ago, in some places for whatever reason, they needed pieces of paper.  We’ve random bits of old cardboard covering the soon to be refinished hardwood floors.  The lid of this old Camel cigarette box is above all my favorite stray bit.

In the days when they were laying this linoleum, the glue was not very good.  Whoever laid this old linoleum was a master at sealing the seams with nails.  Long before the days of the nailing gun, this floor was secured with tiny little nails on each side of the seams no farther than 1/2 inch apart.  Let me tell you, these seams are everywhere!

In addition to that, there are the nails holding down the tack strips and the staples holding down the foam for the carpet that came later.  We’ve been pulling nails out of these floors for the last 3 weeks.  Being a bit nerdy, I saved the nails.  Being even nerdier, today we divided them and counted them to see how many there were, because we knew it was A LOT!!!  This picture doesn’t even begin to do this task justice.  After the count we’ve pulled out 2500 nails!  One at a time!

All these nails were pulled out by a small, but impressive  crew of nail pulling maniacs!  We found having the right tools is what truly makes the difference.

We’ve bought our first gallon of Red Barn paint.  Our True Value hardware store sells it pre-mixed and ready to go.  This store offers a type of customer service we haven’t gotten use to yet, so we got not only the stir sticks, but the paint can openers free.  I might be easily impressed, but I thought this was pretty cool. I managed to butcher up 5 cans of paint before we left La Crescenta trying to open them with screwdrivers.  Not good for the cans or the screwdrivers to say nothing of my language while I was doing it.

With one old shed down, it was time to salvage around and put one new one up.  True, it is a small building, but a big dog house.  As soon as the dogs get smart enough to go into it, we think they’ll be happy to have it and get out of the wind!  We started with an old wooden box we found in a shed (that is still standing).  The box was 2 ft by 4ft by 1ft  Pat added new posts in the corners and covered it where needed with some salvaged plywood.  We bought new siding to cover it completely, and our budding carpenter (Stephanee) hammered it all in place.  We topped it with tin from a lean too that had met the wrecking ball (son) earlier in the day.  Added red barn paint and it is done!

I know this is just the first of many cans of red barn paint, so I think it will be fun to keep track of how many gallons we use over the years.