You have to look closely to see the lovely flowers that are popping up in our sagebrush landscape. The red one is called Indian Paintbrush locally (latin: Castilleja), the blue one is Lupine, and the yellow is some sort of snap dragon I think.
We have become used to taking our building trash to the local dump and I felt we might as well continue doing that for our regular household trash too. After researching dump prices vs. weekly trash pickup I think I'll opt for the dump. We couldn't possibly fill the mega gigantic plastic trash bins from the pickup service once a week and they don't have smaller ones or the option of biweekly pickup. We recycle everything we can already and there really isn't very much left over ... with the exception of garbage (organic stuff). I noticed that after collecting a while it smells pretty bad ... what to do? So I started researching composting with the help of worms. So now we are worm keepers ... first their apartment house arrived (called "Can of Worms") ... then the 2000 little wormies came from a man in Pennsylvania in a very mauled box, but luckily the occupants were not hurt. Now the worms are settling in and hopefully our stinky problem will be taken care of plus I'll get nice compost tea for my plants as well as worm castings which are super good for the soil I hear. I should mention that the reason we can't simply compost outside like normal people is that it would attract bears ... need I say more?
We are dealing with the outside now. Moving dirt around and shaping the land for maximum water drainage away from the house. This is pretty complex it turns out. We needed to make some terraces which required stone retaining walls. We found nice stone a couple of hours away and had it delivered to the end of the driveway. The trick was how to get it from down there up to the house. So Chris rented a heavy duty front end loader in town and had to drive it the 10 miles to the house ... it took him two and a half hours to get it home, whistling and watching the birds fly by as he crawled down the highway at maximum speed.
Here is Aden laying the stone for us. He's a very strong fellow.
After a couple of days he was done and piled the leftovers neatly for us to deal with. There is more stone wall building to do on the other side of the house and Chris and I are going to try our hand at doing that ourselves ... stay tuned.
We have been taking bites out of the piles of boxes in storage, taking a few home every few days. Now I am hauling "studio" boxes upstairs so at least they are in place for eventual unpacking. My loom was the first thing I wanted up, so I spent a day getting it in order ... it was an amazingly good feeling to see it in its new home. Joy comes in many flavors ... for Chris and me, one of those flavors is our tools being at hand.
Our old butcher block has been restored by Chris and installed in the kitchen. This was a mega effort requiring four strong men to lift and position.
A new furniture item that we purchased specifically for this house and for this space is this beautiful old (1700s) Hudson Valley kas. Our friend Howard Szmolko back in Lahaska helped us find it ... he has a very similar one in his home which we had been trying to buy from him for years to no avail.
The next two pictures show progress on the entry porch ... the last of our four porches.
This is an important member if the household being installed over the pantry door. He hung in our old barn for years but now he can oversee our daily goings on for the rest of his days.
And lastly ... a final occupancy permit requires a permanent house number along the street. Evan had made us this one as a Christmas gift you might recall. Chris and I carefully leveled and plumbed it late one afternoon with the intention that Chris would put cement in the hole the next day. Of course our resident free range cattle, being very curious, decided alter our prep work to their own liking. This is Chris' effort to cattle proof his cement work long enough for the cement to set up. He reasoned that cows don't like snakes and so he is protecting his work with a snake proxy.
No comments:
Post a Comment