Happy Mother's Day

It's chilly out today, Jeff is fighting a head cold and its just a really lazy, quiet day. It's nice to have peaceful days like this, even on a holiday. I have several updates for this post that have occurred over the last several months. One of the larger tasks that has taken up quite a bit of time is we have been working on adding supports under the floors in the crawl space. Its a very dirty job in a tiny, cramped space and I am SO thankful that Jeff has taken this on. He and a few helpers have tirelessly crawled around under the house placing supports and leveling the floors. Our foundation is solid, but we needed a little extra bracing to shore up the floors. Unfortunately, when older homes sit un-level for long periods, you may never get the floors back to a perfectly level state. If any of the wood bows over time, its nearly impossible to correct that. We have un-level spots in the kitchen at our farm house because of long term un-levelness. But I feel that these minor imperfections just add to the aged beauty of the home. The goal of adding supports at this stage is to prevent further sag in the floors and partially, but maybe fully in some spots, level the floors. Because of this work, we have had to postpone the electrician, the HVAC work, the carpenter and the plumber. We are just a few days (hopefully) from finishing this project and then we can finally move on to more exciting things! I'm so looking forward to the next phase of this project where we can hire contractors to do the work :) It goes soooo much faster. But, we did find a few treasures under the house that are worth sharing. You know I'm a sucker for treasures...

The 3 bottles on the right are from the late 1800s - early 1900s. The Coke bottle is from 1915. The Mil-Kay soda bottle is from ~1949.

---

Back in March, we spent some time clearing the yard a little more. There was a pretty good sized cedar tree in the middle of the yard that was covered in vines. We cleared the vines off last year and waited to see if the tree would recover, but it didn't look so good. We decided to cut it down and worked on removing a HUGE pine tree that had fallen over and was also covered in vines. It took several attempts, lots of equipment and patience to move a good portion of that tree. But, the yard is getting cleared and looks much better. You can now see down to the little shed that is on the property. Not sure if its salvageable, but its cute!

Cedar tree with vines, without vines during removal and cedar tree gone.

Shed, large fallen down tree partially removed and a driveway!

---

The girls and I worked to take this hot mess of a wood pile and remove all the nails and get it neatly stacked and out of the way. This is all the tongue and groove heart pine that we have removed from floor to ceiling in the downstairs. Believe it or not, it took a couple of days and we still have a pretty good sized pile upstairs to do the same. But we will be so glad we did when we need the wood for flooring or other things.

---

And last, but not least, here is a look at the space that Jeff and some help have been working in. It is pitch black, filthy dirty and you can see how shallow the space is in some places. No. thank. you.

I'm excited for what's to come in the next few weeks. We have been back and forth about the location of an upstairs bathroom for quite some time. It never fails to amaze me how many opinions you can get about some things. I feel like I'm always told no, right off the bat. I was told right away that we could not open up the space in the upstairs dormer to create a Jack and Jill bathroom. We then explored putting the bathroom at the back of the house, bumping into the knee wall space. Then no to that. Back to the drawing board. We almost scratched the whole idea of an upstairs bathroom buuuuut I decided to push it one more time. I'm telling you, you have to go after what you want on these things. I have my threshold for compromise and this almost crossed that line. I reeeeeally understand the value of kids having their own separate bathroom. So, we got the green light on the Jack and Jill bath after meeting with the County and as a bonus....I discovered that we can take an additional wall out downstairs, adding much needed floor space to the living room and making it look so much better. But, this new discovery means that we are flip-flopping the entire downstairs floor plan and we have to take out the new walls that we just added! Jeff took it way better than I expected. I thought he would flip, but once I sweet talked and explained minimal expense and increased value to change it, I got him on board. God love that man. In the midst of all this, I'm going to open houses looking for my next project!

Stay tuned for lots of good things in the near future! Electric work has begun and we are just waiting on the power company to run the line underground to the house. Carpenter is on standby to start framing the bathroom, closets and switching the downstairs floor plan as soon as we finish up in the crawl space. Plumbing rough-in is coming soon and windows hopefully will be delivered this week!

Happy Mother's Day to all the wonderful ladies in my life and those that are following our progress. I know how thankful I am that I have such a kind and loving mom :)