Christmas on the farm

The holidays have arrived! Where did November go? 

This weekend we took our second annual trip up the road to Lenderink Tree Farm. I highly recommend going there. Its such a great place. Family friendly, free hot chocolate (with marshmallows!) and they even had Santa there saying hello to the kids. I mean look at this place. Its sprawling and adorable. I love it.

We found our tree pretty quickly - and I cut it down! Hey! 

We bought a couple wreaths, grabbed a charlie brown tree (aka leftover tree that had free greens taken off of it), loaded everything in the truck & headed home. 

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. 

We did a lot outdoors this year, really making the well house a priority as well as the porch. I love the two trees I was able to snag to sit on either side of the porch steps. 

I also made the well house festive! We took the patio furniture from the side porch and put it inside. I strung up some of those cool bulb lights and added a tree. Voila! 

                                                        (the sink has since been removed)

Happy holidays from our house to yours!!

Wellhouse love.

I adore - ADORE - our well house. I think this outbuilding is why we bought the house. 

Look at it! Ahhh. It's so cute. It's the cutest piece of construction on our property and it should be honored. So that's what we are doing. 

Up until recently it's been housing various construction parts. Wood, shingles, junk. I really have been wanting to clean out the entire space and start working with it. So we had to start with moving all the inside stuff elsewhere. 

See all those cobwebs? It's been awhile. 

We pulled up the truck and the gator and got to work hauling everything out.

We even attempted to go up into the top level of the well house, which neither of us has ever done. & when I say attempt I mean we went up a few steps on the ladder and barely looked into the space before being 100% sure bats or spiders were about to attack & jumping down. 

 I'm not really freaked out by bats but I'm not about to go up into uncharted territory where there's probably a million mice and cobwebs AND possibly bats. That's what my brave friends are for (sidenote: brave friends, I need one of you to go up there).

After a couple trips of hauling, the well house was looking good.

So exciting! As I said, I really do love this building & I'm so happy its actually a sound structure with so much potential. I cannot wait to start throwing around some ideas for what we can do in here. 

Of course just when I say "Come on, there's no bats in here. All good!" This:

Rough photo but that brown blob clinging to the brick is, of course, a bat. We took out the sink, thus removing his hiding spot. I came back a little later to remove him and he had already found a new spot. Do we know if he's in there still? No. Have we found him? No. 

& even though hubby said he was "kind of cute", he's definitely not going into the well house while furry friend is hiding somewhere. Guaranteed. 

New closet part two: NEW CLOSET!

First & foremost, the guys found a really cool (kind of gross) skull on the property. Look at how intact it is! We came to figure out that it is most likely a raccoon skull. It's on display on our porch. Even though it took me about 2 minutes to actually set it on my hand, I love finding things like this!

OK onto the new room. The day has arrived and we are beyond happy with the new space. We have so much more room & so much more organization. I just love it. We can't wait to get everything back to its new home. It's been so long since we've had a completed project here at the house we forgot how fun it is to really see the before and after.


             The new!

My vanity still needs to go against the wall but for now we've started to put our things away. & getting rid of even more. This project was a great way for us to really go through all our clothing and get rid of what we DIDNT need. Goodwill has a lot of bags coming. 

Onto the next one.

New closet for me! Ahem, US. Part 1: The clean out.

So upstairs in the house we have two rooms. One is our master bedroom. The other is probably supposed to be the spare. Since we have the spare bedroom downstairs, we (me) decided that the extra room would be a wonderful closet. An entire room that's a CLOSET?! Yes please.

Well, once all my stuff was in there (two dressers, two shoe racks, a garment rack, an armoire and a vanity) my husband wasn't really left with much room. He was nice enough to put his things in the spare room closet downstairs for what I promised would be a short amount of time. Its been a year.

Recently we have been seriously discussing finally tackling our bathroom remodel. Without going into excessive detail, the tub in our bathroom is connected to the wall that, on the other side, houses all of my husbands clothes. In order to really get into the remodel, that room would be taken over, leaving him no place for any of his things but also no place to move them.

Enter spare bedroom.

I had had enough of the mess & chaos. I had stuff everywhere and nothing was really where or how I wanted it. We met with a local closet company and came up with plans to have built-ins done. The best thing about it? They could maximize space we have and really make it functional. & it was not really functional with what I had going on. Once we OK'd all the details and set the date, it was time to clean out my closet. Literally.

"Oh, this will be easy," I thought. "The rooms so small".


No.

Once you start moving things? Good. Lord. I could open a clothing store.


Here's the left side of the room before. Believe it or not, I had already gotten rid of a box of shoes and moved one dresser and a garment rack out. Im not including a pic of the right wall because its empty:

SO slowly (SLOWWWWWLYYYY) I moved every drawer, shoe box, dresser, vanity, etc. out of the room. Our bedroom became the storage area and resembled a hoarders room. You can't see the floor, but you can see the little paths leading to where you need to get to (the bed). 

I think three pictures are enough for you to get the gist of how much STUFF there is.

Hallway.

The bedroom. 

No joke every corner is taken over. 

Fortunately, this will only last two days.

Empty room! Ta-da! 

Perspective:

I'm really surprised how large the room is when it's not filled to the brim. I can't wait to have a new system in here. Everyone who knows me knows I really love having everything in order so this is like my OCD dream coming true.  

The Well House: Part two

Remember when I took up all the river rock from the front of the house & I was like "I am never going to do this again ever ever everrrrrrr"? Well, I'm doing it again.

The lesson I have learned is that you can't look it at and say "Oh I can get this done in a few hours". I know now that this is a more-than-one-day project. A little bit at a time. 

So first the little fence came down. 

Then the huge rock removal. 

& after some weeding (not sure why I even bothered), I started removing rocks.

This is how far I got.

I feel like that's pretty good. Oh, also I discovered there are three layers of rocks. *dies*

Roxy supervised. 

I'll remove more tomorrow. Day by day. 

In the meantime here's a photo of some pretty flowers growing behind the well house.

Part two: Since I have a green thumb....

OK so a week ago I came home from work & stared at this for a good 20 minutes.

We were going out of town for a wedding to go to the following day. So I could either plant them that night or do it when we got back late Sunday. It was kind of raining. & I was tired. but lets be honest I knew I wouldnt come home Sunday & do it. I also didnt want them sitting out too long. So I got started.

I took a couple hours but I managed to plant everything as the soon was going down. I cannot wait for everything to grow in and expand. It's going to be fun to add & move things.

Onto the real fun part: mulching.


OK so here's what went down. I went to the store where I got the mulch I used for the front. I find out they dont have that mulch anymore. Super. Great. They have similar cedar mulch but it is very light. I bought four bags but once I got home I realized there was no way I could mulch with two different colors. My OCD would not have it. So I went back to the store on Saturday to return the ugly mulch & they had my mulch! Hurray! I bought 6 bags. I thought it was overkill but ended up using 4.5 just for this second planting. Mulch doesn't really go a long way. & it's a big space anyway.

OH I also realized that the lense on my camera was horrifically dirty, so now the pictures will be 120% better because its been cleaned. No more weird bright glow looking pictures.

Halfway done. Seriously this is 2.5 bags in. but it looks so good & I love it! 

Yeah!! Full circle!! 

One more project to check off the list. 

Now onto the wellhouse.....