Loft Room , fall chores, family room floor

Every fall, there are a few outside chores that take a great deal of time. Those are splitting wood to heat the house for winter and harvesting apples. We put away over 3 cords of wood this fall. We had such mild weather this fall that we worked outside well into November which helped in getting an extra stack of wood put away. Eventually we plan to be working on wood a year ahead of need which means we need to put away 2 years worth sometime. If this winter continues to be mild, maybe we will have some leftover at the end of the season. Harvesting and storing apples consumed most of Mindy's time for the month of October. Jars of applesause, fruit leather, dried apple rings, apple butter, and apple preserves were the methods of storage. Cider making will be incorporated one of these years!


applesauce



circle stack of firewood


trees stacked up from house building that Noah is cleaning up for firewood


Noah has hung more drywall (does it seem never ending to you too?). The stairwell is done, the master bedroom is done, the loft room is done. He still needs to finish the kids' bedrooms, the office room, and the storage rooms off the master bed & bath. Mindy has started the ginormous task of mudding, taping, and painting. The loft room was just completed. Eventually this room will be an awesome play room for the kids with murals painted all over the walls. But before it can be a play room it will have to function as storage for a little while (or long while, dependent on how long it takes us to get back to finishing the trim and ladder to make it a safe play space).


loft prepped for paint



loft painted


stairwell (imagine Noah carrying the sheets of drywall up the ladder and then remembering the screws...yep, it happened)...(and then picture the mudding & taping Mindy gets to do on the same ladder...yep, it will happen)


Linna came to visit us over Columbus Day holiday and asked us to put her to work. Gratefully we rose to the challenge and cleared out the family room so that we could lay maple flooring. We still had to re-pile the stacks of wood that took up residency there last year since that wood will be used for trim & kitchen cabinets which Noah can't tackle until summer break. But since we just laid flooring & the wood has dried sufficiently, we were able to restack the wood in a more compact fashion to allow us some use of the family room in the meantime.



family room (the giant round of wood leaning against the wall is from a tree in our Indiana yard that we moved with us...Noah is making it into a coffee table)

Oh, and I nearly forgot the leach field. This should have been done two years ago, but we were undecided on what we wanted to cover the leach field with. We debated over blueberries, a vegetable garden, or grass. In the end, we chose grass. The kids can now have a nice place to kick a ball or throw a frisbee. In August, we had a load of soil delivered by Jerry Wood (our awesome excavator/plow driver). Mindy then shoveled it all one wheel barrow load at a time to spread it out to a 4 inch depth over the length of the leach field. After a few weeks of shoveling, sewing seed, and watering, we now have grass. Pretty satisfying to watch it grow. Unfortunately that also means we will have to start mowing again this spring. Oh well. Such is life.

leach field