We just purchased our first home in a small, quaint and charming little town in northern Wisconsin. Let the fun begin! While raising our six blessings, we are going to attempt to revitalize our cozy Dutch Colonial Revival home. Follow along and see what we learn, discover, and overcome in the process. It is sure to be a houseful of laughs!

Thursday, May 19, 2016

In Love with Oiled Bronze

I decided this spring that while we may not have the funds to tackle the larger ticket projects, I could start working on the smaller ones - the ones that don't require an excessive budget but do need either elbow grease or time. I have always been attracted to oiled bronze finishes, but never really noticed or acknowledged it until I started to tackle some of these projects. Isn't it funny how a key component of our style has always been there but just out of sight? For example, here are some pictures of items that I had already implemented in my home with an oiled bronze finish.


Like this sign that hangs on the front of our house. My husband is a Navy veteran and so I proudly display this as a reminder of his service to our country.


And years ago I had purchased this little bell. It reminded me of the farmhouse bell that was hung at my grandparent's farm. 


A few years ago when I purchased a small patio set, I purchased one with an oiled bronze finish and brown woven seats.


I didn't even think about my pot rack until I was taking photographs of the finished projects with oiled bronze components! My lovely pot rack that we installed a couple of years ago to hold my stainless steel pots and pans and my ever-growing collection of cast iron cookware.

Earlier this spring I decided that I needed to do something with all of the exterior doors. They are all unfinished, steel doors. In an ugly gray finish. Two years ago we decided on the colors for the house - of which one of the accent colors was a charcoal. I was wandering in Wal-Mart's spray paint aisle looking at paint options for the doors when I saw the metallic collection - with an oiled bronze color. I decided to give it a try. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a "before" picture, but here is another door from the house in the same gray steel finish. 


Not the best looking door. And all the wear and tear and fingerprints on it appear to be dirty brown and yucky color. This made the oiled bronze a good color choice since it can hide a lot of the wear and tear that our household puts on doors. The first door I painted was the front door. And I love...love...love how it turned out! 


One door down and four more to go. I actually bought the cans of spray paint needed to paint the rest of the exterior doors, but they got used on a surprise Mother's Day present - a front porch swing! I have wanted a porch swing ever since we bought this house...in 2011. Yes, projects take us a very long time to complete. We are not the Turtle Construction Company like the Duggars; we are the Slow-as-Snails Renovation Company! My goal is to have all the projects done before the house is paid in full or all the kids move out!


I was more than happy to use all my cans of paint for the doors fixing up this swing. I really enjoy sitting out there on a nice, warm day enjoying cuddling with my quilt while reading a good book. There is nothing that compares to it.

In addition to painting the exterior doors, I decided to paint the interior doors as well. We plan on replacing the cheaper, hollow core doors with solid wood ones at some point. However, I have to live with these doors for right now. It took me some time - and cleaning - to realize that these doors were purchased pre-primed and then never painted by the home owner that installed them. I would try to clean them and the finish would turn a disgusting shade of gray. As usual, I forgot to take a before picture, but there are a lot of these doors in the house - all identical in style and type.


This picture does not do justice to how incredibly disgusting this door really is. Just trust me. It is nasty. Well, Wal-Mart was selling on clearance Almond Enamel paint. This was a nice, high gloss and easily washable paint that I thought would work perfectly for the doors. Cleaning them has been really easy. I tackled the dirtiest and nastiest door on the first floor - the bathroom door. This door gets a lot of handling, especially when we are working in the garden. Lots of dirty fingerprints cover just about every available surface of this room. I chose the almond color because I felt that it was a nice, warm color compared to the dirty gray. Plus, with the kids, a bright stark white just would not work. And I did not want dark colored doors as I want  our rooms to be as large, bright and airy as possible. 


I also chose the almond color because I thought it showcased the oiled bronze handsets beautifully. A true complement of finishes. Doesn't that look so nice?


This past week we had two unplanned projects land in our lap - a broken toilet and a leaking kitchen faucet. The plastic handle on the toilet snapped. I temporarily fixed it by tying a string to the chain that controls the flapper thing. We have really hard water so the guts of the toilet were in pretty bad shape after about 7 years of use. A week of flushing the toilet with the string seemed to have skewed the flapper position as well. My husband decided that we would upgrade and replace the inserts. Since we had to buy a new handle anyway, I chose one with a - you guessed it - oiled bronze finish. 


Doesn't that look nice? It is such an upgrade from the original cheap plastic handle. Plus, this is the toilet that has had the seat replaced - not just once; not twice; but three times! I don't think the problem is us. I think it is the quality of the plastic thingamajiggy that secures the seat to the toilet. We keep breaking those silly plastic things!

We discovered that the kitchen sink was leaking really bad. Some of the plastic gaskets had broken and the caulk was missing from around three-fourths of the sink. We had replaced the faucet about three years ago for the same reason. Instead of choosing a good, quality faucet, we went with the cheapest option we could find. It was more of an emergency and necessity. However, this time, I was blessed that my husband agreed we should invest in one of better quality. We were double blessed that Menards was having a nice sale on kitchen faucets! We were able to pick up our new faucet at quite a steep discount!


The faucet itself is higher up than the one that we replaced. This will make filling the watering cans, canning pots, and other pots and pans much, much easier. I also took the time to remove what was left of the old, moldy and disintegrating caulk with some nice, new caulk. No more leaks and a nice finish to the faucet. 

Now that we have recognized that I really like the oiled bronze finish, we are going to slowly integrate it into the house as we update, repair, and replace different things. So what types of finishes do you like or have you found that you use in your house on a regular basis?





Sunday, May 8, 2016

Back to Eden Garden 2016


We spent our Mother's Day finishing the garden. This has been a project that has lasted for several months, since I first started the seeds in our little indoor greenhouse.


  

We also had our work cut out for us with the garden itself. Last year we let the land rest and while we did not plant anything ourselves, it was amazing how much grass, dandelion, and other weeds took root. We did, however, start installing a chain link fence around the property line on the three main sides. Here are some pictures featuring the original fence we installed when we first bought the house. We were not sure where the property lines were at the time and our entire goal was to keep out the rabbits. We knew that we would be letting the land rest in a few years and that we could replace the temporary fence with something more permanent.








Installing the fence ran into a few challenges, namely our haphazard compost pile and scrap wood pile. At one time someone added a lean-to onto the shed. We decided that we wanted to make a dog kennel for our beautiful chocolate lab, Hershey. The compost pile grew year over year as we threw the corn stalks and other garden debris into the corner of the garden. We also ran into an electric power pole. After we had the land surveyed, we discovered that the power pole was placed dead center between our property and the neighbors. They had purchased the home with a few sections of wooden fencing installed about a foot off the property line. After speaking with them, they permitted us to install our fence just outside of our property line and onto theirs, as well as to tie into their fence. Eventually we will be fencing in our entire yard. In the meantime, we needed to get the garden fenced for the next growing season. 


We opted to use a chain link fence for the garden because we needed to ensure that we had plenty of light for our growing plants. The guidelines for fences in our community state that a perimeter fence in the rear yard cannot exceed six feet. This became a bit challenging when we installed the fence around the old sugar maple stump. Talk about uneven ground and roots galore! As you can see, we were able to get the main piping in the ground and the supporting poles installed.





The final step for the main part of the fence was installing the chain link fabric. It was my job to pull with a funny tool my husband bought, while he secured it to the main poles and the upper supporting pole. While not as perfectly straight as I would have preferred, we had to work within the guidelines and the really uneven ground around the tree stump. We only managed to get the three main sides installed before we had to stop for the winter.



As soon as our Wisconsin weather started to warm up, we began to tackle the garden and the fencing again.  We started out by tackling the wood scrap pile. Many of these sticks are leftovers from the 30 cedar trees we removed four years ago. While I worked on removing the grass and weeds from the garden, my husband spent two days burning the smaller sticks, twigs, and kindling. I hauled the grass and weeds to the local compost area while he sorted out the garbage, burnable logs, and mulch. We had to stop burning a few times in order to let the fire pit cool. We moved all the ash into the garden, where I worked it into the soil. Once the wood was taken care of, we needed to deal with the compost pile.

Each year after harvesting the garden produce, we pulled the remaining plants and corn stalks and threw them into a heaping pile that grew, literally, every year. We always had the intention of cleaning it out and someday putting in a real compost bin - we just never got around to it. We were really dreading bagging all of that rotten mess up and hauling it to the city's compost pile. So, you can only imagine our surprise and delight to discover that only the topmost layer was still plant material. Over the past four years, everything else underneath had broken down into the most beautiful and rich composted soil. There was enough there to spread over half of the garden, smothering the remaining bits of grass and weeds that I had not been able to remove.


Once it was all cleaned out, we installed another section of fencing from the main section to the shed. As you can see, we also removed the rotten lean-to. Later this year we plan on installing another section of fencing with a gate at the front of the shed, further enclosing the area and creating a nice, shady dog kennel.


 

We replaced the temporary fencing between the shed and the garage with a shorter, permanent fence. We reused the gate that we had originally installed; we just reinstalled the posts in a more permanent manner. Our land is not even close to being level and so we decided to install the fence so that it was straight at the top and will gradually fill in the bottom with soil and more wood chips as the plants grow.
 

We had one final section to close off, between the main fence on the property line and the garage. We didn't want anything too tall, since we like to visit a bit with our neighbors while they are working on their garden. Plus, we will be tying into the main fence with the wooden privacy fence and will want to remove this section. We just needed it to close off the garden to any little critters that might find our tender plants appealing.


Once the fence was completed, it was just a matter of getting some new wood chips. We had not laid down a layer of wood chips since our initial loads were delivered in 2011 and 2012. It was time to get a really thick layer down, which we did with four small truckloads from a local landscaping company. Finally, it was time to get planting! By cleaning out the compost area, we expanded the usable space in our garden by about 20' x 60'. I decided to rearrange some plants, and add a whole bunch of new ones! In the single row of tires below we planted salad greens, such as spinach, salad burnett, crisp mint lettuce, buttercrunch lettuce, etc.
 

The stack of tires in this picture are two tires tall and house our seed potatoes. We planted three of the tires with red potatoes and two of them with Yukon Gold. Between the two sets of tires we planted zucchini, peppers, cauliflower, broccoli, beets, radishes, cabbages, and other similar types of plants. 


Between the potato tires and the fence running almost the full 60' of the garden we planted four rows of corn. We companion plant our corn, so the corn rows to the left of the huge tree stump were planted with kidney beans and butternut squash. We have done this in the past and it worked well. Along the fence lines themselves we planted bean and parsnips together on a 30' section, peas and carrots along five fence sections, and climbing pickling cucumbers on two fence panels.



A couple of years ago, we were surprised with a small patch of rhubarb growing behind our shed. We never planted rhubarb and we stored the empty tires and tomato cages there over the winter. We thought we most likely killed the rhubarb since we didn't see any of it last year, with all the junk on it. To our amazement, it came back strong and healthy again this year. Rather than continue to fight it, we fenced it in with some short plastic fencing and planted around it. Behind the rhubarb in the other fenced in area we planted 20 strawberry plants/roots. This is my third attempt at planting strawberries! Hopefully, the nutrient rich soil and the full sun that this area receives will help them to grow and flourish. That whole back area from the rhubarb to the fence used to be the heaping compost pile.


When we first started our garden I planted a row of asparagus seeds along the side of the shed. It was really hard to not cut and pick any of it while we waited for it to grow and take root. This was going to be our first year of harvesting the asparagus and lo and behold, we only had three stalks! Something must have happened since prior years shows a full row of little baby stalks. We were so disappointed but decided to invest in some asparagus root and plant again, rather than using seeds. We are back to the waiting game, but the wait should be much shorter this time around. 


While it was a lot more work this year to get the garden ready and planted, we did it and are looking forward to another great year of gardening. We love the Back to Eden approach since we will not have to continue watering the garden once the seeds begin sprouting and our weeding should also be minimal. And finally, here is a picture of one of our happily transplanted tomato plants.


Be sure to stay tuned and we will share more photos of our garden as it grows over the season.