Long days turning into nights

I never realized it, but Halloween's Samhain origins are all about the change of seasons, namely autumn turning into winter. The change is very real up here in the Pacific Northwest, autumn leaves have peaked already and we've had a cold snap this week with nights down into the 20s. 

Autumn color and some new paint!

With the longer nights coming, the last month was a last-minute rush to finish projects before working outside became an unattractive prospect, and we got most things on our project list done. The rest will wait until spring.

Hen Mail. This will hold garden tools and chicken treats in the back pasture.

They certainly aren't camera shy.

With the cold temperatures Ella and Esme are coming in at night, since they are only eight weeks old and it's well below freezing for about 10 hours a night -- quite unusual for our part of Oregon. I'm probably being overprotective, but if being a helicopter chicken mama is a crime, convict me. There's nothing more emotionally expensive than regret, especially if your livestock dies because you assumed everything would be OK...and it wasn't. 

But while I've managed to save the chicks from having issues due to the cold weather, the paint on our brand new shutters has not been so lucky. (although the newly-painted house itself looks amazing!) We discovered the latex paint the painter used did not adhere to the vinyl shutters, so when the temperatures dropped and then rose rapidly the paint blistered, bubbled and peeled.

Frostbite? Sunburn? Either way, ugly.

That lovely green paint peeled off using only my fingers, in one fell swoop. Yikes.

That's disappointing, because now we're stuck with $300 worth of shutters we can't paint (although I'm thinking after I peel the paint off I can donate them to Habitat for Humanity and take a nice tax write-off, since they are good as new, just the wrong color.) And on the bright side, we CAN replace them with green vinyl shutters that are close to the trim paint. For those keeping score, cha-ching, another $300. Since we picked the shutters ourselves I don't blame the painter. I blame us. 

Even at our age, this kind of thing happens sometimes; we face home improvement challenges, and we either complete them handily or mess up and learn from them. At the rate we are going, by the time we are 80 years old we will literally know everything there is to possibly know about house maintenance -- at which point no doubt we will promptly move into a retirement facility.

And on the homestead front, I finally hauled all 12 quarts of tomatoes out of the damn freezer and just canned them instead of keeping them frozen. They were taking up way too much space in the chest freezer, while empty shelves stood unused in the pantry. I got a fair amount of "tomato water" in my cans due to freezing the tomatoes first, but since most of the recipes I use them for call for a cup of water to be added anyway, I've got that. And I can see what I have in my freezer once again -- always a good thing.

Tomatoes...and water. 

This weekend when the clocks go back it will be a time of drawing in next to the fire and enjoying inside activities. Everything we didn't get done outside will now have to wait until spring. And since I don't drive much in the dark anymore, any evening event or party not close to home will be something we take a pass on. We're heading into the long nights now. Time to slow down and settle in. 

Home Chores: Mom vs. Dad

Great color for the pump house, not so much my hair.

The house painter is here as I write, patching, caulking and priming the exterior of our house to get it ready for painting, which will hopefully happen next week. Tuesday I went to the stylist to get my hair cut and as she was washing my hair, she asked, "so...doing some painting?" Apparently there were a couple of different shades of paint I'd somehow gotten into my hair while I was painting walls and a couple of outbuildings around here, before the painter showed up for the Big Job. 

I'm of the opinion that when you start to wear your work it's probably time for a break. 

I used to have some neighbors who had a very clear division of labor in their home: mom took care of everything inside -- cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc -- and dad took care of everything outside, like yardwork. Since mom had no interest in gardening, their roles were enjoyed by both and their house was run well. What was funny was that I was a single mom at the time I lived next door to them, and so I started to realize that around my place, I was both mom and dad. I still am to some extent.

That's because Big Ag works off property in a high-powered job in the agriculture sector, which leaves me pretty much in charge of the homestead. The things I can't do, he gets memos on, in the form of "to do" lists. Anything that requires significant upper body strength I leave to him. So he stretches fence, digs holes, and builds outbuildings in his spare time, which believe it or not, he loves doing, since most of his day job uses brain, not muscle power.  

I do all the typical housewifery-type stuff, but also work in the garden, manage the general landscaping, do the painting (wherever possible) and decor, and manage our finances.

I'll never hire someone to pick our pumpkins. Too much fun.

It works, but honestly after a day of being on a ladder painting or moving 10 yards of pea gravel, the last thing in the world I want to do is come inside, clean house and cook. And so on the days when I'm the Estate Manager and Chief Handyman (dad), those mom things suffer. I've joked before that all I really need to do is hire a professional housewife from 9 - 5 to manage all that inside stuff when I've got a lot of manual labor to do outside. But with the painters here, I've actually had time to clean the house really well, can some tomatoes, AND have some good food prepared by the end of the day.  

When I worked at the winery, I had a housekeeper, so many of my "mom" tasks were covered by her. This week, I'm paying someone to do some "dad" stuff. You can probably gauge how busy you are at times by how many auxiliary people you need to hire to help you. But unless your homestead is your job, some aspect of what you do is probably hired out, whether it's the construction people, electricians, or just hitting a restaurant for take out dinner once or twice a week because you're too tired to cook.

None of us can do it all, and even if you could, you shouldn't even try. It's exhausting, plus there's every chance you'll end up resentful over some aspect of your never-ending tasks.

But in a year full of dad-type house stuff, I gotta say being inside with a latte preparing dinner has been a little slice of mom heaven. 

All the little things

It's been a year of big things but a summer of little things. Little things are, after all, what ultimately makes the world go 'round, whether for good or bad. A magical day is usually comprised of a bunch of good little things. The Roman Empire fell because of a series of bad ones.

Around the homestead we are finally in the swing of growing, picking, and prettying up outside, and touching up, refining, and replacing inside. I'm in the process of painting all the trim upstairs white, which means a little bit of painting, every day. And I've also been refinishing the oak trim downstairs, removing old water damage on the sills, and re-sealing with stain and polyurethane clear coat. Every day there is some little thing inside this house that's improved upon. Or outside. And that feels good. Because even if it takes 1,000 little improvements, once they're all done it will add up to the house looking great -- one big win for us. 

I don't know about you, but I actually enjoy a series of little tasks so much more than one large one. If I can spend my days doing 11 completely different things -- outside for this, inside for that, I'm generally pretty happy. In high school, I was a sprinter, never having been any good at distances. Perhaps it's the same principle. Put forth a little burst of energy for one thing, rest, then move on to the next thing. 

Here's a little of what we've been up to around here:

There's always laundry, but no rain means drying outside.

pumpkin dog biscuits

 

Cukes, zukes and tomatoes coming along nicely. Big Ag did a fantastic job on these raised beds, and the hay bales in the back will be planted soon, too!

Goodbye oak trim. Hello crisp white paint. Wall painting next!

Speaking of painting....exterior house painting coming in September!

A country bouquet to brighten up the house.

Saying yes to color

Spring is in full swing in this part of Oregon, and the fields, highway median strips and yards are all filled with gorgeous color -- daffodils, azaleas, cherry and flowering pear blossoms, all doing their part to make the local area a more vibrant, enchanting place.

My own contribution to the world of color came when I swapped out a boring beige study for a buttery yellow one. As someone who (years ago, in my minimalist phase) would have argued that Navaho White is, indeed, a dramatic color, going for this splash of yellow is true progress. This room gets predominantly northern exposure, so it does not get much direct light in winter. Plus it will host our large library units, which are dark wood. So I thought a definite shade of actual color would do well alongside all that wood and wintery exposure.

When using color on walls, the three stages of progress are excitement, fear, and then either satisfaction or horror. Luckily for me, Stage Three was satisfaction, although I went through a good half hour of abject terror as I was cutting in with my paint brush, mainly because it was such a different color than I'm used to using.

But I figure, this is a farmhouse, and so some warm farm-like colors are a good thing. In small doses -- most of the house will stay painted in shades of neutral. But a creating a nice warm, country feel in a library seems like it encourages reading and relaxing. Or, as we say in the country, readin' and relaxin'.

The other nice thing is that I see myself bucking that recent trend of gray everything. Although gray is one of the colors I'm considering for the exterior, so I can't sit on too high a horse. Either way, I'm happy with how this room turned out.

Fear...

Feeling slightly hopeful...

And in love with the look!

Three days of my life back

When we moved here, the lady who lived here before us decided to remove all the touch-up paint cans she had in the garage. There were some hard feelings about the ultimate sales price of our place versus what it appraised for, so I'm thinking this was a (brilliant) little way of getting some passive-aggressive revenge on us.

After all, her new place was NOT painted the same color, so by taking all the paint, she denied us 1) the ability to touch anything up, ever, because....2) we now lacked the information to determine exactly what the paint color was. After all, you can't exactly scrape off a piece of wall and take it into Home Depot to get it matched.

And so for the last few years, some of the rooms have been looking more and more beat up.  Our son Groceries' room especially took a beating -- as all teenaged boys' rooms do -- but we also had a significant roof leak that left stains on another bedroom wall and ceiling after it was all repaired and dry again.

It was already on my schedule to paint those two bedrooms this winter, and since I was also having to paint the ceiling of one, I figured it would take about three days....three days of my life that I'd never get back.

Then, on a lark one day, I decided to call the home builder to see if they had any information on what color they'd painted the interior of the house when they were building it. It was a shot in the dark -- a home built over a decade ago by a builder who really has no stake in keeping the small details like paint color on record, being expected to have the information right at their fingertips.

Yet that is exactly what happened. The gal at the builder's office got on her computer, and within one minute flat told me the color:  "Stunning" by Frazee Paints. All I had to do was go down there and order a quart, and as long as the sun had not faded it too much, it should be a good match.

Long story short, I did, the paint matched perfectly, and in about a half-hour I fixed what would have taken me three days to fix if I'd had to choose a whole new color to paint the rooms. And there are a lot of other dings and nicks which are now fixed in other rooms as well.

So I got three days of my life back....wonder what fun thing I should do with them? Maybe nothing, but it sure does feel great to have them!

The Last Push

Fun chairs. Before (center chair) and after (left and right).

It's time for that last big push of activities before summer hits. Everything that's going into the ground is in, except for some late lettuce and pumpkins (I'm behind about 3 weeks on pumpkins; it will be interesting to see if that makes any difference come harvest time).  I'm working on refinishing the chairs I bought at the party rental place for $2 each, so we have some nice seating outside for summer. And I completed a new barn quilt which the owner of the winery where I work requested for his tool shed. Those things were all fun.

Around the property, there is also some maintenance that needs doing.  These things are not fun. I paid out about $900 this week to have several double windows replaced where the seals had failed and they'd become cloudy in between the panes. I'm not sure if it will yield any energy savings but the windows certainly look better now that you can see out of them again!  And we'll also be hiring some painters to re-do the trim all over the house, which is peeling and will eventually get wood-rot if it's not fixed. So that clearly also needs doing.

Those are the kinds of things I hate spending money on, because they're not very fun and don't really give you the spending thrill that a more sexy $900 purchase would -- say for a new chair, appliance or some kind of farm machine for the acreage, like a rototiller or brush hog, both of which I'd like to have.  But keeping up with this place is a necessary investment, more so than the fun things we could contemplate buying. One of these days we'll need a new roof, and maybe even some electrical work done so the wires stay safe. 

Living in the heat as we do, everything has less of a lifespan than it might elsewhere -- it just basically bakes to death -- although I think everywhere you live, it's something, be it humidity, cold, etc. that takes its toll on your home. But as fun as homesteading goodies are (which are generally pretty inexpensive and homemade anyway), sometimes it's just normal home repairs that get our extra spending dough each month, and this month that is certainly the case.

Winery barn quilt.