Sounds of civilization

New chicken coop. It will be painted and pretty-ed up once we get more sun.

After what seems like a marathon move, I'm pleased to report that everything we own is finally in one place, our chickens are safe and dry in a REAL chicken house once again, and we have both TV and internet service.  These seem to be the foundations of civilization as we know it (in our household, anyway) and so it feels like once again all is well in the kingdom....the kingdom of unpacked boxes, ladders and paint cans, of course.

There are still more projects than I can count. But I did finish the yellow library walls before the furniture that's too heavy to easily lift got moved in!

I'm trying to pace myself on everything else, and enjoy the spring and the garden. There are three raised beds built over the septic drain field, which will now be used for flowers and ornamentals -- not food, ever. Big Ag will be building some other large beds not on the drain field and that is where we'll grow our food. Putting those three original beds over the leach field is a puzzler, as are a few other things, which I'm sure I'll be sharing in the coming days. I guess you never know what the previous owners were or were not thinking when they did stuff (I know they grew food there because there were still tomato cages in place).

Just say no to food grown over the septic system.

The best thing about living where we do now is that while we have two acres, we have all the sights and sounds of a neighborhood once again. I always felt very isolated in the vineyard. Sure, I loved the natural beauty that was present everywhere and yes, even the silence, but there was not a familiar face to be encountered anywhere except for Prince Albert, the resident and lone turkey on the property. Living on 200 acres is one of those things you think sounds great until you actually experience it. I discovered I really missed seeing other people -- just folks walking by, working on their yards, or driving past.

I miss Prince Albert, the vineyard's resident turkey.

I think that's because ultimately we are social creatures, even if we don't want our neighbors too close. I suppose there are a few Henry David Thoreau types who really could live in the middle of nowhere with absolutely no sight or sound of other people. But even he had his mom stop by to help with laundry and make dinner for him sometimes.

In this neighborhood, we have a lot of walkers, kids coming up the street on their way home from the school bus drop-off, and the occasional car, although since we live on a dead-end road the traffic is minimal. There's people out mowing their grass anytime it's not raining. You can hear the highway in the background, the trains running through the nearby town of Turner each morning, and also assorted domestic livestock noises from horses, roosters and sheep. But we're also less than 10 minutes from true civilization in Salem, where there is shopping, healthcare, and entertainment. The nicest part is, when we're done with the city, we can leave it and come home here to where there's plenty of space... but not too much. I have to be honest, I think we're in the Goldilocks Zone of property zoning and size. Lucky us. 

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!

Progress

Well, we are about 6K into our 10K renovation/repair budget and are just barely making a dent in what we need to do, but what we've done so far has been important to the house, and both things we've done so far needed to happen while we were not living there, since they are the kinds of things that generally make people flee to a hotel for a couple of days. So we've stayed here in the rental and let the guys work before we move in.

The first thing was replacing the well pump and casing. We knew there was an issue there, and negotiated a significant price reduction because of it, so it was the first thing we set about fixing once the property became ours. Country property is only as good as the well it's on, and this well needed work. Not for lack of water -- there's plenty of that -- but the pump was 22 years old, the casing was metal and was gradually disintegrating and instead of fixing it, the previous owners had instead installed no less than three filters running into the house in order to keep the metal flakes from the pipe from entering the household plumbing.

If your house uses no less than three kinds of water filters, plus one at the well head, you might have a well casing problem, not a water quality one.

It was also only pumping a meager seven gallons per minute, pitiful by even California drought standards. Work on a well is a can you can kick down the road, but at your own risk. Generally well pumps like to give out at the start of three-day weekends, at the hottest time of the year....usually when you have houseguests about to arrive. Life is stressful enough without adding that to the mix.

And so the well guys showed up last week, replaced the aged pump and changed out the metal casings for heavy-duty PVC, and the result was....sparkling clean water, coming in at the rate of 27.5 gallons per minute. That's what I'm talking about, Oregon! Bring on the water! That's almost a 400 percent increase from what it had been at. It makes me want to wash the car in the driveway just thinking about it.

The second thing we did was have the yellowed, too-varnished floors stripped and refinished with a clear coat, using a German product designed NOT to yellow over time. What a difference THAT made! See below. It looks like the floors can breathe again.

Floors before. OK if you're a fan of orange.

Floor after! (Excuse the blue tape the guys put on to protect the carpet.)

The window guys, the locksmith, the general contractor, and the garage door guy have all come over and done their respective craft. And I bought five bare-root roses, so I'll spend some time getting them in the ground soon. Pics to come.

Like most challenging things, it will be worth it in the end. And doing it this way is allowing us to get to know the house gradually, before we move everything in. 

Coming up next...replacing the ugly, dirty whirlpool bathtub with a regular soaking tub. What hides in those jets, bacteria-wise, truly scares me, especially since I use the tub on a nightly basis. But like everything else, the result will be worth it.

Overwhelmed

So right now I'm slightly....OK, actually more-than-slightly overwhelmed at what we've taken on at the new house. As per usual, there is a lot we've learned since closing escrow that has added to our to-do list and will put a strain on our wallet. There are busted window casings, broken blinds, and garage doors that don't open. Is it ever any other way? Do people ever buy houses without hemorrhaging money for the first six months? 

I'm not even gonna list all the things that need to be done, because it will probably make me cry if I see it all written down in one place, and I don't think you have that long to read it all anyway. But some of it has to happen before we move, and the rest will be done by us (long) after we're in.  I don't even have a date for moving right now, because as I said....some things have to get done first, which means I'm relying on The Guys (collective term for the Flooring Guy, the LockSmith Guy, the Tile Guy, the Windows Guy, the Contractor Guy, and the Garage Door Guy) to start work on the things that are on the Before We Move list.

That's right, I'm expecting contractors to show up and complete work on time. Clearly I have lost my mind already.

But once we're in, I suspect I'll have projects going on for literally years. And since I actually like projects, this may be the most perfect house ever for me. But looking at it from the start is a little like staring up at a skyscraper you are about to climb. Hopefully once you get past the 10th floor it'll get easier. Hopefully.

In the meantime, I'm enjoying our last few weeks in The Vineyard House. The Vineyard House is like good, strong alcohol...incredibly enjoyable until it gives you a headache. I will miss the views, the grand trees in the back, and the quiet -- but not the total isolation or the fact that something died under the house recently and is causing intermittent stinkage. Neither Big Ag or myself feels inclined to crawl into the crawlspace and inspect, and the company does not seem to be inclined either. They already have this place rented out when we move, so I guess the new employee/tenants will have to deal with it.

I also had the fun experience of having a mouse living INSIDE my car recently, which stays in the barn when I'm not driving it. One electronic trap later and I have solved that problem. But living in a working vineyard has its drawbacks, I'm tellin' ya.  Yet I will miss it deeply. How dysfunctional is that?

So in the overwhelming moments, I'm having to just breathe deeply and remain in the present. After all, how does one eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Of course this situation is actually TWO elephants. One elephant is this house (packing and readying to move) and the other is the new house (unpacking, projecting and making it  a livable home). But taking it all in good time all any of us can do when faced with a pages-long to-do list...

Northern Flicker and Snow Days

I just love the variety of birds we find in the vineyard, most of which I've never seen before. This Northern Flicker has been hanging around, and today I was lucky enough to get close enough to him to get a shot.

We've also had plenty of snow, so you know what that means....sledding through the Pinot Noir vines,and building snowmen on the front doorstep! Not bad for a couple of former Californians. But even in Oregon, snow days mean play days since they don't happen very often!

No expectations

One of the best things about starting over in a new place is the freedom from having a lot of preconceived notions about things. Right now, for instance, daytime temperatures have been hovering in the mid to upper 30s in the central Willamette Valley. And every night when I watch the news from Portland there is much grousing and commiseration among the anchors and commentators that it is supposed to be about 54 degrees at this time of year, and why in the hell is it not warming up, already? The poor weather guy really has to take a lot of flak about it. People are quite offended the weather is so "abnormal" right now.

But for us, with this being our first year here, we have no expectations. Which I'm glad about, considering I made something of a cottage industry of complaining about summers in California when we lived there. So if we wake up and it's 27 degrees that seems just fine, thank you very much. It's still February, and we knew February means chilly temps anyplace north of the 40th parallel. So we're open to whatever form winter is going to take, including ice and snow. We're never disappointed because we have no expectations...or years past to compare anything to. What freedom there is in that!

54 degrees?

No expectations.

Expectations are really a curse in long-term commitments, when you think about it. We expect friends, the weather, spouses, towns and restaurants to all be a certain way, and it really fries us if they start to change and we don't like the direction things are moving. And the longer we've been enjoying something, the more we take offense when the ground beneath our feet starts to shift. That's why, occasionally, our elders can seem like such massive pains in our behinds. Often you'll find that, for them, the way things were has hardened in stone and is now the way things should always be. With pretty sharply defined edges. There is sometimes anger in nostalgia; paradise lost and all that. What a way to curse a perfectly good present.

I'm not afraid to say that I'm not exactly sure how it's all going to work as we move to our new place, and in fact am kind of excited by that fact. Homesteading is, by its nature, fairly monotonous, and so re-learning it all in a new place is certainly one way to keep it fresh, if one can just resist the temptation to try and bring the past routines along and cram them into new spaces. That probably would not work anyway, and I've seen people broken by the act of trying to make that happen. 

It's hard to keep those expectations at bay, but trying to stay in the zen of the present is a good exercise for staying open to any new ideas up ahead. 

It's official

We are homeowners again! Escrow has closed and we now legally own our own sweet little farm-ette. We won't be moving right away as the family/former owners asked for a few weeks to rent back to us, but we'll begin doing some repairs right after they vacate and will begin moving a couple of weeks after that.

I am already looking to purchase a couple of livestock animals to help us keep the grasses down, so stay tuned for that! And my hens will once again have their own chicken house, which will make life a lot easier for me, as it will need a little less cleaning and they'll have more room to roam around inside when it rains. 

So with this move will come a return to a simple, less carbon-intensive lifestyle, which I can't wait for. The old adage of "you don't know what you got 'till it's gone," is true when it comes to homesteading. There is not only common sense and environmental responsibility, but also pleasure and comfort to be found in things like re-using instead of buying new, composting, growing your own food and hanging your wash. (Since I've brought it up about ten times, can you tell how much I really miss drying my wash outdoors? Every day here it doesn't rain I think to myself, "If I had a clothesline I could do a load of wash and hang it out right now." 

So the order of moving will be from least important to most important items, with professional movers coming on the final day to take all the furniture we can't lift ourselves. I miss the college/LA days of having rattan Pier One furniture, masonry brick-and-wood stacked shelving, and art posters in plastic frames, all of which I could move by myself if necessary! 

Those were the days. Milk crates and DIY shelves.

And in a great Murphy's Law Conundrum, two of my three kids will be here visiting the week we're getting down to the nitty-gritty. Which probably means lots of take-out food, driving around showing them things, and of course having them move some stuff for us. Just so they feel useful and needed, of course. Ya, that's it. 

So maybe the simple, eco-friendly life will have to wait another week or so after we move. But it'll come. I know that now. And just in time for spring! There will be flowers and veggies to plant, animals to bring home, and the art of turning a house into a home. I cannot wait to show you around the new place and get to work making it our own.