Starting a new chapter!

I'm starting a new blog to commemorate the newest chapter of our life. It appears that our nomadic lifestyle has been put on hold and we're once again property owners. I've decided to blog about life as a wanna be potter and the adventures I'm sure we'll have on 18 acres living in a hundred year old house.

At the moment, we're living a kind of a double life. We have minimal furniture in the house while we make a few changes and updates, so we're sleeping in the camper. But we are using the kitchen and bathrooms in the house, so I've spent a lot of time carrying necessities from one place to the other!

We're living in a state of complete disarray for the moment and I've decided to just embrace it. I think I'm truly a slob at heart but mother-hood forced me to actually become somewhat organized! Now I'm just happy to delude myself into believing that I've achieved some level of organization.

The first day we were here, we both kinda walked around in a daze. We didn't know where to start or what to do first! Steve's not good at prioritizing or planning and I felt too overwhelmed to start! Now I'm starting to get a handle on things and I keep telling myself that we have all summer to get a lot of stuff done, so we need to pace ourselves.

The first project we tackled was tearing up the carpet in 3 downstairs rooms. The people we bought the house from had 2 dogs and they either didn't own a vacuum cleaner, or didn't know how to operate it!! The house reeked of old, dirty dogs!!! When we tore up the first room, it was disgusting the amount of stains and the piles of dirt and dust that had accumulated between the padding and the floor!! Here's what it looked like!! I wish it was possible to upload the smell, but I would hate to make my loyal readers gag!!!




After removing the carpet and padding, and vacuuming and mopping up the filth, we started removing the staples and the tacking that's used to hold the edges under the molding. That took several hours!! I'm not used to sitting on the floor for that long!! I wish we could figure out how to get the hot tub chemically balanced so we could use it without fear of slow cooking ourselves in a warm pool of bacteria!

I definitely feel a sense of accomplishment today though!! And we're relatively happy with the condition of the flooring underneath the carpet, at least in two of the rooms. It's painted a somewhat "poopie" shade of brown, but it actually goes rather well with the molding and the character of the house. (Not that the character of the house is "poopie," I'm mostly referring to color and style.) I think we're going to freshen the paint, and maybe do a contrasting border. I hope that once we get a large area rug and move our furniture in, it will be quite cozy and we will have saved thousands of dollars by not putting down new carpet or hardwood floors. I would LOVE to lay some gorgeous hardwood, but I'd rather live with this for now and see what transpires with our finances, the pottery business, and Steve's job search.

The house is actually in pretty decent shape and even though we could put endless amounts of money and sweat equity into it and make it quite a showcase, we're hoping to keep the costs down and make it livable and just a little more cohesive than it is right now.

And hopefully we'll leave ourselves enough time and money to be able to just enjoy the setting. Seems like we try to find this idyllic life and then we end up making it so complicated that we never have time to relax and enjoy it. So that's my goal, keep it simple!!

We'll see how it goes!