18. Home Updates (are slow) but We Have Good News!

I haven’t posted much about the house and the sprucing.

Well, it’s mostly destruction rather than construction.

The hole in the family room ceiling has grown from a hole to patch to a complete ceiling replacement. We’ve got the ceiling mostly demo’ed (all the way up to the attic) with piles of insulation raining down everywhere. We have plans to fix the ceiling, just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

What began as some pernicious water damage, has graduated into an entire ceiling project. Surprise!

In our typical fashion, we began another project before finishing this one: the kitchen floor.

When we moved in, the kitchen floor was a tired brown-patterned linoleum that was curling up in the corners. Very classy.

Lineoleum-schenolineum

I figured we’d wait on it, peel it up later this year, cover it with ceramic tile or some of that newfangled waterproof wood-like tile, and cross it off our list when we got to it.

Instead, the Lovely Hubs began peeling one afternoon, leaving in its wake the white adhesive, painted with blooming brown water stains. Then he got to peeling that off, and beneath that film was particle board. And then that came off, to reveal grease, oil, and dirt-stained wood, punctuated with staples, nails, splinters, scribbles, and whathaveyou. Then, he got down on his hands and knees, and started sanding, beneath which, was some beautiful, remarkably unsullied pine. Who knew? Apparently the Hubs and his magic floor intuition.

Sooooo yummy…

Well hello, there.

So that’ll be the next magic to work.

Meanwhile, while weeding today, I found something lovely: our first strawberry! With the frost and then the soaking rain, I feared that a lot of our warm-weather crops wouldn’t fair too well, but finding fruit was a wonderful surprise. So we’re officially producing produce!

Hey pretty mama.

Meanwhile, the hens remain the stars of the farm show, laying like an egg harem, and I’m getting egg-rich, because I won’t start the market for another couple of weeks. Not that having a healthy cache of eggs is bad news: it’ll be great when I can get to market. Just that I would rather they be a little fresher for my future customers than a couple of weeks old.

The ladies: fat and sassy.

So that’s all the news that’s fit to print right now. Maybe I’ll find some more farm surprising as I make my way down the rows weeding, uncovering spring secrets.