long time gone...

Well I'm appalled at myself for my delay in getting a new post up. I do plead for forgiveness however as I have been insanely busy and unfortunately many of the things that I would like to do have fallen by the wayside.. blogging being only one of many.

Just to give you a bit of what's been going on. I thought perhaps a brief rundown in photographic form.

We finally wrapped up the remodel of the basement living room and library areas. My wife did an amazing job of updating our fireplace with a whitewash finish and we added new flooring to replace the terrible old white carpet that was in there.

 As I said, we also re-finished the library adjoining the living room. We ended up having to remove all the old shelving that was in there and it was a good thing as we found some serious concerns with electrical behind them. Problems resolved and a nice new functional area defined.

 Easter found us at a Krishna Temple an hour away to celebrate the festival of Holi with them and a few thousand of their closest friends. It was AMAZING and we will certainly be back.

 We added a few new birds to our menagerie. Three turkeys, two ducks, and 9 new hens. 3 Buff Opies, 2 Barred Rocks, 2 Ameraucana, 2 Silver lace Wyandottes. They're growing up so fast..lol

 I took cuttings from a friends OLD established grape vines. A green seedless Himrod and a Concord grape varieties. I currently have 109 cuttings in the ground hoping to have at least enough viable starts to begin a vineyard on the property.

 We also finally got out pigs out of the well house in which they've lived since Christmas eve. We cleaned out and renovated an old "barn" in on the property and with all recycled materials that were pulled from the grounds, we fabricated a nice new pig pen.

 The pigs, needless to say, are much happier rooting and wallowing away in snortingly happy tones.

Last week I managed to get a few of our 9 new bare root fruit trees into the ground. This row is of two apple trees and two Asian pears. I need yet to add a Bartlett pear to the lineup. These will be trained in an Espalier living fence.  

And finally last weekend, my wife got a great idea to complete one of our final big home projects. Our upstairs bathroom. We had to remove two layers of underlayment to reveal that we had some rot in our subfloor around the toilet and bath tub. Got these removed and A~ got the walls painted and some new flooring put in place. She's working on a cool board and batten treatment for the walls that will really bring it up to date. 

 

So you can see, I haven't been completely lazy, just a wee bit occupied. There were lots more things as well, but not enough time to put them all down here. I'll just say that I have big news coming up soon with relation to this blog and our farm itself.

 

I hope you have all been well and look forward to hearing from as many of you as possible!

Take care.

P~