A whole month!!

Here's what we've been up to since I last posted (in September! Sorry...)

We tore down the bookshelf/door between our living room and the front room. I did most of the crowbar work and then Bill kicked a hole in the sheet rock.

I've been painting the room purple with some random stenciling throughout. It will be my craft room very soon!

We picked a wheel-barrel full of pumpkins.

And stuccoed the top portion of Bill's oven. The bottom will get a brick facade some day.

We've also been canning ripe tomatoes. What?? Wasn't there a frost in Indiana weeks ago? Aren't all your tomato plants dead? Yes, they are. But we picked 10 gallons of green tomatoes just before the frost and have been ripening them in a basket (previously two baskets) in our kitchen.

Last week we canned 6 quarts of tomatoes in their own juices and will likely do so again in a few days. Every 5 days or so, I go through the basket and pull out the tomatoes that are turning red (or yellow or purple as the case may be) and put them in a bowl where we can keep a closer eye on them. When they are ripe, they go into a pot of progressive tomato sauce (that is, we start it when it needs to be started and add tomatoes as they get ripe. It's usually 2-3 sessions of cutting and boiling over the course of one week). When we fill up the pot, we can them up.

We've only lost a 5-6 tomatoes to mold or fruit flies and it only affects individual fruits, not their neighbors in the basket. We read about this "method" on a favorite blog (How To Ripen Green Tomatoes Indoors the Really Easy Way) and highly endorse it. The cans we get from these 10 gallons will represent about 20-25% of the tomatoes we preserve this year, so it's well worth it.

If you give a girl a crowbar...

I'm starting work on our front room / former nighttime kitty jail / future crafty room of awesome. Much of the work has been really boring...cleaning, organizing, floor scrubbing.

But today, I started attacking with a crowbar! There is a bookshelf in our living room that was previously a door between the living room and the front room. We're reopening it!

The first step is to attack it with a crowbar. Bill hopes we're going to find some buried gold. So far, I've found a mirror.

I hope to report more exciting finds soon.

Now with 50% less blue

Two of the four rooms in our house that were a tired sky blue when we moved in have been transformed into much nicer rooms that people would actually want to spend time in. You may recall our bedroom was the first to be tamed...

Bluefore and after:
And now the living room is done being painted! More photos when it's cleaned up, but here is a preview.

Bluefore:

(This, by the way is a photo of Bernie on the night before we brought Sugar home and threw his entire world into disarray. He thought the new doggy-sized bed was for him. Sucker.)

AFTER:


Two rooms are still in a state of bluedom. This was previously, I imagine, a lovely parlor before an awkward bathroom turned it into a "master bedroom." We've never showed you a photo before this moment because it is really the saddest room in the house. It will be the next to be tackled with the intent of creating a hobby room. We'd ditch the bathroom, but the walls contain the pipes going to the upstairs bathroom we want to keep. Dilemma.


The kitchen and adjoining pantry are also blue:


Eradicating those blues, however, is for another time. After a hard day of painting, some sleepy snuggles are now in order and I'm going to get in on this: