Taking care of business…a summer of all work and no play.

” Be Bold. Be Courageous. Never be afraid to speak up and speak out.” John Lewis

Dollar store flowers are still hanging in there.

Well summers over, just flew the coop? It was a busy and beautiful summer, went by too fast and now there is chatter in the air that this Winter will be a cold one.

The leaves are starting to change on our Dogwood tree.

We still need to get our logs piled and organized in the garage. This four season thing is a fun ride, I’m enjoying the adventures of watching this show. Where I’m originally from we basically had two seasons, Summer, Spring and a couple days here and there of early morning and night time freezes…that was Phoenix.

The leaves are changing again, this is my favorite part, so many colors. We still have a lot of green though and that is nice too.

I started back on my woodland walks, although now I am a bit more careful with staying more alert. Not that I didn’t do that before but this past summer in the Ozarks taught me that in the world we all live in now, no place is ever completely safe anymore sadly.

Anyway, I’m glad to be back walking around the Little Lake. Although my daughter will not go anymore, as well as another new friend we just met. Her and her family are implants from Texas. She no longer takes walks out by the Little Lake either…”Too secluded out there” she told us. Things have changed here in my country…so many ugly things keep happening and many are breaking. People are becoming afraid again, just like when the bug virus started.

I love seeing all the flowers and butterflies out at the lake walks. All the little critters are out at the lake the most, especially during those early morning hours. I get my best art ideas out by the lake for my coloring page designs.

So…what have we been up to over the summer? Too many projects that’s what. I think we may have taken on too much with this latest renovation. I keep saying that and keep thinking that don’t I ? This kind of work is so hard , trying to bring back something old…and so broken. I do enjoy seeing the end results though. You have to be stubborn though…really stubborn.

This is sorta the look I am going for in the shop. I want to try and turn it into a garden shop.

Hey, do you ever watch those home shows where they open the door and invite you into their homes, talking about how old their homes are and how they decorated them? I love those shows, they are so fun to watch. Everything is finished, clean and so pretty. Yeah…we’re far, far away from that level.

We stopped off at a discount renovating store. We were on the hunt for windows. The windows we found were only a little over $40. To buy them new for the size we needed would have cost $600 or more,. That’s for each window, and we needed two. Actually we need three more. We have two buildings to replace all the windows in. We will be headed back next week to load up on windows again.

Going to the resale shops saves us so much money when renovating a property. I share the prices in case there is curiosity from anyone wondering what it cost here in the USA to build. It’s expensive, but there are ways to get around that. The shortages are what bother us the most. Sometimes you have to wait to buy wood or bricks when that happens.

Right now everyone is loading up on the wood for rebuilding because we all know what’s coming…higher prices from the tariffs. Seems our wood comes mainly from somewhere else. Anyway, it’s a long process and nowadays there are new road blocks added to rebuilding homes. When ever we get a new renovation I always hear my dad saying….”Looks like you bought a money pit” and I laugh thinking about that…

“Looks like I bought another one dad” I think to myself, wondering what he would think of this newest project of ours. So far we have been able to turn these places around, with each eye sore we buy. Just fixing the broken.

Hard work always pays off in the end. Always teach your children that. Shortcuts only hurt you in the big picture of things.

They sell used furniture and home decor at the resale warehouse.

We went back two weeks later to find two more windows and in the short time these same windows went up to $60-$80 now. That’s how fast our prices are going up daily. It’s getting crazy out there.

One day driving back from the city down a beautiful country road, we came across a couple French doors laying on the side of the road with a sign that said Free. My husband and son went back to pick them up and the owners told them that there was nothing wrong with the doors, they just didn’t like the color. I will be using them for my she shed and repainting their color. That saves us $1.000 as doors went up too. And French doors are especially expensive.

The doors still have the primer color on them, so they are pretty dark right now.

We have all been super busy this summer and with it being the early stages in our renovations, it feels like everything is going at a snails pace. It’s a process. Every time my husband and I have bought a fixer upper, even back when our kids were little, we always had our days of wondering if everything we wanted done, would actually get done.

One of my projects is this old drawer organizer in photo above. Right now it’s filled with all kinds of furniture hardware. Old doorknobs, drawer knobs, hinges and other things I have no idea what they are used for…just hardware stuff. It will be a great display cabinet for the garden shop.

There are plants everywhere around the property. That is also hard to keep up with, especially with all the rains we have had recently.

Now that our son is back at the university and summer is over it’s back to just my husband and I. On some weekends both our grown kids come to help us out the best they can. This week I’m working on cleaning up and painting the old doors. Doors are my least favorite thing when it comes to renovations, and you have to do both sides…just a mess. We are mostly working on prepping and sealing the outside so that the Winter weather doesn’t effect it too much.

After chipping away the paint on this original door I kind of like the old look of the years of cracked and chipped paint, I may keep it like this and seal over that and paint around the trim area and outside to make that look new instead. There is a lot of character in the old surrounded by the new.

The cracks are like wrinkles…they tell a story…the chipped paint, with decades of people walking through this door, it’s a story. If it could tell the stories of the people who passed through this doorway, what amazing adventures they would be I imagine.

As each day continues on in this door’s life, with new characters coming through it every decade…the stories continue.

The property had one family that owned it for decades, they built it in the 30’s themselves by hand. We are the first owners to own it outside the family.

Three generations in the basement. I found this old photo of the original owners. Then I researched and found the granddaughter that’s still alive, and gave her all the old photos I found. She was so happy, and she even shared stories with us of growing up in that house. She is the last sibling alive, there were three of them. My favorite story she shared with us was about sucking on honeysuckle from the garden.

Now that I’m thinking about this…I may keep this old look of the door. It has become it’s character in a way. Of course the bottom needs some work as the original owners drilled a hole in it for a washing machine downstairs. The washing machine used to be in the basement and when the grandma got older it was really hard to walk down and up all those stairs. Going up and down the three levels can wear out those knees.

I think what I will end up doing is half and half, leaving some of the worn and painting new on the rest of the door.

This is the original door from the 1930’s. We found an old poster the original owners had drawn up when they were planning out their garden area and it has this door in the drawings.

The garden area at this place has so much life, it reminds me of the children’s book The Secret garden.

The soil at our historic home is so rich, the original owners planted different varieties of plants. We just threw some seeds down from the dollar store months ago and it’s still going strong. I picked some for a bouquet for our kitchen table back at home.

This week in the shop we found an old tin, a tennis racket, and a poster of the house garden plans back when it was first built. I need to find a frame for that.

This old pen still had ink working in it.

I may weave something for the center of this rack and use it as a frame to frame in the art.

We found some other small items from the shop that I will be trying to use for an idea I have with an old drawer that I will be turning into an art piece where I use found items to make into tiny furniture and create rooms in the box, then cover with plexiglass and hang on the wall. Like a museum shadow box.

And that’s not all we have been up to…we were also trying to catch up on the house we live in.

Watching the cardinals feed their baby from our kitchen in the morning. They are so cute.

I still have the kitchen to remodel. We just bought the tile for the backsplash and the paint for the cabinets. I just have to find the energy and time to do that. I will be painting and everyone else will be putting in the tile. Everyone works as a team. I’m looking forward to Christmas decorating. The flower boxes will be prepped for the Winter and what plants I can safe will go indoors to our indoor garden with grow lights to keep them alive until Spring comes again.

Pippi in our kitchen sink after washing dishes she jumps in to play in the water.. We don’t use a dishwasher, we have one and it is still brand new, it came with the house…but we have never used it. Our old dish washer almost set the kitchen on fire back when we lived in Phoenix. I was up and caught it in time. Turns out there is a big lawsuit about that as unfortunately some homes did burn down from faulty dishwashers…I don’t trust them now.

Pippi is growing so fast, no longer Pocket Pippi.

I am so happy that my craft space in the garage is coming along. I will be painting the floor later this week. It will make things so much easier to know where everything is.

I have a garden update coming up, and guess what…we actually got some tomatoes. One of our reasons we moved was to be able to actually grow a garden that produces without going broke from a water bill. I can’t explain how yummy actual home grown tomatoes taste. In America, in our stores, those tomatoes always seem to taste like fish waste…it’s pretty gross when you compare the actual flavor of a tomato you grow to what they sell in the big chain stores. Actually all the food in America taste a little funky and has gotten so much worse since 2020 rolled into our lives…just being honest.

We made a trip to the craft store. I needed some Acrylic for some Christmas coasters I will be making as gifts for everyone. They use a lot of coasters in the humid states I have discovered. I haven’t been to Hobby Lobby since July. They were busy putting Christmas items out the day I went. It was packed as always, products everywhere.

Sometimes I look at how packed the shelves are and wonder where they are going to put all these products? They ran out of room.

I have to be so careful in the craft stores, so I tried to stay focused on just getting what was on my list which included some Fall color paints for some cement leaves I made. It was fun walking around getting decorating ideas for the Fall. Here are a few items I’m going to try and copy with items I already have back at home.

We have plenty of Mason jars, stencils and paint to make this project.

On my nature walks I can collect items to make one of these jars.

Somewhere I have a bag of sunflowers and burlap in my craft supplies, I can make one of these too.

I ended up buying a couple things that were not on my lists as always and this little chicken ornament was one of them.

It was so cute. I still need to try and needle felt some chickens.

Now that the garage is getting more organized we were able to set up my husband’s old computer he used to edit on years ago. We were sitting around looking through old photos and jobs he worked on, commercials and videos and one that stands out was a music video he did.

It was so strange hearing that music again. I remember when he was in his office cutting it together and hearing the music play over and over …it took us back to those early years. How life has changed for us all.

Many in our circle, friends and others in the business…they left too. And now the adventures continue in a whole other direction. We all ended up going different routes. Life is beautiful like that, always changing, always something to learn and to share with others.

Here is the link to the video my husband put together when he was an editor. Why did my husband leave the business….:The cross he wore bothered and set some people off in that environment, that is happening, this was before it was out in the open like it is now. Now everyone knows it. Many people left. They will deny it of course, but everyone knows the truth now.

So that was our summer. I love coming home after a long day of work and just sitting out on our porch listening to the sounds of nature. Pretty soon all those little critters will be gone for the Winter and it will only be the silence of Winter snow, which is also really nice.

I hope you all had a great summer where ever you are out there in the world and that you all have a fantastic Fall. Thank you to my followers who put our neighbor on your prayer list, he got back home from his heart surgery and he is walking around back to doing the things he loves. God bless and protect you all. Have a beautiful Fall everyone. And remember….

” The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.” Exodus 14:14

Now back to work…we have a lot to do before Winter gets here.

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