Adding lights to the historic home.

We had all the electric replaced through out the whole home we are renovating. This will be the first year we are able to have some little lights out for Christmas. Now people driving through the historic district can see that this old house is slowly coming back to life. Being as it is just the four of us mostly doing the work…it’s taking a long,long time. We have four structures we are working on. Our projects get pushed aside until we catch up as they say.

Anyway…I wanted to add some Christmas cheer to the old home. I think the lights will help with that. It sat dark for years. People in town will have a nice surprise when they see some Christmas lights in the windows. I’m going to try and add some to the shop too.

I went to a Catholic church sale, searching for lights. I wanted colorful lights and only found one strand. When I went up to purchase the lights I was told that there was another huge box of lights for only $5, so I bought those too, but those were all plain, no color.

I guess this year our lights will just be clear lights. There were enough in that box for two houses. Mostly at the historic home the lights will be inside upstairs in the windows in all the bedrooms and Attic windows as well.

Adding lights to the upstairs bedrooms on the back side of the house,

I also have to figure out where to put them all. I still have some pretty colorful lights that made the trip from the city. I might put those on a tree inside though….we will see. Most people now days only do the clear lights but I love colors.

We have different types of trees on the property, mostly oak. I would love to add lights to some of the trees on the property, but I do not have the equipment to reach these trees. The trees will stay bare this Winter. The leaves are the decor for now.

I had to check all over the historic home for extra lights in storage that we have there. Christmas is all over the place in that home right now. I have some upstairs in the attic I think, now I can’t remember, but there are boxes up there in the attic room. Then I have some upstairs in the main bedroom…and then some downstairs in the fireplace room.

When we moved I didn’t get around to unpacking everything so we just stored boxes where convenient. A lot of the old furniture from the original owners was still in storage at the place so until that was organized we put boxes in different locations.

The only place I didn’t store anything was downstairs in the basement. I didn’t really go down there until the lights worked. It’s as big as the first floor in the house, so lots of storage down there, but it was too dark before we had electricity.

I had been down there before but it was dangerous with walking and I didn’t want to trip on all the clutter the original owners had down there. Now it’s very bright and completely empty. I look around and see so much potential. I can design another little mini apartment in it. There is an outside entrance with a big French Door, that lets in some light during the day time.

As you can tell…I love Christmas and I am a little disorganized at the moment because they had to rewire and replace all the old 1930’s electric in the house. Which means floorboards and parts of the ceiling were removed.

I figure I will work on putting the lights up before the real cold gets here. Our neighbors down the street have their lights on right now. It’s so pretty seeing them sparkle all night, puts us all in the Christmas mood.

Some other projects I’m enjoying working on at the moment are some old Christmas decor I am redoing. Like this metal tree. I will be turning it into a pretty little Scandinavian tree with fairy lights. This is a before photo, I finally remembered to take a photo before it was turned into something totally new.

Back home working on outside craft projects and prepping pine cones for Winter fires.

And I started on my Christmas craft kits that we hand out for the holidays. We drop them off at our favorite mom and pop shops, little library book drops, big libraries and charity shops…oh, and some schools. Just a really fun project to give back to the community (that’s a hint for anyone else reading this, find something to do with your local community this Christmas).

This years kits include clothespin snowmen ornaments. So far we have made up over 200 kits to give out. Each little bag includes scraps of fabric, buttons, paper, beads and confetti to decorate tiny plaster trees or snowmen. We stopped doing the Halloween thing years ago. I guess these little kits are our own type of passing out treats now., The whole family can enjoy making them together. Staying off those screens and creating instead.

We are also getting our inside Winter garden ready. Lots of moving of things around to get this done. I like that though. I enjoy rearranging and organizing.

Even our neighborhood cat Mr. Missy is loving the days right now. Just laying in the leaves smelling all those outside Fall smells. Christmas in coming, we all can feel it and smell it in the air.

I can’t wait for hot cocoa, Christmas trees, and snowmen. It’s just nice seeing Christmas lights. Even if we can only do one little window, it really does add some cheer to our home and the neighborhood too. Happy decorating everyone.

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