Heidi-ho Neighbor

Since my last posts about our old Arkansas house were brought on by the tenth anniversary of its purchase, I suppose it's fitting we remember another "anniversary" of sorts. It was eleven years ago this month that we brought DaVinci home as a puppy. It was definitely another of those firsts, not knowing what we were getting into (a few photos of those early days were blogged about here). He was adopted right after Thanksgiving when we lived in a little townhouse and I was still working full-time. It was a rough few months, as any new addition is!

We've finally gathered up the courage to start again. We have really missed having a dog around the house, and while we love Schrodinger the cat, those are two very different animals. It's taken us almost a year to determine how we could manage a dog, given that we travel so much and are gone all day at times. We really planned to adopt an older dog, but finding one acclimated to chickens and ducks and cats and farm life was nearly impossible. And we're having a major coyote problem this winter (lost two chickens just last week, in fact), so we needed a breed that could survive and maybe even deal with that issue.

So, meet Heidi, the Great Collie (as Jeff calls her):

Heidi is a 15 week old Collie (or Lassie Collie, as some nickname them)/Great Pyrenees cross. She was raised on a farm by a couple who normally breed full-blooded working Great Pyrenees, but their determined female got out and bred with the Rough Collie at the next farm. Heidi was the runt of a large litter, so we really don't know what size to expect out of her. She's only 8 1/2 pounds right now, but she may catch up quickly, or she may stay small (for a Great Pyrenees, anyway)! Either way, her bloodlines give her great potential as a farm dog and guardian.

Lest you think we went pedestrian with her name and bucked our tradition of scientist-inspired monikers, "Heidi" is derived from Werner Heisenberg and his eponymous Uncertainty Principle. It's rather difficult to find pretty, feminine names in the historically male field, so we had to stretch just a bit!



And because there can never be enough cute puppy pictures:

Reminiscing complete!

As the current bathroom remodeling project is coming along so slowly, it's a good thing I started this little reminiscing series. Since I've been showing old photos of our first house remodel, I had better show the finished product before you think we lived in a wreck. We were so happy in our little bungalow by the end, it was really hard to leave. We felt that first house could have met all our needs for the future, so I'm glad we never saw it as a "starter home". It was just home!

This was no overnight transformation, like they portray on the design shows. The saying in the construction world is "fast, cheap, good; pick two!". I think we only ever got one of those qualities on any single project. It took four years and more thousands than I initially expected to get to the point of the "after" pictures below, but we wouldn't have traded those experiences for anything. 

Exterior before

After

After

After

Living room before

After

After

Dining room before

After

Kitchen before

After

After

Study before

After

Downstairs bath before

After

Master bedroom before

After

After

South bedroom before

After

Gable bedroom before

After

Upstairs bath before

After

No before shots, but carriage house/garage after

Carriage house loft after

Fish pond we added

Front yard in spring

Reminiscing II

As I mentioned in the last post, we really did not know what we were getting into with our first home. I had always dreamed of owning an old house, and Jeff was willing to learn some manual labor skills, but neither of us had ANY experience working on houses or decorating. I had never even painted anything! We had no tools and a very small budget. But we were eager and innocent (and much younger, as you can see in the photos)!

Reminiscing

Several conversations and events lately have me reminiscing about our very first house. We started our journey as homeowners and DIYers almost exactly ten years ago. In hindsight, we really had no clue what we were doing! But we had been house hunting for over a year, looking for a historic, affordable little first home that we could put our stamp on. We found our fixer-upper in a quiet, central location with a large yard and beautiful (though overgrown) landscaping.

After the home inspection, we almost didn't buy that first house! But the seller lowered the price to accommodate some big repair expenses, and we jumped right in. It needed a new roof (decking and shingles), a new water heater and new venting due to dangerous carbon monoxide issues, significant kitchen and bath updates, and a very thorough cosmetic overhaul.

We bought the house in December and had to immediately get the roof replaced before it got too cold. I don't think I even have exterior photos before the new roof went on because it was already dark on the evening we closed on the purchase, and the roofing crew arrived first thing the next morning!

Lots of potential, and lots of peeling paint

The mess of old shingles covered up the mess that was the old steps and porch

Front entrance and living room

Dining room

Blue, blue kitchen; and more dated ceiling fans!

Looking past the patched walls into the study

Dirty bathroom

Peeling paint and filthy carpet

What's with the mint green fascination? Our current house was covered in it, too!

Little country ducks border and heart stencils everywhere

Blank Slate

After all our bathroom remodeling woes over the past few days, we are thankfully down to a blank slate. We got the self-leveling concrete underlayment poured this weekend to take out the worst of the floor dip (more than inch drop from the edge of the floor to the middle, and that's only a distance of about three feet)! The patch looks a bit awkward right now, but it will all be covered by new flooring, so appearance hardly matters. We'll just be glad not to get dizzy and off balance on the walk to the commode anymore!



While picking up the deep soaker tub at Home Depot Sunday, I started chatting with a very friendly lady who was contemplating a bathroom remodel herself. After discussing the merits of different tubs and surrounds, she insisted on checking us out with her military ID so she could gift us with her service member discount. Since I used credit card points for a store gift card, our tub worked out to be free. I even have a few dollars left on the card! It's nice to save a little money here and there, since budget creep always happens during these projects.

Living Dangerously

What does one do with sharp, prickly, potentially dangerous small objects that have outlived their usefulness? Why, drop them into the nearest available wall cavity, of course!

Innocent hole in the wall, right?

This is what I found after removing the old recessed medicine cabinet in the downstairs bathroom. A large pile of rusty old razor blades, bent sewing pins, and broken needles!

There were probably more that went down between the bricks!

I think I was aware of the little slot in the back of a medicine cabinet being used for that purpose many years ago, but I guess I wasn't prepared to find decades worth of old sharps in my bathroom wall!

But that was only the first brush with danger. As Jeff was tearing out the tub surround later the same evening, he happened upon an electrical outlet in the wall. A live outlet with plugs in it buried right behind the flimsy fiberglass surround, just under all the plumbing. You don't have to be an experienced remodeler to know that water and electricity DO NOT mix! We still have no idea what it goes to, or which breaker it's on, so we have been gingerly working around it for the time being.

See that orange outline around the electrical box? This is exactly where Jeff found the outlet, just inches from the tub spout and all that insulation!

So, you would think that would be our excitement for the week. But no. When you start messing with an old house, that's when problems pop up. In order for us to tear out the old wall-mounted sink (on which the shut off valve had broken), the plumbers came out and capped off the old galvanized pipes in the basement that run to the bathroom. All was well for about 24 hours, until I noticed a strange noise suddenly. It turns out that the cap on the cold water line split and water was pouring out in the basement. This was just as we were sitting down to dinner, so Jeff had to get in the car and drive down to the corner where our water main is located (on the cross street about 500-600 feet as the crow flies, but he wasn't about to walk the bumpy pasture in the dark) and shut off our water. The plumber can't make it until the morning, so I filled a few jugs and pails in the time it took Jeff to get the water off. Sponge bath it is tonight, then!

The blue arrow is pointing to the broken cap on the end of a very rusty galvanized pipe. You don't need an arrow to point out the growing pool of water underneath!