Let The Fun Begin!

After reading some of the comments, I think I have some of you confused about these pictures that I have been posting. The work that these pictures show is what we have already done since we bought the house in April, 2004. With that cleared up let's walk through the room additions to the house.

This picture shows what is now the living room. J.D. took the two kitchen windows out and we left that open to the living room. The screen and porch doors came off to the porch and a solid wall went up there with a door that opens to the porch from the living room.

This is another view of what is now the living room with steps down to the master bed room.

This is a view from the front. Throwing in an interesting tidbit here. Before J.D. started construction on this addition, pretty much of what is now our living room was once the deck. As I was sweeping the deck off one evening, I caught a glimpse of something move under the deck. I was pretty certain that it was a snake. I called for J.D.and he confirmed that yes, it was a snake. He got his Brier knife and jabbed it down between the wooden slats of the deck several times. The snake kept moving around until we couldn't see it any more. I figured J.D. might have nipped it a few times and it had slithered away, perhaps back to the woods. The next morning we found it laying dead in the yard about 50 feet from the deck. It was a copperhead and had probably taken refuge under the deck when the bulldozing was going on.

J.D. got the frame work done for the walls and waited for Chris to bring a couple of his friends by after work to help raise it.

From this point on it surprised me how fast things moved along. Of course part of the reason for that was most likely the fact that once J.D. starts something, he stays on it like a man possessed.

In 2003 J.D. retired and we moved to Ohio from Louisiana. Our original plan was to travel and live in a camper for a few years and see the country. So a couple of years before he retired we decided to buy a camper, park it at a camper park and live in it to make sure we could deal with living in such close quarters ( figuring we would have the camper paid off by retirement time, that way too). We did fine living in the close quarters.

I don't even remember now why we decided to buy property and settle down in the first place instead of traveling. The fact that this house was quite small didn't bother us. After living in a camper for a couple of years the original size of this house felt huge to us.

Things started feeling tight when the grand girls would come to spend the weekend. We had one bedroom at the time and a very very small living room. The girls took turns with where they slept. All except for Britt of course. She laid claim on sleeping in the recliner. With that settled Alley Oop and T~Bear took turns sleeping on the couch and sleeping on a pallet on the floor. When we packed 6 adults and 4 children into the house it added up to needing some addition work to the house.

This is a side view shot of the house from the parking area. Since this picture was taken I have painted the pergola brown so it wouldn't blend in with the house. The small building off to the right of the pergola is what we call the bunk house. From what I understand the previous owners built it to be a wood shed and before it was completed they decided to make it an office/sleep over spare room instead. Since we moved in it has been a storage area, but we are slowly sorting through and thinning out what we had stored there. Hopefully someday it will once more be an office area.

An up and coming project will be to add a side deck from the pergola to the back of the house. With this idea in mind that is why J.D. added a single french door leading outside from the master bedroom.

In this picture you see the finished (Did I say finished???) product of J.D.'s labor. I helped with the staining, the painting and holding things in place while he attached them but the fact remains, he hammered every nail that went into this addition. The man amazes me.

Don't wander off too far because I'll be sharing some more photos with you in the next few posts. Until then have a great weekend.

Time For Grass

The house and yard looked so much better once the bulldozer had done it's work. Now comes the fun part. It was then time to plant that grass seed.

I even found a spot to plant a small flower bed in the front yard.

Planting the grass seed wasn't a simple matter of throwing the seed out and letting the rain and sunshine do the rest of the work. (Laughing at the thought of something being done simply around here). Before the seed could be planted all of that dirt had to be raked, groomed and smoothed out.

This wasn't a small job either because it also involved picking rocks (most times big rocks) out of the dirt and chopping roots with the hatchet that were sticking up out of the dirt.

I couldn't begin to tell you for how many months we picked up and dug rocks out of the yard. I had begun to think we hadn't created an ordinary yard. No, I was thinking we had created one heck of a BIG Rock Garden.

But look at the end results. We have Grass!! Pretty Green Grass coming up every where we looked.

With the yard cleared and grass growing where once there were rocks, brush, tree stumps and briars it is time to look around and decide what our next project will be.

No problem...... We can do that! We needed to find a solution to our laundry situation. If I had a preference I would prefer to have a wringer washer, but as hard as we tried to find one, there just was none to be had in this area. I tried going the laundry mat route, but that was a 30 minutes drive one way to the closest one. I would sooner haul the clothes to a creek and beat them with rocks than to deal with an hour drive to do laundry. There was no place in this house to hook up a washer or to plug in a dryer. Again, no problem...... J.D. got his tools together, some material and enclosed a section of the porch in the back. He ran the electric, fixed me up with a water source and all of a sudden there was a laundry room.

Next came our plan to add a bigger living room and a master bedroom on to the house. J.D. got on his computer and drew up the plans on his Auto Cad program. That meant doing away with the existing side deck and the side entrance to the porch . Guess what!!! No problem, this is just another example of what this talented man that I am married to can do. Until he got this small deck built, he had put up a few temporary steps from the porch. There were no hand rails and when the grand daughters would come out to stay over, poor little T~Bear was so unsteady and shaky going up and down them. The next time she came out after J.D. had finished the deck and steps, I took her straight to the deck to show her what Grandpa had made for her. She took it all in with wide eyes and a great big smile and said. "You know Grandma, my Grandpa is a Genius!" I certainly agree with her on that. He is that and so much more.

Tomorrow we will stand back and watch the room addition become a reality. Until then wishing all a blessed Friday!

Little House On The Mountain

Do you have your coffee? Well then sit down, drink your coffee and finish waking up while I show you the results of inviting a bulldozer into your yard.

Like I said in yesterday's post, Keith was here for two days dozing the brush, briars and tree stumps out of what we wanted to be yard.

As you can see from this picture, just how close to the house the brush was growing.

This picture shows what we had decided we wanted to be our back yard. JD and I sat on the screened in porch and watched as the bulldozer easily took away all that unwanted wilderness. We have still another 4 acres of wooded area behind the back yard, with that 4 acres bordering a state forest.

I had the before picture of the wood/tool shed posted yesterday. This is the after view of it. I couldn't get over how the appearance of everything changed after all of the brush was cleared.

There were times while Keith was out there clearing the property that all we could see was the smoke stack on the bulldozer and the brush shaking as Keith moved through it.

Look...... The path is gone. I can walk back there if I want to without fear of a couple of mice running across my feet. I have a very low tolerance point when it comes to mice and snakes. I will not walk in the woods during warm weather because of the snakes. During cold weather when they are hibernating, no problem.

That's it for today. The construction of the pump house is coming along quite nicely. I go out every day and take pictures of what J.D. has completed. When I finish with these photos, I will have to give you a tour of the inside of the house and show you J.D.'s newest addition to the property.

Please keep our troops in your prayers. KY Woman at 'Little Drops... In The Pool Of Life' has a special prayer request for one of our soldiers on her blog. I hope you will stop by and get the information from her. Last, but no where near least, please keep everyone that is even remotely dealing with those fires in California in your prayers. The firefighters have been working tirelessly with very little time to even stop and regroup. As Connie at Over Good Ground has said, "The whole state of California seems to be on fire." These fires has driven so many people from their homes and threatens so many more. I can't even imagine the stress these people are living with to find themselves packed, ready and waiting to be told to evacuate from their homes. While in many of these cases after the danger of the fires have passed to return to the ashes of what used to be your home. Please drop by 'Over Good Ground' and give Connie (Farmlady) and the Prospector a few words of support. They haven't been told to pack and wait yet, but if you are anywhere in California you could be. Wishing you all a blessed day.

Déjà vu ?

Chris and Melody took the children and went to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina for a vacation. I have talked to Chris and Melody a couple of times since they left and everyone is having a good time. I can always hear Riley in the background whooping and hollering and just being a child having the time of his life. Melody said that Seth doesn't like riding in the car any more. I wonder why...poor baby!

Yesterday when I opened my e-mail I found this picture of Buck-a-roo Riley riding a wild bull. Just the other day I had gone through old pictures of Chris to put together a slide show for his birthday on the 18th of this month.

Hehehe.... This is one of the pictures I had picked out. Hey isn't that Buck-a-roo Chris? It sure is!! This picture was taken of Chris at Knott's Berry Farm when we lived in California, he was the same age as Riley. That was a dream come true visit to Knott's Berry Farm for Chris. Being a huge fan of 'Dukes Of Hazard' one of the stars of the show was going to perform there that day.

I thought I would give you a tour of our 'Heaven on Earth'. This will be stretched out over several days, so don't forget to come back so you don't miss the follow ups. When we first found this house, from the parking area you couldn't see the house. In fact I wouldn't even get out of the truck to go look at it. I did finally walk down the path to look at it on another house hunting adventure. J.D. insisted that I take a look at this house. I fell in love with it the first time I saw it. The house consisted of four rooms (and small rooms at that). The bank wouldn't even finance it because it was so small. We talked to the owners and together worked out a land contract. We were the proud owners of a slice of the God's Heaven on earth.

In this picture you can see how much of the briars and underbrush J.D. had cleared by hand. Where the dirt is worked up to right of the path was a tangle of briars and underbrush. The same was true of the left of the path to the second bend in the pathway.

This is the Wood/Tool Shed. J.D. had cut back enough of the under brush and briars to allow enough room to walk around it without getting snagged by thorns.

This is where you come in the gate from the parking area.

As much ambition that we had, it was soon clear to see that it was going to take a lot more muscle and energy than either of us had to give to clear the property of all of this excess wilderness.

We even have an operational little house out back. It is a compost outhouse so there is no smell to it. Of course some that remember using an outhouse may argue that without the smell it doesn't count as a real outhouse. This is the view that we had from the screened in back porch. One evening while sitting on the porch enjoying the peacefulness that we had found in this house and the property that it sat on, I saw something run across the path to the outhouse. I sat there and watched quietly and pretty soon there it went again. It was mice....... lots and lots of mice. Back and forth they went across the path.

On the right of the path about half way to the house you can see a pile of just a little bit of what J.D. had cleared that needed to be burned. It didn't take a lot to convince us that we needed a bulldozer to come in and clear what we wanted cleared. The top of my list was getting that mess cleared out in the back to drive the mice further away from the house. We called a young guy that Melody recommended for the job (She used to work at as a secretary at a lumber company. I used to tell people my daughter-in-law was a lumber jack). He showed up with his bulldozer and for all the work he did (2 days worth) he only charged us $600. J.D. paid him $750 for his work. I couldn't begin to tell you how many tree stumps he uprooted in the proccess of clearing out the brush.

That's it for today friends. You will get the second installment of 'Our Retirement Home' tomorrow. Have a blessed day.

God's Garden

As I was out walking around the property the other day I noticed these tall weeds growing along the property line that was full of activity. I have no idea what these are, but for a weed they have a beautiful mauve colored flower.





We choose to leave about two feet of native plants and weeds growing the fence line. It offers a little more privacy and we have a season full of color that way too. As soon as one type of 'Weed' is finished blooming another starts.

As you can see from the photos these flowers were covered with butterflies and bees. What a photo opportunity my little walk proved to be.

After giving it a little thought, I guess I need to remember that a weed is not a weed if you invite it to live in your garden.

I hope you enjoyed your walk with me around the property, admiring the beauty of God's garden and the tiny critters that He made to prosper from it all. Have a great day!