Child's Play

I feel like we really got a lot done this weekend.  We now have steps that lead into the house, all the windows are in, the house is completely wrapped and interior walls were built...then torn down and rebuilt.  Hmmm...  Anyway, I also now have all but three of my twentysome plants, grasses, bushes etc. transplanted to the new house so I'd say it was a pretty productive weekend. 

Notice the trash pile is gone!  My dad burned it.  Hurray!

Goodbye ladder!

2x4 labyrinth.

I took a box of sidewalk chalk out to the house to draw in the upstairs to see if what I had in mind would work so the girls and I had fun pretending to use the chalk drawn bathroom and walk through the chalk drawn doors.

Then the kids decided to color all over the floor downstairs and naturally that lead to drawing hop-scotch.  As soon as Gracie finished drawing the last square, rocks began flying everywhere and children began hopping all willy-nilly, like loud, squeelly, laughing popcorn.  It was obvious they had no idea what they were doing and needed an intervention.  I, being an expert on the rules of hop-scotch, calmed them all down and began to explain how to really play the game.  Once their eyes were sufficiently glazed over, I knew I had thoroughly explained the rules.  Then eight year old Gracie said, very seriously, "Hop-scotch is complicated."  Just call me the fun sponge.

I don't know which is worse, that my children didn't know how to play hop-scotch or that they now think it's hard.  This is what happens when you homeschool.  Next weekend I'll be teaching them to jump rope and hula hoop.  That should be fun!

Isaiah spent the weekend being as manly as possible for a four year old boy.  He hammered nails into everything he could and wore a piece of rope looped over his shoulder because that's just what men do.  I think it was for therapeutic reasons.  He is after all, the only boy and he's always surrounded by a bunch of girls.  I think it gets to him after a while.  These things must be done to reaffirm his manhood and regain his dignity because occasionally when his daddy isn't around to protect him, things like this happen...(I don't have five daughters.  Isaiah's the one in the hat.  Poor guy.)

My apologies go out to his father and all his grandpas and uncles.  Oh, and to Isaiah.  Sometimes girls just can't control themselves.  We must girlify everything.

What??? There's a pumpkin shortage?

I just heard there's a bit of a pumpkin shortage and we're only a few days away from the big day when pumpkin pie is the center piece, the piece de resistance, the crown jewel, the cornerstone on which this holiday was founded!  I could go on, but I digress...except that I must first say, au contraire mon frere!  Which translates into, "Whatch you talkin' 'bout Willis???"  Just take a look at my freezer!

All that beautiful gold colored stuff is PUMPKIN from my garden.  We've been living in pumpkin-shortage-ingnorant bliss, eating homemade pumpkin butter, the likes of which this world has never tasted!  (And for you who are compulsive cleaners and are only focusing in on my freezers dirtiness, at least I have pumpkin.  Pumpkin for days.)

If this pumpkin shortage is old news to most of you, remember, we don't have TV so I don't always know what's going on in the world.  But I knew this day would come.  All the best economic doomsday sayers have been predicting a food shortage and here it is!  They've been telling us to drag out our rototillers and get them running again.  To be prepared to rip out our front yards and turn them into vegetable gardens because pretty soon seeds will be worth more than gold and you'll need these seeds just to buy stuff, like food.  Well, I took these soothsayers seriously and planted my garden.  Then I told everyone around me to get ready!  Start your gardening!  The end is near!  The sky is falling!  The sky is falling!!!  But did they listen?  No.  They did not.  And now, here we are, right smack dab in the middle of a real live pumpkin scare.  What, pray tell, are they ever going to do?

Seriously though, if a lack of pumpkin pie is anyones biggest burden right now, be thankfull.  And if you have bigger problems than that, turn them over to God and hang in there...then come by my house on Thanksgiving, I'll save you a piece of pie!

Munching away at the budget

Instead of working on the house this past weekend, Jeff had to spend time (and money) on the Suburban. What little we can occasionally save (and then some) is always getting eaten up by something. Isn't that how life goes though? So, what do we do when our house money gets nibbled on here and there by cars and such? Tighten the belt if possible and pray it all works out in the end. That would never work for some people but it really does boil down to walking by faith which is right where we should be no matter how much money is or isn't in the bank!

As Jeff started to fix the problem he was aware of he then found another problem, then another! He turned into a real dirty fella by the time he got it all worked out. Look at the back of his head! I sure am thankful he could fix it all.

Changing the subject...tonight was very rewarding! We had a completely home grown meal. Rabbit and spaghetti squash with watermelon for dessert. How fun is that??? I'm not the biggest watermelon fan normally but the heirloom "moon and stars" watermelons we grew are sooo good!

I half heartedly attempted gardening one other time about five or six years ago and it was a big flop. I literally only got two pea pods out of the whole deal. This year I read up a little on gardening and we put some extra effort into the actual dirt to prepare it and that's just about it. I watered some when it didn't rain and occasionally weeded with my hula hoe, my favorite tool and an absolute must have for the home gardener. I'm pregnant and could weed the whole garden in about five to ten minutes mostly one handed with that tool. The garden isn't especially small either...it's about 22'x26'. So if you've ever considered gardening, go for it! It's not too hard and it's very rewarding. (It's a money saver too!!!)

Change of Plans

Several posts ago I showed you all the "livable" phase floor plan that's our first goal. Well, it's changed a little since then. Jeff gave me a deadline for deciding on a permanent floor plan and I'm pretty sure I've finally got it. My deadline was to get it figured out before he starts the framing which would be tomorrow except the ol' Suburban broke down and needs attention from Jeff's magic, mechanic hands! Have I told you I'm pretty sure he can do, fix, build, etc. anything? It's a HUGE blessing too because we're, as usual, broke!


Back to the floor plans. I want to share with you how/why we came up with the basic design we did. First of all, it's 20'x40'. We chose a depth of 20' because we can easily use regular lumber for the floor joists rather than the expensive engineered lumber usually required to span greater lengths. Then we settled on 40' wide because that gave us the smallest, hence the least expensive, amount of space we would need to be comfortable including a second floor. That, and 40 is divisible by 8. The sheet goods come in 4'x8' which means less cutting to fit and less waste. The total square footage when done will be approximately 1250 square feet. I know that seems small for a family our size but plenty of bigger families have survived in smaller houses for generations and generations! We really want out of debt more than we want a "big enough" house. We have plans for future add-ons if/when the need and the money line up.



Now, I know I said I'd use a scanner next time I shared floor plan pictures with you all but I didn't preplan this post and I'm not feeling patient enough to wait a few days to have it scanned so here's what I've come up with...


I know...get out the magnifying glass. Does this picture even make sense to anyone but me??? Sometimes I wonder. The door at the bottom of the picture is the front door which opens up to the living room and the ladder style stairs. The only interior walls to begin with will be around the bathroom which is in the upper right hand corner. Next to the bedroom (lower right) is a small walk in closet and laundry closet. I think the rest of it looks pretty understandable. Now to show you what a nerd I can be when it comes to this sort of thing...








Don't confuse my use of the word "nerd" with smart. It's nothing smart at all so maybe I should use the word "dork." I go so far as to make little paper cut out pieces of furniture to match my real furniture and then laminate them so I can play, I mean figure out if a floor plan will actually work the way we need it to. I start, however with a pad of graph paper. I LOVE graph paper!!! I have one pad half filled with plans and sketches of this one little house. It's so grungy with everything from dirt and grass stains to tea stains and sticky kid prints, I'm embarrassed for anyone to see it. It goes out to the land with me every weekend which maybe explains it's dirtiness.



Once I get it how I like it on graph paper I then move on to a big sheet of vellum paper and drag out the T squares. With the thickness of the walls drawn into the final draft, the actual amount of floor space shrinks up a bit so it can require a few more small changes as I'm drawing it up.



I don't have drawings of what the second floor will look like finished because that's still up in the air. Our future additions will be decks, front and back, a master suite on the back and a new living room on the front. We'll then move the dining area to where the old living room is so it will be nice and big. Someday I hope to have a lot of grand kids coming back with my grown children and their spouses for big Thanksgiving dinners and such. Won't that be fun?!!



Speaking of fall feasts. My fall garden produce, a.k.a. pumpkins, have turned out to be a lot of work so guess what I'll be working on this afternoon again. Mmmhmm. Look what else I got from my garden.


From five seeds I got about six or seven spaghetti squashes (my favorite!!) and from five seeds I got three watermelons, one of which was completely devoured a few nights ago by some little critter thugs!!!

I hope everyone has a nice weekend and I hope I have a baby!!!

We gotta lotta punkins

About two weeks ago the kids and I picked all of our little Sugar Pie pumpkins and cow peas. We shelled the peas, which were dried on the vine, right away and made a huge mess on the living room floor doing it. We loved it though. It felt so old timey! Now I need a pressure cooker so we can eat 'em. Yum!

I planted 5 pumpkin seeds and got 15 pumpkins out of them. Not bad although I expected more. I'm happy with the turn out though. I'll be doing good to get them all processed. The pumpkins have had their curing time, whatever that means, and are ready to be chopped, baked and pureed. Sooo, since I didn't have the baby last night like I planned, I guess I'll take care of the pumpkins today instead of a cute little squishy baby. The poor child is probably holding out on being born till I have a name picked out. Maybe Jeff and I should look into that tonight over a pan of pumpkin squares.

Phase One

If our current printer has the capability to scan documents to the computer I don't have any idea how it works. So rather than messing with figuring it out right now, I used my camera. It's not the best but there aren't many details on the plans anyway.



























This is a general idea of our first phase. The "livable" phase. Like I mentioned the other day, the only walled off room to begin with will be the bathroom so I'll start there. Jeff's mom is having her bathroom remodeled and trading out her jetted tub for a huge walk in shower, soooo...guess who's getting a big jetted tub in her new bathroom. I am! Thanks Bob and Jackie!! They give the best hand-me-downs ever! We'll probably have a concrete counter top vanity with open shelves below and for our linen cabinet, I'll probably start with using a medium sized book case we built this past winter.

I love concrete counter tops. Jeff made them for a couple of our houses in the past (have I mentioned we move a lot?) Concrete is great. It can be stained or acid washed, sanded to show the aggregate or whatever you put in the mix (shells, colored glass...) It's very durable, versatile and cheap! ...if you do it yourself. Jeff says it's really easy.

The bedroom area will be closed off for privacy with big canvas painters clothes. If I remember right they're about $20.00 for 9'x12' at Harbor Freight. I'll let you know if that's right when we actually get them. I love their natural linen color and because they're canvas they'll be heavy duty curtains.

While we're starting with only four windows and one exterior door on the first floor we'll go ahead and frame in where we want future doors and windows. That way, when the time comes we'll just open up the correct spot on the wall and pop in a new window. I'm sure it will be just as simple as that too. heh heh.

The washer and dryer, also temporarily closed off with canvas, will eventually be in a laundry room next to the bedroom beside a walk in closet. The fireplace (or wood burning stove) will be placed permanently where you see it and with a coil going up the flue, will be a part of our radiant floor heating system. The other source of heat for the system will be from the water heater on the second floor which will eventually be in a small closet of its own, surrounded by a bathroom and two bedrooms. We'll be using some type of ladder style stairs, thanks to little to no building codes, to get to the second floor which will eventually have an open balcony overlooking part of the living room. The stove and refrigerator are in a temporary spot until we build another interior wall to place them on.

The exterior of the house dimensions are 20'x40' (a small 800 square feet) and the roof pitch will be 12/12 which will mean the second floor interior ceiling height will be approx 10' high and slope down to 4' high side walls. (The side walls are in the future so they're not shown on these plans.) Taking into consideration the open space for a balcony, this will gives us roughly 1200 square feet of living space including three bedrooms and two bathrooms. We also have hopes of adding on more space in the future but we have to move in small steps to avoid taking on more debt.

Jeff may have some editing to do or comments to add later but from this woman's point of view, that's about it. As we move along I'll share future floor plans with you too (scanned, not photographed.)

In other Dixon news...check out some of my fresh from the garden produce.

Yes, I'm in Missouri and just now getting veggies from the garden. With our looong, never ending to do list our gardening fell behind and I didn't plant anything until the first weekend in June. I should have started in the middle of April but I cut myself some slack (I am, after all pregnant with #5) and decided that if June is planting season for my sister in Iowa, surely I can plant a few things then too. The shell peas didn't agree with me on that but the other plants are putting better effort into feeding us.
One of the things we're most looking forward to is the Dakota Black popcorn. I hear you can pop it right on the cob!
I know it looks like Sadie's doghouse in the garden but it's actually in a pen behind the garden. My garden is strictly "No Dogs Allowed!"
Here's something we made the other night with the squash and tomatoes...

Pizza! Just put whatever toppings you like on a flour tortilla (precook the meat) and pop it in a 400 degree oven for 15 minutes or so and you have these yummy, little, crunchy pizzas. Don't think squash and pizza doesn't mix because it does! Even the kids love it.



Never mind the small pile of tomato bits on Isaiah's plate. I'm sure those just fell off on their own.