Painting on the Walls
27 September 2018 • Crafts, Home
When we first bought our house the entire thing was painted this dark salmon colour (ugh!). We ended up painting all the walls in the entire house white. Not even "cloud white" but straight-outta-the-can eggshell white and I loved it! We have a very...hmmm....eclectic (?) style so having white walls means there is no colour scheme and everything we put on the walls just magically works. It's great!
You know what else is great about white walls? It's very easy to paint on them. I don't know why it took me so long to get to the idea of painting directly on the walls. When I first learned about Maud Lewis, oh man, was that ever an eye opener for me. "This woman just paints on every surface of her tiny house?" I was so inspired! I remember watching Maudie and mentioning to Dave "Wow, I really want to paint on our walls now" and he (surprisingly) said "yeah, go for it!"
So when I had the house to myself for a few hours I just did it. I stared at the wall with my paints on a plate, totally second guessing the idea (what if it looked bad?!) and I just started painting. I painted some flowers by the coat rack and loved it so much I did some above the light switch as well. I kept telling myself, "well if it's weird or Dave hates it I'll just paint it white again".
This planter I saw on Pinterest
Ooko I copied from a library book
I don't have any tattoos but people who have them are always saying you get one and you immediately want another. I feel this way about painting on my walls. I'm itching to do something in kitchen now...
The Current Brood
21 September 2018 • Chickens
I've realized that so much has changed since the last time I wrote about the chickens! Here's a little update if you're curious :)
Sadly, we lost one of hens this summer. Good ole Frida. By far our favourite hen! The only one that would stand still when the kids came near and let them pick her up. She got something called an impacted crop which I guess is pretty common for chickens. We knew that it would eventually kill her so when we got a text from our house sitter while on vacation we weren't too surprised. Iris was very sad though. When she's overtired she'll still sob "oh I miss Frida! She was my best chicken!". Poor girl!
To be honest I'm quite surprised that we haven't lost any of the other hens to predators! I've jinxed it now but we live pretty close to a conservation area so we've kind of prepared ourselves for something to snatch a hen. So far so good!
In happy hen news, this past spring we got two baby chicks! Iris saved up her allowance for months and was so excited to buy her own "babies". We let her name them and she went with Dolly (Parton; Jolene is one of her favourite songs) and Betty (if Harvey was a girl he was going to be named Betty so she heard the name a lot. Guess that name's out for our next kid!). And oh man, I will forever get baby chicks instead of pullets now! The temperament of Betty and Dolly is so different than the others which we got as full grown hens. Betty and Dolly will follow us around out back, aren't nervous around Gus, and let the kids pick them up so easily. Dream chickens! Plus their colours! So beautiful!
In terms of eggs, we only get about 3 eggs a day from the 5 hens. Which I mean, if you were doing it for the eggs isn't the best lol. Factory egg layers are typically killed after a year since their production goes down so much but our chickens are more pet chickens now I suppose. I remember before we got them Dave and I thought "well we'll just get them butchered when they stop laying and use them as soup chickens" but then you name them, the kids (and let's be honest, Dave and I) begin to adore them and you can't possibly imagine having them killed regardless of how little eggs they are producing. Pretty soon we'll be running an eggless chicken nursing home ;)
This time last year we we're getting nervous about the coming winter and if the hens would survive the cold. This year we have another whole year of experience under our belts and are confident that everything will be just fine.
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We buy all our hens from this amazing farm called Happy Hens Heritage Farm. It's a bit of a drive but the owner, Marina, is so kind and helpful. She gave us a little how-to booklet when we picked up our chicks and has (happily!) answered many of our questions for us as we venture into this chicken adventure. Highly recommend her farm if you're looking into chickens, especially interesting breeds.
Hello Again!
14 September 2018 • Family
Hello again! I've really been feeling the urge to write and blog again lately so I thought I'd pop in here and spruce things up a bit :)
The past few weeks have been very full around here. Dave went back to work, our wood stove got installed (!!), we did a tiny reno (read: put up shelves) in our kitchen, were handed down Dave's moms piano that had to get moved in (!!) and the kids and I are settling into a different routine with just the three of us during the day now.
We've been spending lots of time at home lately. I've been trying really hard to let the kids be and what a difference this has made in our days! Being the one staying at home with them, I've always felt this pressure to be doing something with them all the time and really planning out our whole day. Which, surprise, left me feeling like I had no time to do my own thing and the kids were constantly nagging me to entertain them.
I hesitate to use the word ignore, but essentially for most of the day now I just get on with my own things and let them be. If they're safe, and not destroying the house (the bar is low here people lol) then I just let them be. Even if that means they've pulled out all the crayons and dumped them on the carpet to find the perfect shade of pink, I just let them be. To be honest, sometimes I just have to leave the room because I find it so hard not to interrupt them and shout "Gah! Don't do that!".
What a change! I've noticed the kids will play with each other so much more, and they've become so much more engaged in their own little worlds and activities. It's so lovely to see! Plus I've been able to read SO MUCH more and work away on my own projects. Instead of waiting for the kids to go to bed to have some "me time" I just do it during the day.
What a revelation!
This makes feel so optimistic about the coming winter and spending more time together inside :)
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This book was really inspiring to back off and let the kids be : The Idle Parent by Tom Hodgkinson
Around Here
17 January 2018 • around here, Family, Home
Oh hello! Long time no see! Just thought I'd check in and share a little about what's going on around here....That makes it seem like I have big news or something. A new baby?! We bought miniature goats?! Nope nope nope nothing like that.
At the end of the fall Dave and I pulled the trigger and bought a wood burning stove! We had a bit of money saved up and decided we could afford a small renovation. Our top choices were either a dishwasher or a wood burning stove. Although a dishwasher would have probably been the more practical choice there's something about a wood burning stove that just screams COZY and HYGGE that a dishwasher simply can't compare with. We have to wait till the spring to get it installed in the living room so we aren't enjoying it this winter but we're stoked to have it for next winter! We live in a small bungalow so we do all of our living on one floor of the house so we'll be able to use the stove to (most of the time) heat the house in the winter which, come on! Doesn't that sound amazing?! The house will always smell like woodsmoke and chopped wood *swoon*. Our modern Little House on the Prairie dreams are pretty much all coming true.
Now that winter has definitely settled in I'm starting to feel the dreaded cabin fever. Over the holiday break we didn't play outside once because there were extreme cold warnings every day and now it seems like we're stuck in the rut of playing indoors most days now. Ugh! Must get outside every day!
The chickens live on! Near the end of the summer Dave shingled the coop roof and added a small extension to the back to give the hens a bit more room. We were wondering how they would do in the winter but they've been really great so far! Surprisingly they come outside and walk around in the snow every day and Rosa is still laying an egg every other day or so. We haven't had to add a heat lamp or anything, but we do have to bring the water in every night and fill it with boiling water in the morning so it doesn't freeze as fast.
Trying very hard to fully enjoy and appreciate the winter and not wish it away for spring but man, it can be hard! In the meantime we've been drinking lots of tea, reading so many books (I recently took up reading Anna Karenina and there is nothing like Russian literature for the wintertime!), and Iris just started Forest School for the winter semester so there's that!
Hope you're all enjoying your winter :)
The Cob Oven!
1 October 2017 • Cob Oven, Make
It's done! It's usable! We've used it! It works!
This thing was a mighty labour of love but we couldn't be more pleased with the results! It's a little unrefined at this point. We didn't get around to doing the final finishing layer quite yet, but it's 100% usable as it is right now, and I'm A OK with that.
The final oven step (everything above the base) took us a full morning/afternoon with no kids around. It was by far the most satisfying but nerve wracking part. Would this dirt I dug up actually hold up as building material?! Will it collapse once we remove the sand form?! But alas, it all worked out! The walls are now about 12 inches thick and even when the fire has been burning for a few hours the outside is still cool enough to touch.
It takes about 2-3 hours to heat up the oven so it's hot enough for pizza. Which seems like a lot of wood to use but again our neighbours have been amazing giving us scrap wood so we haven't had to buy any yet. Usually if we're having pizza for dinner I'll start a fire around 2 and throw a few pieces of wood in it every 20 minutes or so when it starts to burn down. Once we're ready to cook the pizzas I use a metal hoe and either remove some of the ash/coals into a metal bucket or push them to the back of the oven. Then, using a wet mop-like tool Dave fashioned out of a scrap fabric and a wooden pole, I'll quickly mop the floor of the hearth to clean up any ash. Then you just slid your pizza right on to the hearth and cook it! It took a while to get the hang of it but now I feel pretty confident making upwards of 10-12 pizzas depending how many people we're feeding.
Words cannot describe how amazing it was to eat the first (albeit slightly charred) pizza from the cob oven. Pizza has never tasted so good! And fast! The first few pizzas only take about a minute to cook.
Our next goal is to build a removable door for the oven so we can start baking bread in it. For bread baking you need to remove all the ash and coals from the oven before you bake. Plus you need a door to keep the residual heat inside. I recently took a sourdough bread making class at Little City Farm (where they bake their bread in a cob oven too) so I'm really excited to try that next.
Some Final Thoughts
- I know I've said this throughout the entire process but I cannot believe that we built this! Using stuff we mostly found and with dirt in our own backyard! It has really opened my eyes up to what we can do if we only take the time and just start
- Our cob oven took all summer to complete but I would say that is 100% due to having two little kids around. Most of the building took place either during naps, once the kids went to sleep or when Dave could fully take on kid duty to free me up to concentrate on the oven. If you don't have kids you could probably get this done in 2 weekends
- I think in total we spent around $150 for everything, not bad!
I'm thrilled and slightly relieved that this project is now complete. It will be so nice to enjoy the oven and move on to a new project :)
I didn't get into the specifics of how we built our oven (it would take forever) but if you are interested in making one of these for yourself you have to check out Kiko Denzer's book. Ours is totally covered in mud and well worn now. Or shoot us an email! We'd be happy to chat more about it :)
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