Living Room Feature Wall: Part I

Making the decision to move from the city to the country 3 1/2 years ago was a no brainer for us. The only hard part was leaving our historic home full of character and charm that we had grown to love dearly and had fixed up to make our own. If only we could have just moved the house!

Our home in the country is just a few years old which is awesome (the windows don't leak!), but it lacks the character that we really miss about our old house in the city. Ever since we moved out here, we've been trying to incorporate charm into our home little by little, and have always wanted to create a big built-in shelving unit on the feature wall in our living room.

It took us 3 1/2 years to decide what to do, but finally we are getting started! Phase 1 was creating a focal point in the center of the room with our electric fireplace and some old reclaimed wood David received in exchange for helping out a friend with a project last summer (which made our project super cheap - can't beat that!). 

David was the brains and brawn behind this phase of the project, so I mostly just supervised. He gets all the credit here. It turned out great!

The fireplace is at the very center of the living room/kitchen open area and really anchors the space. We are still deciding on whether or not to put a mantle and artwork up or keep it clean and minimal as is. I think as we go along with the rest of the project we will get a better idea of exactly how we want the fireplace to look.

We are getting started on the next phase right now, but this will take a bit longer since it involves more prep work with the materials. Here's a sneak peek - any guesses as to what it may be?? :)

~Tammy

DIY Muddy Boot Tray

Last week our weather warmed up enough to melt all the ice that had plagued us earlier this month, so things have been quite messy around here. I'm happy that the dangerous ice is gone, but now there is a thick layer of mud to deal with. Which apparently can also be dangerous, as I've found myself sliding and nearly falling on my way down to the chicken coop several times!

Due to the muddy conditions, I knew it was time to bust out the muddy boot tray again.

Photobombing Gizmo strikes again.

Our boot tray is simply a tray filled with river rocks. That's it! I found the plastic tray at Target a while back (it's actually a food serving tray) and the rocks are repurposed from our wedding reception way back when. They were used in the centerpieces on each table and we loved them so much that we saved them after the reception to use again in the future.

By placing the rocks in the tray, the boots can drain and don't just sit in a wet muddy pile all day long. When the river rocks and tray start to get dirty, I just give everything a good scrub down. I put the rocks in a bucket, fill it up with water, and swish the rocks around a few times to remove the caked on dirt. Hose the tray out then place the clean river rocks back in and it's good to go. Easy peasy!

Our tray is located in the entryway right inside the back door, so we can take our dirty boots off right away and not track the mess throughout the house. Even though I do sweep the floors daily, this cuts down on the frequency of mopping. And that is one of my least favorite chores, so I count this simple muddy boot tray as a big win!

~Tammy

Year In Review

Tomorrow marks the two year anniversary of this little blog of ours (you can see our very first ever post here), so as we did last year this time, we thought it would be fun to look back on the past year and see what all we've accomplished. Sometimes it seems like we aren't moving fast enough toward our goals, but seeing a list of all we've achieved in the last year is very encouraging and keeps us excited to continue our journey to self-sufficiency. Here's what we've been up to this past year.

1) Expanded our flock of guineas when one of our hens went broody and hatched out her own keets.

2) Got our first big snow since moving to the country and learned about being prepared for winter storms.

3) Tried our hand at making maple syrup (part 1 and part 2) from our own maple trees.

4) Contributed to our first e-book, Farm to Table through the Year.

5) Developed an easy (and beautiful!) method for drying herbs from our garden.

6) Delved into the world of beekeeping when we brought home our first nuc colony.

7) Added to our flock with five new pullets.

8) Witnessed the magic firsthand of letting a broody hen hatch out her own chicks.

9) Rescued two tiny kittens (Gizmo and Emma) who just appeared in our chicken coop one day.

10) Successfully transplanted fig trees from my grandma's garden and harvested our first figs.

11) Had great luck with planting cucumbers for the first time.

12) Opened an Etsy shop to sell prints of photos taken on our homestead.

13) Grew sunflowers for the first time.

14) Built our own reclaimed wood farmhouse table.

15) Tried a new heirloom variety of tomatoes with great success.

We're really proud of all we've learned this past year and can't wait to see where the next year takes us. We hope you'll continue to follow along in our journey!

~Tammy and David

Reclaimed Wood Farmhouse Table

Over the past couple months, David and I have been working on redoing our kitchen and living room area to make the space feel more like us and reflect our style. Previously, there was an island in the kitchen which I really liked for the storage and counter space, but over time I realized it wasn't functioning well for us. We don't have a dining room, so when we had friends and family over for dinner we all were forced to cram around the island. When time came to rework the kitchen, I knew I wanted to replace the island with a table.

I've always loved the look of a dining table in the kitchen because I think it gives the room such a cozy, inviting, casual feel. I had in mind exactly the kind of table I wanted - a distressed farmhouse table. I shared my idea with David, and thankfully he liked it and agreed to build one for me.

The coolest thing about this table is the wood that we used for the top - it was salvaged from David's old band room! A couple years ago they were remodeling the floor and decided to remove the risers. The risers were framed with this beautiful cedar and David was able to bring the wood home in exchange for his labor in helping to tear apart the old floor.

The wood is full of character, but we decided to distress it just a little bit further and hit it randomly with a hammer and some chains (which turned out to be a lot of fun!). When we put the polyurethane on top to seal the wood, it brought out the imperfections that much more and really enhanced the character of the wood.

For the legs and support beams, we painted them white then distressed them a bit using sandpaper along the edges and other places that would normally show wear over time. I'm really thrilled with how it turned out and now I love my kitchen so much more. We are big fans of old farmhouses, but our house is new construction so we are working on adding in elements of the farmhouse style. This table totally fits the bill!

Since we already had the wood for the table top and supports, we only had to buy four legs which cost us $60. We had the polyurethane and paint on hand as well, so the legs were the only thing we had to shell out some money for. I've seen tables like this sell for well over $300, so I was more than happy it only set us back $60. Especially when the table means more since we worked on it together and it has a personal history. We plan to make a bench with the same wood used on the table top for extra seating as well.

We had some family over last weekend for a birthday party, and the new table worked out really well. We just need to get going on that bench so we have some more seating!

~Tammy

This week in the Homemade Living series, I am joined by Daisy and Mary in posting about how we incorporate homemade items into our lives. Next week Meg, Staci, and Amber will be up. If you have some free time, please check out the other posts in this weekly series!

Shared with Rurality Blog Hop, Home Sweet Home, Down Home Blog Hop, From the Farm Blog Hop, Tweak It Tuesday    

How We Homestead: Our Future Goals

It's hard to believe, but this is the final installment in our five-week series called How We Homestead. I have really enjoyed writing each post for this series and I hope you have enjoyed reading! For the final installment, I'd like to talk about our future plans and goals we have for the homestead. Looking back on the past two years, I've realized that we have accomplished a lot so far, but of course we still have more we'd like to achieve. Here is our vision for the future.

Animals
I am a huge animal lover, and that was a big part of our reason for moving out to the country. I didn't want to be restricted by city ordinances on the types of livestock I could keep, and I also wanted plenty of room for my animals to roam and enjoy their lives. I told David a while back that one of my goals was to have some of each type of fowl, and so far we only have chickens and guineas, so we have a ways to go! Our next addition will be ducks to help with garden pests, and we are hoping to add them next year.

A little further out into the future, we want to get some sheep or goats. To me, there are few things cuter than a tiny goat kid jumping and bouncing around, so I really want to experience that firsthand. And of course it would be wonderful to have goat milk to make my own goat cheese. Yum!

Just visiting with this sweetie, but hopefully I can have one of my own in the future!

Garden
We have adopted a "learn as we go" mentality with gardening, and we still have so much to learn! Each year we are discovering more about our land and soil to help us maximize the efficiency and productivity of our garden. We recently expanded the garden and added lots of raised beds, and we are still working on enclosing the entire area to keep thieves from our harvest.

Gathering fresh lettuce for a salad.

In the future, I hope to keep adding new veggies to our garden each year and grow as much as I can from seed. One of our big long-term goals is to grow enough food each summer to last us year round. I think we are quite a few years out from realizing that goal, but we are working towards it. I need to learn more about food preservation as well so that we can safely store food to get us through the winter months.

House
We love houses with lots of charm (like our first home, a 1914 bungalow in the city) but our current house is really lacking. It is a newer house which is wonderful, but there isn't much in the way of the architectural detail or character we typically go for. We have been saving up our money for a while now, and today just purchased new flooring to go down in our living room and kitchen area (currently there is a commercial style carpet and linoleum). In July, David's mom and stepdad are coming to help us install the floor so we are very excited for that! We want to build bookshelves and make a new mantle for the electric fireplace as well to give the living room some more interest and charm.

A few more years down the road after we have saved up enough money, we'd like to change the outside of the house a bit. On the bottom part, we want to add a natural stone facade to make it look a little more cozy and woodsy. The previous owner was a big John Deere fan, so everything is green! It does fit in well with the landscape of the property, but we prefer brown tones, so we may also look into painting the roof to fit in with the stone on the bottom of the house.

Land
The thing we wish for the most on our property is to have a pond dug behind the house. So far, we've had local conservation agents come out to map and flag the best location for a pond and got several quotes for the work ($18,000 - yikes!). Since it is so pricey, we are looking at other options and trying to figure out how to best make this become a reality.

Back here is where the pond will go (looking out from our back porch).

We had the property logged last summer and it is still a mess (the photo above is pre-logging). Shortly after we moved out here, David made several trails in the woods and we really enjoyed walking on them with Duchess whenever we could. Logging destroyed our trails, so over the next several years we hope to clean some of it up and make some new trails. Right now it seems daunting to tackle a 20 acre pile of sticks and downed trees, but somehow we will make it work!

Of course all of these goals require money, so we would like to be able to do something from the homestead to earn some extra income. Not sure what that will be just yet, but we are always thinking and open to new ideas. In our ultimate dream, we would both be working on the homestead each day and making a living somehow off our land. For now we still have our day jobs, but we are always dreaming for the future.

Four other awesome bloggers are participating in this series as well, so don't forget to check out their posts to read more about where they are in their homesteading journey. You can find them here -

Staci at Life At Cobble Hill Farm
Meg at Little Homestead
Daisy at Maple Hill 101
Amber at Making A Home

Thanks so much for reading and please do let me know if you have any questions or comments. I'd love to hear from you!

~Tammy

Creative Use For An Old Soda Crate

You may remember my post last month on my thrift store finds which included some old soda crates. I told my grandma how excited I was about the crates, and she mentioned that she had a couple soda crates in her basement that I could have. My grandma's house is like a treasure trove of antiques, and lucky for me, she is trying to downsize and declutter. Every time I visit her I come back with a new piece!

The crates she gave me had been previously painted a pretty light green color and had a great weathered look. David had been brainstorming ways to use our new crates and came up with a really clever idea, sort of born out of necessity.

He is always losing his keys and wallet, so we made the crate into a shelf to house everything he needs before heading out the door in the morning so he can just grab and go. He simply screwed in a couple of mug hooks (leftover from our project here) to hang our keys and then secured the whole crate to the wall.

To make it a little prettier, we placed a small vase of flowers on the shelf and displayed a lovely seashell - a birthday gift from my wonderful friend, Sherry over at The Rusty Pearl. Thanks again, Sherry!

I really like how it turned out and was so happy David had the idea. He's definitely my better half :)

~Tammy

Shared with  Tweak It Tuesday, Creative Things Thursday, Sunny Simple Sunday, Eco Kids Tuesday, Home Sweet Home

City To Country

Now that we've been on our homestead for nearly two years, we can reflect (and laugh a little bit) about some of the unexpected differences between city and country life. David and I had both lived in the city our whole lives up until moving to the country in May 2011, so we basically walked into this thing totally blind. It has been an adventure, and some things have been more surprising than others in our transition.

For one, we had to get an address and buy a mailbox!

The house we moved into was just built a few years ago and the previous owner had a PO box in town, so there was no physical mailing address or mailbox. We wanted to get mail delivered to our home, so we had to get an address. It took a while to get all the kinks worked out, but we now have a rural route address. We normally don't have issues getting our mail, but have found that FedEx and UPS don't recognize our address so they won't deliver to us.

We also learned all too quickly about the danger of ticks. Just two weeks after we moved, David was bit by a tick and developed the "bull's eye rash" associated with Lyme disease. Thankfully, if caught early enough and treated with antibiotics, Lyme disease can be prevented. But that really scared us, so we immediately got a flock of guineas to wage war on the ticks. The guineas have worked surprisingly well at reducing the tick population (when they're not busy dust bathing in our herb garden, that is).

We knew before we moved out here that our water would be supplied through a well, but being the city girl that I was and not knowing much about well water, I didn't realize that the water got to our house through an electric pump. Of course this means that if the power goes out, we have no water. Obviously we (and our animals) need water to survive, so this became a huge concern. We could deal with losing the lights and maybe the heat for an extended period of time, but water is the ultimate necessity.

David's mom and stepdad heard about our concerns over the possibility of losing power and being without water, so while they were in town visiting for Christmas, we got a VERY unexpected blessing...

They bought us a generator! We had been talking about buying one after this last power scare and were trying to think of how we could pay for one, but now we don't have to worry about that. I don't think I've ever received such a generous gift and we are so very grateful. Thanks again, Cindy and Ramon!

Have you made the transition from city to country life? What took you by surprise?

~Tammy

Shared with Down Home Blog Hop, Farm Girl Blog Fest  

Old Ladder Turned Display Shelf

I picked my grandma up last week for a family get together, and I arrived at her house pretty early. We had some time to spare, so I did what I so often do at grandma's when I have extra time - I browsed the attic!

Lucky for me, grandma has always been sort of a pack rat (I'm sure that's where I get it) and her attic is filled to the brim with so many treasures. She hates to throw things away because she has a memory attached to nearly every item she owns.

This time exploring the attic I found a fantastic old ladder. Grandma said it was the ladder on bunk beds that my dad used growing up. How sweet is that? I love when an item has a story behind it (I suppose I get that from her as well).

I decided to make a display shelf out of the ladder. I simply leaned it up against the wall and grabbed items I had elsewhere in the house to fill the "shelves."

Our rose bushes are still kicking, so I cut one of the roses off to place on the shelf for a bright pop of color.

For the bottom two shelves, I draped my BHG magazine over one of the rungs with a framed picture my grandma gave me after I took the ladder off her hands. I had to add my little piggy bank on the bottom! We put all our spare change in him. He has a guinea feather for no reason, really. Just because I have so many feathers laying around I want to display them however I can!

I really like how this turned out. The spot over by my closet was looking pretty bare, so this filled it perfectly. I'm sure I'll change out the items from time to time to give it an updated look. Can't wait to decorate it when the holidays roll around!

~Tammy

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Also shared with Repurposed Ideas Weekly , Creative Things Thursday, Tweak It Tuesday

How To Repurpose An Old Chair

A few years back when we were still living at our old house, we bought this great chair at an antique shop. It had been painted white and was perfect for the corner of our bedroom next to the window. We sold a lot of our furniture when we moved since our current place is much smaller than our old house, but we brought along the antique chair.

It had a home on our back porch and was put to good use whenever we had company. Seems that it was used a little too much because it started to break. The back basically fell apart and we tried to fix it to no avail. We brainstormed new uses for the chair, with our original thought to turn it into a flower planter of some sort. That never really panned out, so the other day David suggested we remove the back and use it as a stool.

Seemed like a great idea until we realized the bottom was shot, too! There was a big crack down the middle and it was starting to cave in. Definitely not safe for anyone to sit on. I got frustrated, thinking we'd have to pitch the whole thing. But then, a light bulb went off.

I've been wanting a side table next to the swing for drinks and magazines, and thought this might be perfect. It was just about the right height, but the top was damaged from removing the back. David offered to sand it down and repaint, but I suddenly remembered a little bit of fabric I had picked up a long time ago in the remnant section at Hobby Lobby, and our new side table was born!

I really like how the legs are visible and it still looks a little distressed. I got a deal on mums at Buchheit's while picking up some chicken feed and used some of them to liven up the space (the container we used is recycled from a housewarming gift from our friends Jay and Angela).

It didn't take David long to put the table to good use.

We also have an idea to use the back of the chair in our revamped garden next year. Be on the look out for how we repurpose the back in a future post!

~Tammy

Shared with  Budget Decorating Party, Farm Girl Friday Blog Fest #1, Repurposed Ideas Weekly, The Shabby Nest

Vintage Bathroom Cabinet

Remember my recent post on our Bollinger Mill day trip in which I cryptically gushed about a fabulous piece of furniture I found at an antique store? Well, today I brought it home!

I know it may not be everyone's cup of tea (Dad, I'm looking at you!) but I'm pretty much obsessed with it. The store owner said it would be a great piece to restore, and I kind of shouted, "No! I love it how it is!" It was painted many years ago and the effect of the paint chipping off and rust underneath has given it a great patina.

It has glass sliding doors on the top with two adjustable shelves inside and two pull out drawers on the bottom.

And I got a deal! After watching lots of Cajun Pawn Stars episodes with David's family last night, I was inspired to test my negotiation skills. I scored it for $65 instead of the original price of $80 (which I still think is a steal - truth be told I would've paid well over $100 for it).

Many thanks to David and Ramon for getting it safely from the antique store to my bathroom!

~Tammy

Butterfly Bush Blooms

We planted a butterfly bush on the side of our house last year, and so far this year it has grown like crazy. It looks a little funky, though, because some of the branches are longer than others and some stand straight up while others fall to the ground. David decided it was time to cut it back so it would grow more evenly. It was hard to do because there were a lot of beautiful purple blooms at the tops of the branches.

But I had an idea. There was no way I was going to let those gorgeous, fragrant blooms go to waste! I sorted through each branch and threw the ones that didn't have any blooms into the compost. Made a couple friends in the process. :)

I gathered some of my favorite containers, filled them with the blooms, and placed them in as many rooms as I could!

They smell sooooo good. I love having fresh flowers in the house and it's even better when they are gathered from my own back yard!

~Tammy

Our Quick (and Free!) Kitchen Update

I love coffee mugs. And I don't discriminate. I like all shapes, sizes, and colors. I've seen some super cute kitchens that have coffee mugs hanging from the cabinets, so I thought that would be the perfect way to display some of my favorite mugs.

From L to R:

1) Our mission statement! This is probably my favorite quote ever, so when I saw it on a coffee mug at Starbucks I had to have it. "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined." - Thoreau
2) My Missoni for Target spoil! Kind of obsessed with this one at the moment.
3) A mug I painted! Can't see it, but it says "coffee" on the front.
4) This should require no explanation at all. Troy and Abed in the Morning! This is actually David's mug I got for him last Christmas.
5) A cute mug David's mom made for us one Christmas. It has pictures from our honeymoon on it!
6) Another one of my absolute favorites - handmade by my amazing friend Holly!

The mug hooks were free since David found them lying around. All we had to do was drill a pilot hole into the underside of the cabinet and screw the hook right in.

I used to be much more minimalist in my kitchen design aesthetic. Always thinking less is more. I still do, to some degree, but a kitchen can feel kind of bland and impersonal without some of your favorite items out in the open. It just makes it feel more cozy and home-y when you add your personal touches.

We have mostly been working on the outside of the house since moving in this May, so it was nice to do something on the inside. We love how it turned out!

~Tammy