Welcome!

In February of 2009, my husband and I bought our first home located on a few acres in Johnson, Vermont. We live here with our dog, Ollie, two cats: Elvis and Atticus, six Nigerian Dwarf goats: May, Chutney, Poppy, Juniper, Willow, and Jokers Wild, and about fifteen laying hens. And to top it all off we welcomed our daughter, Isabel, into the world on January 11th, 2011.

We're slowly updating our 1850's farmhouse while steadily working towards a healthy, meaningful, self-sufficient life together.

This blog details our endeavors along with our successes and failures- all in good fun. Thanks for stopping by, hope to see you again soon!

May

May
May and I enjoying some sunshine

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I gotta get caught up!

Lovingly Posted by Melissa Monday, May 18, 2009

OK. SO. We have the big house inspection tomorrow to satisfy all the VHFA (Vermont Housing Finance Agency) requirements that were set when we closed on the house. We are officially done today (assuming that the guys from the gas company really DID come by to install the heater in the kitchen). So here's the breakdown.

We updated the electrical wiring...fun fun.
We had the flashing around the chimney re-done (even though the ROOFERS said it looked fine)
Kyle screwed down the newel posts on our railing for the main staircase for added stability...
I extended the railing at the top of the stairs... (sorry, no pictures for these things at this moment)


Put in some new stairs to the basement:

This is Kyle's brother-in-law, Chris going down the ladder after they removed the old stairs.








And this is the end result...very sturdy.


















Took out the carpet samples from one of the bedrooms and had new carpet installed:




crap- thats before...I don't currently have an after- I'll get it later.















We installed a support beam in the really wide threshold between our living room and family room:













this beam is now painted white so it doesn't stand out so much...

















What else...oh, we took down the "unsafe" portion of the shed:

before....


















after Kyle removed the walls...

Kyle's truck...tied to the support beams (after Kyle cut all the studs with a chainsaw...)










This is a picture I took, running like hell to get out of the way when I thought the little birch trees were going to fall on me...the shed fell by the way...you can KIND of see it there on the left of the picture...














See. This is Kyle next to the fallen shed...after this we had a HUGE mess of wood, etc when Kyle continued to tear it apart using an excavater...and there was a fire...a couple of them actually. One of them was WAY too big.

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