Now that the holidays and filming of the cookbook have wrapped up, are able to sit properly with my head straight and give you a long awaited update on the farm. I was going to do it before, only seriously He underestimated how long they would take movement and actual unwary. (Like wow. I was Very Ambitious and inaccurate in my packaging estimates * and * disimalting.) And then it was thanksgiving, then Christmas and then the cooking book concert. In addition, there are still dozens of boxes in the basement and garage. But you know, I feel like it always takes a while to really settle in a new place, so I’m not in a hurry. At this point I am of the field which is beautiful live In a space for a while before disimalizing everything, so you can have an idea of how you move and use every room and organize furniture and all the pieces accordingly.
I may have mentioned it in a previous post, but we were Finally Able to sell our home in Portland in late October and had to move by 1 November to 17:00. And on November 1st at 17:05, we were loading the last random pieces of our things in my parents’ car (my cars and Jeremy cars were already full to the edge). We had done the entire “Movers + Moving Truck” thing at the beginning of that week, but we overwhelmed how much of the last small scraps from the garage we would be able to insert ourselves in our car, so it was a last minute hail to that i My parents were able to guide the neighboring city and help us adapt all the latest random things. You never have Truly Know how many things you have until you have to put them in boxes and transport them around. Yikes! I hope this is the last time we move, practically never.
And so we guided our enveloping gravel road, downloaded the latest boxes in the rain and we collapsed on the bed. Even if it was a really crazy day, that first night sleeping in our bedroom on the farm was the most system and relaxed I tried AS long. No more mortgage questions, no more domestic exhibitions, no more decisions to be made on the details of the farm. We did it! We were Here! Inside the house we had been imagining and working for years. Honestly, I don’t think I have ever been more proud of anything than the fact that we have been able to build this house.
Which seems like a suitable time to thank the people ** truly surprising ** who have contributed to making this house a reality:
- Our incredible manufacturer Philip da Construction of hainline To finish the house beautifully and with budget
- My friend + interior designer Sam hit For the Warm + welcoming interior design
- Our landscape designers Resilience design To help with all external planning
- Our architect Dylan Lamar To design a house so efficient from an energy point of view
- Fantastic women a Churchill mortgagewho were there with us from the construction loan to the final mortgage
So once we all moved, we started working on small projects inside the house. Lo Sowww. He is brand new: what could be done more to do ?? Well, once you are physically In A space, you start imagining little design or furniture things that could be beautiful in some places. With the Build, I had difficulty imagining what the spaces would have done Touch As until they had actually finished and I was standing inside them. So now that we are here, all those little ideas are popping up and it was * really * fun immersing yourself in some internal projects during the cold season 🙂
The first project we worked on was to finish the suite for guests in the basement. We wanted to add a little shutting for beads for a welcoming sensation and some coverings for the window windows, since we hope to host short -term guests in space. It has its private external entrance, but we had to create a gravel path that connected the entrance to the road. Unfortunately, all the ground around the house is Potters’ clay, and since it is the season of the rains, it attaches to everything like glue. So you can’t really walk on it when she is wet without forming a mass of multiple thumbs of sticky mud on the bottom of the shoes, which has made the gravel path a huge priority. Now it’s all done and we have a path that crosses the whole outside of the house in a circle, so now all four external doors have a gravel path that makes them accessible. Jeremy has done most of this, since I’m not strong enough to displace and transport gravel. But we have invested in an electric wheelchair that made the movement of the gravel much easier. And if you have big landscape projects you are planning that involve rocks or sand, I highly recommend you to get one. He certainly saved Jeremy’s back! And we brought our landscape specialists out with a controlled burning team (Jesse + Spark) to burn the large cutting stack that was in front of the house. We will plant the vegetable garden and a native grass lawn where the pile was in the spring. There are about 13 others of those batteries around the farm, so we will dismantle some of them in the coming years since they are a rather large danger for fire in the dry season.
The second largest project we worked on this winter is the configuration of my photo studio. I wanted to be able to immerse myself to work as soon as possible, so I started painting the room as soon as we moved with a delicious Bauwerk Lime Wash blue paint. If you are not familiar with Limewash, it is basically a non -toxic water -based mineral paint that is made with natural pigments and it is essentially what the house paint was like a few hundred years ago. It was the first time that I used Limewash Paint and I absolutely loved it, so I will definitely use it for other projects at home. I will immerse myself more deeply in my process and how I designed the photo studio in a dedicated blog post, but you can take a look at how it came out above!
And we also dug and filled the bearing for the sauna. We bought This External barrel sauna for our old house years ago and we brought it with us when we moved, but we had to disass up to do it. So the bits came out in the garage occupying a lot of space until a couple of weeks ago when we bit in this project. Jeremy dug a square bearing in the clay and made a wooden frame, and then we put the gravel to us and hit it. So we added sand and uniform and cushioned * that * downwards, so we added concrete floors, we spaced them evenly and poured sand between them. And it curled it off a little. And finally, he was ready for us to reassemble the sauna (cheers!) Resembling the sauna was a million times easier than making the pad to sit, but at least he will have a stable dry place to sit on. And it seems incredible at that point with the view through the window. It is also right for the suite for guests so you can easily access it. Subsequently we are planning to build a little wall and a privacy roof on it so that they have a place to take off their guise and jump.
Finally, we had our first snow here only a week ago! I really Truly I love snow. I love how bright it is, how it makes everything clean, as it absorbs the noise and makes everything so quiet, the way it creaks under your feet when it tramples on it, as a giant sprinkling a pile of sugar in powder over the landscape … It’s just the best. (It also helps to make enough food that we didn’t need to worry about driving until it melted a little. And it’s a rarity here, so we must not face it for weeks and weeks like Midwest). One thing I have not thought of until After He snowed how easy it is also to see animals against the snow and see where they walked through their footprints. We were locked up last week with our binoculars watching deer, hawks and calve eagles and was so fascinating! (I have to get a longer telephoto lens so that you can photograph them better from inside the haha house.)
Since we moved, we have held a pair of binoculars upstairs and a pair of under so that we can look at the animals in vivid detail without frightening or disturbing them. They are only so beautiful and seeing them makes you really appreciate the beauty and complexity of nature (and life in general, for that matter). We haven’t seen a bear yet, but we Done Look at a black bear last year and then again a couple of years earlier, so they certainly live in the area. And don’t boast or anything else, but I have been Pintty Good to identify animal excrements. I found Bear Scat from spring, Bobcat Scat on the road and also Coyote Scat on the road! In addition, many deer excrements (obviously). Due to all predators in circulation and how small our dogs are, we ended up getting them These Coyote jackets which help to discourage predators. And of course we are always with them when they are out (no longer let them go out in the courtyard alone to become trivial). It was a wonderful surprise to see how happy they are here too. Sequoia, our oldest dog on 13/14 (he is a refuge puppy, so we are not 100% of his age), has been much more active and playful since we moved here. As, Everything is fine * Single* Day that sounds, which he did not use in our old place. And both love walks so much, and the fact that they are out of the leash and can run quickly as they want (moreover all the strange animal animal illuminates their brain like a crazy, I’m sure!)
Our next big project is to obtain the fence of deer next month for the future vegetable garden, and then we will do all the raised beds after that and, hopefully, we will be ready to transplant the end of April. I will share more on the garden while we also dig in that project. It will be quite wild to get everything from scratch, but I’m really excited for this! There is nothing better than starting from a clean blackboard. And I am thinking of sharing posts on each of the rooms of the house while we finish moving and putting everything in place (I know there were not a lot of internal photos in this post, but I hope you liked the winter outside!)
Well, for now it’s all, dear reader. Thank you for reading my Ramblings + who follow my journey, it means a lot. «Until the next time my friend!
