Home at Winshaw

We have chickens!

Well. We did it.

We promised ourselves over and over that we wouldn’t get any farm animals until we were completely set up and ready for them. But…a few weeks ago a deal on a flock of 30 young laying hens came up unexpectedly that was just too good to pass up. So, we picked up the chickens but didn’t have a house or pen for them yet.

For now they are spending the nights in our stock trailer, while Jordan works on completing their permanent house.

Marian is absolutely thrilled to have chickens. Her big fun in life now is letting the chickens out in the morning, feeding them and collecting scraps for them, and locking them up in the evening and telling them ‘night -night’. Whenever we hear a chicken clucking outside or the rooster crowing, she has to repeat the noise with great enthusiasm!

We got two breeds of chickens – Barred Rocks and Buff Orpingtons, and a couple that are a mix thereof. I really like both of these breeds so I’m happy about that!

We’ve had quite a time hunting eggs, sometimes we have found big nests, or a few here and there, but overall the chickens are being very sneaky. When we have their house completed we are hoping they will lay there so we won’t have to hunt so much!

Jordan began on the chicken house as soon as we knew we were getting the chickens. Here he is digging holes for the posts.

Marian is quite fascinated with the whole process. We went out and watched the progress whenever possible.

Some sweet moments with my babies.

My heart is melting….

Ok – back to chicken house progress. Here are the posts in the ground, with a birds-eye view from our upstairs porch of the layout.

Floor joists in.

Jordan had a lot of bed orders to catch up on at this point, so one day he hired a friend from down the road to keep working on the framing.

Jordan finishing up the roof.

The lap siding begun. Oh – also, I forgot to mention that Jordan also had to fell trees and saw out the lumber fresh for the chicken house, as we were out of wood. (don’t I have a handy husband? I’m not a bit proud of him or anything…:)

More siding on. I got to help with this part as Jordan needed another pair of hands to hold the end of the boards steady while the other end was nailed.

Looking good!

Marian enjoyed exploring the new structure!

The flooring going in…

Marian loves the chicken door!

I think its looking so good! I can’t wait to see it finished.

The chickens are happily awaiting their new home – pecking and ranging all over the pastures around our house.

One happy girl!

Marian likes to spend time with the flock, just watching them and trying to get a chance to pet one. This picture of her and her baby doll sitting with the chickens cracks me up.

Hope to be back for an update soon with pictures of our newly finished chicken house!

The World’s Most Amazing Clothesline

A few weeks back Jordan made me this beautiful, sturdy clothesline. I was so excited to start using it! I’ve had little cords tied from porch post to porch post to dry clothes, so this is a colossal improvement in our laundry system.

The posts are from big cedar trees that Jordan logged and sawed last summer, set deep into the ground with concrete. It has six strands of wire – so plenty of room to hang out the entire laundry hamper!

Here it is in action. Notice the full sun?? So nice. My little porch clothesline was in shade almost all the day, so this is another wonderful improvement. I love how the sun fades away stains, and of course speeds up drying time.

This may seem like a simple thing – but it makes me really happy! Marian loves coming out to ‘help’ me hang clothes – she hands me clothespins and says ‘thank you!’ every time. (I suspect she thinks the pins are called ‘thank yous’!)

What things have been making you happy lately?

Bookshelves

Ever since we started planning our house back in 2012, when we were just engaged, the design for the sitting room included window seats and built in bookcases in two corners.

Because we are still finishing our house, we just haven’t gotten to start on the finishing touches yet, such as bookcases and window seats. However, since it had been two and a half years since we married and I moved up here to Tennessee with all of my beloved books boxed up, we decided it was time to unpack them at last!

We got two spacious bookshelves to house our books for now, courtesy of Craigslist. I love having the shelf space – and unpacking my books was like discovering old friends again! It’s been great to have so much reading material handy. (it’s also been great to give the books a home that were formerly stacked all over the living room!)

It might seem like a small thing, but these Craigslist shelves have been a big blessing, and I am so thankful to have them!

I had so much fun decorating the top of the shelf in the sitting room with some crockery, dried flowers, and some of my Blue Calico china.

This second set of shelves went into my sewing room. It’s wonderful having all my sewing reference and history books within reach from my sewing machine! It also provides a place for some of my bigger art paper and notebooks. The sewing room is much more organized now.

plenty of shelves = happy housewife. :)

Summertime Moments

We’ve been busy this summer – the weeks have just seemed to fly by. Here is a smattering of pictures (in no particular order) from our summertime activities…

A good day in the summer always starts out early….isn’t this a gorgeous sunrise?

When Jordan is planning to mow with a scythe, he tries to do it first thing in the morning while the dew is still on the grass.

The kids would hardly sit still for a picture, but they were cute none-the-less.

Dishes sure haven’t taken a summer break.

At least I have a good helper.

Picnic food!

The green, green woods

Alan helps Dada figure out a floor plan for the future shop.

Marian poses on the front steps after a wagon ride

I’ve done a few little sewing projects recently – this was was turning a stack of beautiful old printed hankies into bunting. I plan to decorate with it in the sewing room, and also use it for birthday parties and other such celebrations.

Alan looking ridiculously adorable while we hang out on the top porch.

Any day it’s cool I snatch the chance to fire up the stove and do some bulk baking. When we have our summer kitchen built I won’t have to wait for a cool spell to have my wood stove going. However, in the mean time I’m very thankful for my crock pot and electric skillet!

Marian napping with her stuffed beaver

Alan really knows how to rest.

Marian in her berry picking attire.

I found this sweet scene upstairs one afternoon. Jordan and Marian had both been taking a nap on our bed, then Marian apparently woke up and decided Dad’s back looked like a more comfortable spot!

Reorganized my kitchen shelves and pantry storage one day. Took SO long, but was so worth it.

How are we supposed to STAND the cuteness of this squishy baby!!?? He’s so adorable he makes my heart hurt.

Marian swinging with Grandad while we were in Texas earlier in the summer.

Well, there’s a little peek into our summer. I’ve got lots more pictures, but those had better wait for another post.

Porch Railings

Over the last few months, we’ve been trying to move forward on the finishing of the house. We still have lots to do. In the last two months or so, with the help of some dear friends, we were able to pretty much complete the porch railings for both stories of the house.

The railings were constructed of Eastern Red Cedar wood, which we logged last year from a place that had had their whole stand of cedar trees blown down by a tornado a couple of years ago. The logs were sawed into lumber on the sawmill.

Fresh cut red cedar is so brightly colored.

Our two busy ‘helpers’ caught in the act dumping out and mixing up the various boxes of screws -again.

A new set of front steps also had to be constructed as the porch railings were being built. These were made from oak.

Cutting the treads for the steps:

Fitting the treads into slots cut into the side pieces, known as “stringers”…

The railings coming together upstairs.

The Cedar wood has lots of character!

…and finished! The house looks very different externally with the addition of the railings. I think it makes the house look bigger.

Looks so good! It also makes the porch space so much more useable, especially upstairs, where the porch wasn’t safe enough to really enjoy and use much before the railings.

The two small gates that will close this opening on the first-story porch still need to be hung. Other than that, the railings are all done.

How to Construct an Off Grid Shower with a 5-gallon bucket

The 5-gallon bucket Shower

So, I did this project back in march, and this post should have gone up then… but, better late than never, right? :)

For awhile now, we’ve had our claw-foot tub in the bathroom, with the drain plumbed in. But having no running hot water yet (and running cold water in only one place in the house so far- the kitchen sink), we have not been able to take showers, only baths, and that’s not terribly easy. We have to heat water on the stovetop or in a big cast-iron kettle outside, and then haul it to the tub in pots or buckets. It takes a lot of hot water to get a decently-deep bath in our large tub, too.

We got the “bucket bath” down to an art, too. The advantage to the bucket bath is that it takes much less hot water than filling the tub (it’s also not a real bath- and therefore not as awesome :).

Bucket bath: set a 5-gallon bucket in the tub, and fill with water at the desired temperature. Then, using a small pot or other vessel as a scoop, pour the water over yourself, being careful not to run out of water before finishing washing. Sound awkward? It is. And that cast iron tub is normally cold when you sit in it. :P

Back in march, I made the time to put us a temporary shower rig together. Here’s what I came up with.

Here’s the hardware I used. At the top of the first picture are the pulleys I attached to the bucket and ceiling, for the lifting rope to be run through. I wound up not using the showerhead, as the weight of the water in the bucket did not create enough water pressure for the head to work. The water just sorta trickled out. I intended to try to make or locate a showerhead that would work with the low pressure, but never got it done, and we have pretty much gotten used to just a solid stream of water. Had I known this was going to happen, I would not have used the shiny tube either, but used cheaper PVC pipe instead. I used a 5-gallon plastic bucket for the water reservoir.

Note the “o” ring at right, used with simple threaded PVC fittings to attach the assembly to the bucket, and seal the joint. Works great, and the rig doesn’t leak a drop.

Fittings, 1/2″ PVC. Left to right: female thread/female glue, pipe, double female glue ball valve, pipe, female glue/male thread, rubber “O”-ring, female thread/female glue. All is assembled except for the last fitting (next photo), and the male threaded end w/o-ring is inserted into a properly-sized hole drilled in the bucket, near the bottom. The last fitting, the coupler with female threads in one end, is then screwed by hand onto the male threads from the inside of the bucket, clamping the assembly firmly to the bucket.

Here, I removed one end of the wire bail on the bucket in order to slip the eye of the pulley directly onto the bucket.

Here’s the bucket fitted with the shower.

There are two pulleys. One is a single pulley, while the other is a double. The rope is tied to the bucket handle, goes up to the ceiling and through one side of the double pulley, back to the bucket and through the single pulley, and back through the other side of the ceiling pulley, with the free end of the rope hanging where it can be easily reached. The multiple pulley system is absolutely necessary in my opinion, as a full bucket of water would be very hard to lift with a single pulley. The more pulleys you have, the easier it is to lift the weight.

Kinda fuzzy, but you can kinda see the rope and pulley setup here, along with the shelf that the bucket sits on after it is hauled up.

The shower works pretty well, and certainly much better than the old “bucket bath”. A full bucket can give a really good shower for one person, and we can actually both get a pretty good shower only using 1/2 a bucket each. It doesn’t take a lot of hot water to make a warm enough bucket of water, either- 4 to 6 quarts of near-boiling water seems to be plenty, usually. So there you have it- one man’s 5-gallon-bucket shower. :)

Mommy’s Helper

Something I have been working on with Marian since she was…goodness – six months old…is being a cheerful worker. Work is a good thing! Definitely not something to constantly escape from, or to shoo children away from until they are ‘older’. While I want Marian’s childhood to be as full of as much fun and joy as she can hold, I also want her to take her responsibilities seriously from a young age, and be able to work cheerfully and efficiently. Since before she could crawl, she was sitting on the kitchen table in her little bumbo seat ‘helping’ me cook. When she could stand, she was right beside me in her little wagon or high chair to ‘help’ me wash dishes or stir up cornbread.

Once when she was crawling (but not walking yet) She was standing by the couch watching me change Alan’s diaper and I folded up the old diaper, handed it to her and asked her to take it to the trash for me. (I didn’t know what to expect as I had never asked her to do something like that, or showed her where the trash can was located) Marian looked at me with wide eyes for a minute, then she dropped on all fours and crawled over to the trash can, dragging the diaper along with her, then stood up and threw it away! Apparently she understood a lot more than I had given her credit for! After that incident I start looking for thing she could actually do for me – fetching little things, or throwing things in the trash, or toddling across the room to give Da-da something. She seems to relish being a ‘big helper’, and it sure keeps away boredom while I am having to do my housework. Keeping her busy along side me is much easier than trying to make her amuse herself ‘having fun’ with her toys.

Here she is helping me put up strawberries in freezer bags, just as busy as can be!

She is only 17 months old now, and already helps in quite a few little ways. I am hoping that by the time she is 5 or 7 or so she will be quite the competent little helper (for real – right now her ‘help’ takes much long than me just doing it myself – but she has to practice sometime!) I think little kids are capable of much more than they are allowed to do most of the time – I don’t want Marian to do anything unsafe or unsuitable for a child, but I am going to keep asking her to stretch and grow her abilities as she works with me in the real world, learning real skills, and not consign her to the world of playtime and cartoons until she is ‘old enough’ to actually help.

Now – does this work? Does this ‘method’ help children into being cheerful workers? I honestly don’t know – I’ve never done this before, so I suppose I won’t know what worked and what didn’t for about another 10 years….but, I certainly hope so! I trust that the Lord will bless the efforts dedicated to him, and show me how to train up my children.

(Sorry about the photo quality on these- Most were taken on my phone while I had soapy hands from washing dishes or something!)

Atlanta’s Antique Woodstove

This is my cook stove. It is an antique from about 1899, designed to burn wood or coal. It was make by ‘Atlanta Stoveworks’ in Atlanta, GA. I bought the stove for $350 when I was 15 years old, at an estate sale.

My Granny actually found it first – she was at the sale and called to say she had found ‘my’ stove – since my name was written right across the door! Once I saw it I just fell in love with it. It sat on our back porch for about seven years, we cooked on it occasionally, even did some canning one summer. I did dream of using it for everyday in my own home in the future. (of course I thought I would never be able to find a guy who would want to live old fashioned enough to have a wood cookstove in the house!) Well – I did find that guy – or he found me, or something. At any rate – I was actually going to be able to use my beloved little stove!

Before the wedding, when we were moving all of my belongings up from Texas, Jordan did some cleaning up on the body of the stove – it was covered in old rust, dirt, and thick paint (the wrong kind). He ground all of it off to make it useable. We used it in that condition, clean but bare, and sans warming oven for the first two years in our house.

I had been anxious to get it restored and looking ‘pretty’. It cooked just fine – but I think all you ladies will agree with me that its much better for morale too cook on something cute as well as utilitarian? Anyhow – this spring Jordan finished the restoration project, and I couldn’t be happier with it! He cleaned and brushed every part – and then took apart and painted everything with high-heat black satin paint.

The before pictures:

The original warming oven brackets had been broken and then patched at some point, so Jordan hand-forged some pretty new scrolls to take their place! The white enamel doors on the warming shelf had gotten damaged as well. We may some day replace it with new enamel – but for now we decided to just paint them with white gloss, which turned out looking great.

Jordan painted everything but the stove top. This he polished with stove black. We will have to re-black it from time to time.

And – the finished piece! I’m so, so happy to finally have my little stove in my kitchen as I’ve been envisioning it for so long!

Don’t those scrolls look nice?

I’ve been using my handy warming oven to make yogurt. It makes a great place for bread to rise, too!

I feel quite fancy cooking on such a pretty piece!

I’m so proud of Jordan for doing such a beautiful job.

Homestead Progress

Well folks, it’s time for an (EXTREMELY overdue) update. :) We are slowly making some visible progress around the homestead. Here are a few pictures showing some of the things we’ve had going this spring.

The next three photos show the area of our yard that has been covered in leftover lumber, wood scraps, and metal roofing (originally used to cover the stacks of lumber) since the initial construction of the house. This has been what Jordan calls a “colossal mess” for the two years we’ve been married. Now the mess is cleaned up, and the area is closer to ready for it’s use as yard and gardens. Jordan’s brother Jeremiah was hired to do much of the work of cleanup, while Jordan worked on other pressing projects.

The lumber was sorted, and some moved and re-stacked, some given to friends, and the culls and scraps cut and split into firewood for our little cookstove. The “cooking wood” section of the woodshed is full to overflowing.

Here’s another project we’ve had going: our red raspberry patch. This patch was originally planted nearly ten years ago by Jordan’s family, and after they moved because of a house fire, became neglected. Our house now stands just a few feet from these raspberry plants. With help from another part-time hand, and Atlanta’s brother Stockton, we cleaned the weeds out from between the plants, and transplanted the many young plants that had sprouted in the past few years. Some of these plants went to start a new berry patch at Jordan’s parents house, and some were given to friends, and all the rest were used to fill out these two rows. The patch now has around 60 plants, at a spacing of about 18″ between plants. The patch is mulched heavily with wood chips about 8″ deep. The next step is to build trellises for the raspberry canes to climb on. We don’t expect the plants to bear fruit this year, but hopefully they will next year!

That’s all for now, but we have lots more to show y’all real soon, including things like porch railings, splitting fence rails, vintage tractor restoration work, and more!

Stay tuned, and God bless.

Spring Snapshots

Yesterday was the most beautiful spring day you could ask for! Marian, Alan, and I spent a good deal of the afternoon outside, enjoying the fresh air and new greenery springing up everywhere. Alan rode happily in my new Baby K’tan wrap, while Marian observed everything from her stroller as we explored. (her favorite thing) I snapped a few pictures as we went along to document our afternoon adventures…

The sky was very beautiful with thunderstorms brewing, but the sun still brightly shining.

First we set off into the woods behind the house to take a peek at some of our favorite spring flowers –

Violets! These little pretties are everywhere this year. I think they may be my very most favorite woods flower – but it’s very hard to decide!

Wild irises. The Tennessee state flower.

…and bluebells! We always look forward to the patch of bluebells being in bloom.

After our visit with the flowers, we strolled back towards the house to say hi to ‘da-da’. He was busy cutting down a firewood tree by the creek.

Marian crawled around for a while and played with her cat (named Violet – she just had five kittens in Jordan’s toolbox).

Marian tried to convince da-da to take her over to pet the cow. Her mission when she is outside is to greet as many animals as possible.

Instead we went to the creek. One of Marian’s happy things to do is throw rocks in the creek. She loves seeing the splashes.

By the time we headed back for the house, both babies were ready for a nap!

We had a lovely afternoon, indeed. It’s amazing how spring happens every year, but each time it seems new and wondrous all over again. It’s especially fun sharing it with Marian who probably doesn’t remember much about last spring!