Home Sweet Home: Part 2

The upstairs of our new house is very reasonably sized for us. We're not fans of big houses and this one falls right in the comfortably sized range with two rooms upstairs. The room following will be the craft room. Besides the basement (which we will tackle later) and kitchen cabinets, the upstairs bedrooms contained the most trash and cat poo! Yuck.

Future craft room before trash removal:



And after!



A hallway connects the two upstairs room with the stairs leading downstairs between them:


Guest room? before trash removal:




And after!




We focused on cleaning out the one car garage too so we could stockpile bagged trash for removal. Here's what it looked like before cleaning....check out all the particulate matter in the air!



And after!


A side view of the house with trash thrown from the upstairs window, which made for convenient clean up.


Remember the trash visible from the window in Home Sweet Home: Part 1? Here's the back yard cleaned up.


More cleaning this weekend is on the agenda with help from Jennifer's mom and sister. We'll post more on the house as things change and shape up.

Home Sweet Home: Part 1

Thanks for all the well wishes everyone...we so appreciate your good thoughts for us! This weekend we headed north to our home in Cardington, Ohio to start the cleaning out and cleaning up process. We just love these fixer uppers!

Here's a peak into the cleaning process from the beginning:

First time going in since looking at the house in July!

Living room...


Dining room; Steve's taking down old curtains and sheets and shower curtains acting as window curtains so we can see.


Sun room (to the left of the dining room in the picture above):


Front door going out the sun room to the porch; there's two front doors, the other goes into the living room. Next summer we plan to remove the front porch enclosure walls and restore it to its original state.


Kitchen pre-trash removal:



Kitchen after trash removal:


SOOOOO much sweeping and vacuuming. Whew. Those dust masks were mighty necessary! Steve's already ripped out the built in table so we can create more space to cook. We aren't sure how much we will tackle prior to moving in, but so far the table removal is a good start. Look at all that kitchen light! The windows in front of Jennifer face south. Perfect!


Hallway from the kitchen to the bathroom and 1st floor main bedroom. Jennifer forgot to take pictures of the bathroom...ugh! The stairs on the right hand side lead to the other bedrooms.


There's a cute little area before you enter the main bedroom outfitted with nice built in cabinets and space for a computer desk.


A window flanks the west wall of this little space and offers a nice view of the surrounding farmlands...and the trash left behind too.


Master bedroom....west, north and east windows! We love it!


Stairs heading up to the two other bedrooms...that's for Part 2. :)

Closing Day

UPDATE: October 22 - All went well at closing! We are traveling up north this weekend to get to work; we'll take many more pictures and share those next week. YAY!

If all goes well today we should close on this gem of a property! The rectangular property is 3.5 acres and is adjacent to many farm fields to the west.

The house is OLD. We don't know when it was built, but it's definitely prior to 1900. The front of the house will look much better once we restore the front porch (on the right side of the picture). Paint is in order too; perhaps next summer.

There's nice sunny growing space for fruit and nut trees, vegetable gardens, native plant gardens, etc. We can't wait for that! :)

We will spend the weekend cleaning and post more pictures next week....

Think good thoughts for us today!

60 Pounds of Apples!

Yep, we picked apples this weekend...a whopping 60 pounds of them! The super fabulous weather and desire for more fruit put-away for winter inspired us to head out to Windy Hill Apple Farm. We chose this apple farm because they use no chemicals and grow the apples organically, though they are not certified.

We so enjoyed ourselves :) ....

The orchard is laid out neatly and allows for easy access...

Yay for apples you can touch and eat straight from the tree!

Is this place called "You-Pick" or "Eat-While-You-Pick"?

Gotta reach high for the good ones!

The area is very picturesque with rolling country and apple trees...

Jennifer bringing in the haul:

Trusty Subaru ready to do the transport back home:

Cobbler, crisp, pie, sauce - if it's got apples in it, we're about to make some!

Home-Made Salsa is So Easy!

We became addicted to fresh tomato salsa in the Mex-Tex city of Carlsbad, NM. There's a great grocery there called LaTienda that has a deli where you can get 2 kinds of fresh salsa and hand-made tortillas and tortilla chips. Wonderful older Latino ladies makes all this stuff right before your eyes. When you go see the caverns and bats, check out the chips and salsa at LaTienda!

So that's how we found out how very easy fresh salsa is to make. Here's what we do here in Ohio now:

Walk out back to the garden and collect tomatoes, chiles, cilantro. We got our garlic at the store but just wait until next year!

To our stickblender reservoir we add tomatoes...

...chiles...

...cilantro, cumin/salt/oregano (1/2 tsp each) and 1 clove garlic and chop thoroughly:

Makes about 1 pint based on about 3 medium tomatoes and 2 chiles. One pint of good organic salsa at the store is at least 4-5 bucks so this is a deal and we don't feel like we have to ration: