the Green Grass House

Catching up - out and about...

2011-08-29T16:27:00.000-06:00

Occasionally we even leave TGGH to get out and about in the world!

Field trip with Common Ground Homeschoolers to Lookout Mountain Nature Center

Field trip with Common Ground to the Butterfly Pavilion

We love co-op classes - this one was a cake decorating class with Common Ground...

We went camping with some of the wonderful people from Lakewood UCC

I really need to do this more often than every 6 months...

2011-08-16T14:32:00.001-06:00

So, here goes - massive catch up post! Since February, what all have we done around this crazy place? Well...

We moved the chicken coop forward about 4 feet so that we could add a fully enclosed day run on the back side because we lost 6 of our girls to fox during the spring.

We had our first ever "raised by mama hen" chick hatch on Mother's Day - dubbed Little Peep, she has grown into a feisty little pullet!

We won a loafing shed from Tuff Shed - how cool is that??

We added some new girls to the flock - Norwegian Jaerhorns - the group of them are inseparable, and like perching anywhere they can be all together.

We started on the basement remodel - sort of - and then entirely shelved it for the rest of the summer.

We had a visitor - the chickens were NOT impressed with him coming by so frequently - in this case, on the fence about 10 feet from the coop.

We got pretty and cute little bantam eggs from our girls - yum!

It wasn't all work, even though it seems like it sometimes...

Valentine's Day at our church

Orange cranberry, banana and chocolate chip pumpkin breads

Homemade veggie and chevre pizza

Sometimes we even leave the house! More to follow...

I am a wacky Urban Homesteader!

2011-02-21T17:38:00.002-07:00

Hey, a blog post from the Green Grass House - wouldn't you know, it takes drama and controversy to get me to set aside everything else going on and take the time to write up a post over here! So, for all my non-homestead crazy friends, here's the scoop - a family is Pasadena CA has decided that they are the only urban homesteaders of worth in our 2011 world. They trademarked "urban homestead" and "urban homesteading" and are trying to make it stick by going after authors, bloggers and organizations that use those words. Honestly, they probably would have gotten away with it for quite a while, too - but they made the mistake of kicking a big fat buzzing hornet's nest by having Facebook yank down a whole bunch of Urban Homestead oriented pages, including the one belonging to James and Irina at Denver Urban Homesteading . Oooooo, boy, really, really glad I'm not in their shoes now because I have a feeling this is all not going to go the way they would like to see it go! I won't beleaguer it all here, partly because I'm supposed to be outside helping the boys and partly because I know I won't do it all justice, but if you are interested, here's the best place to go for more info: Take Back Urban Home-steading(s) on Facebook - it has links to related sites, fantastic blog entries from everyone talking this up today and updates on where the legal battle will go from here.

So, what's my interest in this? Well, although we don't quite fit all of the narrow definition that the Dervaes' family, we are proud to call ourselves Urban Homesteaders. This crazy house and property with all of its time-intensive work is our labor of love, our livelihood and most of all, our HOME. David and I were chatting over coffee a few mornings ago about this whole thing and one of the firmest conclusions we came to was that there is no way anyone can define, limit or trademark something as broad and encompassing as "urban homesteading".

What is Urban Homesteading? Well, to some of our acquaintances in the heart of Denver, it is growing their own herbs, eating homemade vegan food, creating art and goods from recycled and upcycled items, buying wind power credits and biking instead of driving. To some of our friends on the fringes of the suburban/rural border it is growing the vast majority of their food, belonging to co-ops for the rest, purchasing cow shares and raising their own chickens and goats. For some of our suburban friends it is underground chicken raising, CSA delivery, solar power and motorcycle not car. For some the focus is on the health benefits of eating real food grown and raised by real people. For some it is on the sustainability of a lifestyle that gives back more than it takes. For some it is channeling grandparents and great-grandparents who were farmers as best as they can in a modern city environment. For most of us it tends towards home made, home grown, home baked, home cooked, home oriented.

For us personally it is a little bit of all of these. To my family's continual surprise and amusement, our 60 year old farmhouse on a sweet little half acre is a little bit city and a little bit farm. We are five houses off one of the busier highways through Denver, complete with the never-ending street buzz that comes with it. Our 18 bantam chickens live in a coop that is 1/4 Craigslist, 1/4 big box store and 1/2 recycled and repurposed. They are foraging the garden area while I write this, making a gigantic muddy mess out of themselves. They can do that right now because the garden isn't in yet - on the slate for this spring is an asparagus bed and more grape vines for our wine making aspirations in addition to requests from friends who don't have space to garden but want to help here. I'm currently typing on my computer in the out building my fantastic dad and husband built from the ground up for my work at home business. Speaking of dad and the hubby, I can hear the bobcat skid steer they are using to make a level spot in the back yard for a loafing shed going in tomorrow (but that is another post all together!) to store some of the equipment we use here, and maybe, just maybe, goats in the future. My tiny funky storage celler downstairs has canned pears, spiced peach jam, pickled green tomatoes and dill pickles next to 50 pounds of flour and 25 pounds of pinto beans. I cook a mean potato breakfast dish in my grandmother's hand me down cast iron skillet with eggs laid by our hens. Ah, I could go on and on about the things we are trying to do, and all the things we want to do, and all the things we do completely wrong and all the things we should change and probably won't but I'll finish this for today with a few pictures of things that make me think of Urban Homesteads - oddly enough, not a single one of the things that comes to mind is related to a family's home in CA that I had never even heard of before this week :-)

Peach jam - from yummy Palisade peaches bought from Ripe 2 U

You think this slanted roof here is going to stop us from climbing on it? Nope!

Biggest calzone we have ever made with fresh salads last summer

Putting in the flagstone patio last summer and a shot of the herb garden when it was still in the ground clearing stage

And to finish up...if you leave the backdoor open to get some fresh air in the middle of winter on a warm day, you just might come in to the kitchen to find a visitor - one that thinks our coop is nicer than hers

New Year, New Leaves...

2011-01-03T19:38:00.000-07:00

Turning them over, that is. The list of resolutions for this year is too long to go into in a quick little post (I really just needed a quick break from wrestling with Flutterby's Quickbooks end of year stuff, which is making me a little more than bonkers!) but suffice to say, lots on the plate this year! Many changes, many goals, many challenges ahead - whew! More to come in the next few weeks!

Oh- on a side note, after writing the title above, it got me to wondering where that phrase "turn over a new leaf" actually comes from - of course, like many things in the crazy world of the net, there are lots and lots of opinions and very little facts, but closest consistent guess is turning to a new page - "leaf" - of a book and starting fresh from that page. Works for me!!

Experimenting...

2010-08-04T17:14:00.000-06:00

...with some changes I made - template stuff, picture sizes, etc.

Oh, my, it's been a while!

2010-05-08T13:56:00.000-06:00

So sorry, we've been busy, busy and I have completely let this go for the winter! Thanks to the handy-dandy library, and a book about Using Blogger, I will be cleaning this blog up and making a few changes. For one, since I can't manage to keep up with blogs for different pieces of our life, and because they all just roll into one big fat ball of crazy anyway, I'm going to be expanding TGGH into an all purpose life, work, markets, farmin', schoolin', remodelin', jibber-jabberin' place to catch up on all things Zserdin Family. Woohoo! For now, I'm off to walk the length of the ditch after we turn on the headgates for our area, check on a limping chicken and transplant seedlings into larger pots - sure sounds funny considering we live less than 10 minutes from downtown Denver LOL!

Before and Afters: Hidey Hole

2009-08-28T17:55:00.004-06:00

When we were looking at this house, one of the things that stood out, both for the kids and us, was this funky cool attic style room jutting off one end of the house. The kids dubbed it "The Hidey Hole" the first time we looked, and the name stuck!

Starting painting - it was a dingy masking tape ivory and we wanted to brighten things up, as well as make it super easy to clean in here - high gloss white, here we come!

Sara helped quite a bit....
Voila!

The Hidey Hole today - we were going to use some of the "green grass" carpet from downstairs up here, but there wasn't a run long enough that wasn't also terribly worn. I found these wild shag rugs at Target - they fit so nicely they aren't even seamed - we intended to, but so far it hasn't been necessary. Mom made the curtains here, too - seersucker again, bright and FUN! David thinks the kids look creepy in this picture ..."Come play with us, Danny...."

The guard dragon - I just loved this guy and had to snag one for the kids when I put in one of our Melissa and Doug orders.
Storage, controlled chaos....
The tree house - remarkably cleaned up, since we are getting ready for the start of school and trying to turn over a new leaf (teehee) with keeping the rooms cleaned up better.

All in all, a fun use of a funky space - and it keeps most of the kids chaos contained to just a couple of rooms - kinda...

Before and Afters: Classroom

2009-08-28T17:38:00.005-06:00

The upstairs here has the fun sloped ceilings and there was a fantastic built in desk and tile floors that remind me exactly of one of my classrooms at Lakewood High School (built in the 50's I believe, so fits right in with this house LOL!) It was just natural that this room become the classroom for our homeschooling - lots of light, next to the playroom, desks and storage - yay! I realized while I was working on this entry that we don't have good pictures of the before, darn it. Basically, we didn't change much here - repainted a brighter yellow and left the desk brown, the tile was fun, and is perfect for paint, clay and the other messes that happen here - so it was just scrubbed up. We installed a ceiling fan, partly for air (because, holy cats, it gets hotter than the hubs up here during the summer!!) and partly for better lighting. David ran cable lines in for the computer, I packed in a ton of supplies and books that had been all over the house before and voila, work space!

Before - just started painting

You can just barely see the floor in this shot - and one of my very old paint shirts - I think I have 17 different types of paints on there from previous houses and the apartments we managed...
Midway through - my mom made these beautiful seersucker curtains that perfectly match the brown and taupes in the desk, tile, walls and ceiling fan - yay, mom!!
Today - desk, computer, map, penny saver, growth charts, cupboard and drawers
These cool old desks were at my grandmother's house - super cool find! Bookshelves, posters, and of course, the easel with a scary forest Sara drew...nope, my kid's not warped AT ALL ;)
my ham of a daughter is in every picture I was trying to take in here, the little turkey...other side - bulletin boards, calender, more posters, rocking horse with two cheeseballs on it...and the door to the Hidey Hole - next entry!!

I promised to write about the girls...

2009-08-28T16:22:00.004-06:00

so here they are! We took the crazy urban homestead plunge this past May - Sara had been wanting to have chickens ever since we looked at this house with our real estate agent and the print out with stats had "zoned for chickens and horses" listed. We knew we had so much else on the slate this year, so we planned on putting it off until next year, but every time I was on craigslist, I couldn't resist looking up coops, just in case. Lo and behold, a coop, chickens, feed, litter and other paraphernalia for sale, in one big lump! Pullets, already beyond brooding stage, it seemed like the perfect way to go :-) So, off to Littleton, with a bobcat trailer and the help of our dear friends Kristy and Byron, to load a full coop and the birds and bring them home.

The chickens in a dog crate - it was the only thing we could think of to transport them in

Charlie REALLY wants to know what is in that crate!!
So, if we just turn this baby over on its side, ya' think we can maneuver it over the ditch without landing in the water?

Alrighty, we got it over the ditch, now we really need to move it 3 feet to the south....mmmm....If all else fails (and you're losing light for this project before the girls need to be locked up for the night!!) get out the big equipment - a skid steer and a rope do a pretty nice job of moving it over!

We get the cutest eggs! Since the girls are bantam (half size chickens) they lay smaller eggs. But still average one a day, in pretty shades of green and brown.

It is COOL to have chickens!

Thanks to the mad breed id-ing skills of the amazing forum folks at Backyard Chickens, we are pretty sure this is the line up:
Snow - Easter Egger, Puff - buff brahma, Polka Dot - Mille fleur d'uccle, Shadow - Belgian D'Anvers and Ice - Easter Egger.

Shadow and Puff in the coop
All the girls together. Sadly, we lost Red (at top in this pic, the Belgian D'anvers, and also the chicken Sara is holding above) mysteriously a month ago. She was fine Saturday night, roaming around and roosting just like always, lethargic and miserable Sunday morning - she passed shortly after noon. RIP Red, you were Sara's favorite -and our little farmer girl was a trooper, she did the eulogy, helped dig the grave and made a cross to mark it. It was a bittersweet lesson in the circle of life!

Finally - some shop pictures

2009-08-28T15:40:00.009-06:00

Well, sure, we finished the shop last August - it has only taken me a year to have it cleaned up enough to be willing to post pictures :) This is the wonderful 500 square foot shop my dad and David built last summer, from the ground up. We had the foundation done for us by the wonderful guys at KW Walker Concrete, but from that point on, it was all dad and David. They did a gorgeous job, don't you think?

Where I spend a good portion of my work time - the command center - complete with butterfly mug from Rising Sun Earthworks :-)

Looking at the front door - hey, there is sunshine out there!!! Such a nice change from the last 5 years of working in the basement - don't mind my pasty white skin or adverse reaction to sunlight...

View from the front door - heat transfer press, rack of stuff to do, rack of Melissa and DougWhat we affectionately call "the warehouse" - inventory, supplies, shirts, inventory, orders to go out, packaging stuff, lots and lots of inventory...
The girls - our Melco Amaya embroidery machines, Mary and Maya - poor Mary is all torn aprt waiting for a replacement part to come in, so we are running on just one machine right now
Water cooler that we found on Craigslist - it does cold and hot, so I can make my Harvest Moon Chai tea out here in the winter - yay! Also a rack of Aura Cacia oils and scales for shipping.

Just for fun - a before and after - after the boys demolished the old shed and coop
The shop now - ignore the chairs, they are getting ready to be painted and had to move for us to lay the flagstone patio

Oh, hail no...or reasons to not blog...

2009-08-27T15:49:00.008-06:00

I had good intentions - I had taken pics of lots of the projects that we are working on, even sized them and just needed to load 'em up - but Mother Nature has her own plans sometimes! Plans in the form of a rip-roaring hail storm, complete with 90+ mph winds and microbursts that beat the bajeezus out of everything around here. We were blissfully up at Golden Gate Canyon camping - even watched a beautiful sheet lightning storm around the campfire, entirely unaware that the beautiful lightning we were watching from afar was the herald of serious nastiness back home.

Our street
The front driveway - yes, there really is asphalt under there somewhere - it was buried in a 4 inch thick layer of pine needles, pine cones and leaves.

The culprits - or what remained of them.

The garden - we ended up being glad that we only had 4 tomato plants, a few cucumber vines and a basil plant in the ground this year - they were all stripped down to a bare twig.
Dining room window glass and leaves smashed against the side - can you see the dimples in the downspout? Our siding, gutters and spouts look like someone with a ball peen hammer and a vendetta went at them.One of the hall way windows - the hail went through four layers of glass here and hit hard enough to embed pieces in the wooden door across the hallway - maybe we are glad we weren't home after all!

Needless to say, this put a bit of a damper onto projects this past month - we had just had the roof re-done in January - one of the few projects that we didn't do ourselves - including 5" gutters to deal with the leaves from all the big, beautiful and now bare trees around here. On the bright side, raking this fall should be a whole lot easier...

All in all - 22 panes of glass to replace, roof, gutters, siding on two sides of the house, and a whole slew of other incidentals that keep cropping up as we find them (oh, you mean that wasn't a soaker hose before???? But it spews water so nicely...) *sigh*

Long time, no updates...

2009-06-30T11:53:00.003-06:00

I'm justifying the lack of updates by the sheer and complete insanity that life here has been the last several months, but that is a crummy reason - I could have been here blogging instead of dinking about on Facebook some nights :-)

So - in a nutshell, been working: on house, on business, at Roberts Sales' business, at schooling, at trying to stay on top of things...working away LOL! We've done a fair bit more on pieces of the house, have the shop to a fairly good point, and are tackling outside things when the crazy CO weather this year cooperates - we had 7 weekends in a row of rain that slowed down a lot of projects, and launched us straight from rainy muck to 90+ degrees, which I like even less to work in. But I digress....

I think I am going to just do lots of before and afters to catch up a bit on what we have been up to - quick and to the point! So, I'll snag pictures of some of the fun projects, and not so fun ones and get them up here in the next few days.

For now, I leave you with this little smile - we have our first chicken eggs! We joined the ranks of other urban chicken farmers in May and have 7 bantam girls - the kids, of course, named them all, so pictures and names will be forthcoming. Two are white with gray and lay light blue eggs, the other 5 lay various shades of tan and brown.

If I never re-finish hardwood floors again...

2009-01-13T22:50:00.005-07:00

...it really won't make me even a tiny bit sad. Remember the Green Grass carpet that we pulled up? Two bedrooms, hallway, front room and stairs - the front room floor was the best - in good enough shape to just get a light buffing and polyurethane. Everywhere else needed sanding...lots of it. But, hey, they're done, and they turned out pretty well considering how much David and I both really wanted to just be done with them!

Oil based poly REALLY darkens the wood ALOT! We were kinda hoping these would stay lighter, it was a pretty light oak. We learned a bit from this- on the kitchen my brother suggested using water based poly - it does make quite a difference on how much it darkens up.

Happy New Year!

2009-01-13T22:28:00.007-07:00

I have so much to catch up on! We have been busy bees working away on the Green Grass House - we did end up taking quite a bit of time away from remodeling work to do "real" work, the Holiday season was not as busy as it has been in the past (darn economy...but that is a whole other post...) but busy enough to keep us hopping a little some weeks and put most everything around the house on hold until the new year.

So first things first - the SHOP IS DONE! Well, has been for quite a while, but since this will be lots of back info, that is the first and foremost. Above pics are the finishing, windows, outside paint, etc, done back in August or so.

Moving in racks, inventory, and most importantly, the embroidery machines... I need to snap pics of the "after" still - might clean it up a bit before I do, though, the shop is a bit of a disaster!

Cardboard Counter Experiment

2008-08-15T12:14:00.005-06:00

The kitchen has been the single biggest source of frustration, as they always are, I'm sure. One of the problems we have there is that it is in the middle of the house without much light - we figured out a solution I think - it's a bit unique but hey, everything we do usually ends up a little unique ;-) We are cutting a window into the wall here, but to leave it as an open window would mean that the kitchen would be open all the time to the formal front room (not so nice when we decide to blow off doing the dishes lol!) so we are putting in a vinyl shutter, on its side, to make it "closable". Thanks to Habit for Humanity Denver, this funny little project cost us $12 for the shutter and $10 in sawzall blades (poor sawzall - plaster is hard on blades!)
The other thing we are debating on for the kitchen is an island, a counter, a peninsula, something to add more counter space and give a little bit of a division between "kitchen" and "dining room". Some brilliant person on Houseblogs (I can't remember who!) had made countertops and cupboards from cardboard to test their layout and we copied their idea with our cardboard counter/island. Oddly enough, it double as a fantastic "den" for Sara and Alex, and she took great pains to decorate all of the outside with signs and hieroglyphic symbols about them living there ;-)

Speaking of mud...

2008-08-15T11:59:00.006-06:00

I snapped these pics a couple weeks ago...it had rained, the new gutters for the shop work wonderfully, but of course, land right in the unfinished and unlandscaped dirt from the foundation dig. Which of course, makes it irresistible to all children 3 and 5 years old.

Ouchie lawn!

2008-08-15T11:50:00.004-06:00

Well, only if you can call tangles of low growing weeds "lawn", I suppose...I forgot to post this, but the guys had to trench to bring wiring out - this trench went right through what was a sorta "flagstone" patio, we had to pull up the flagstone, but we are currently searching for more to add to it and make it into a really nice large outdoor patio. David snagged some today (yay, Craigslist again!) and we will probably end up buying some from Santa Fe Rock and Gravel, too. We are looking at ground cover plants to put in between the stones and loving this site: Stepables

Shop Progression

2008-08-15T11:47:00.003-06:00

More apologies - been too busy to blog! So, here's a catchup - the shop is coming along fantastically! Framing, siding, drywall, wiring are all done. Yesterday they textured (MESSY!) and painted, I didn't snap pics yet but will if we make it over there - it is currently raining and the yard is a ginormous muddy mess, so we may not take the kids and dog over LOL!

Luckily, it isn't all work, all the time

2008-06-17T15:56:00.004-06:00

Dad and Charlie taking a little break

Sara's "Rock Museum" collected from all around the yard

A soda break

Soooooo worn out

our work crew ;-)

2008-06-17T14:44:00.004-06:00

And believe me, they earn the "work" part of that title every time they are over here!
Mom, Dad, David, Alex, Sara and Kristy eating some pizza!

Our pizza cutter and server that night LOL - I couldn't resist snapping a pic, it just cracked me up for some reason!

More shop

2008-06-17T14:38:00.004-06:00

That was several weeks ago, in the meantime, David and Dad have been busy beavers getting walls and roof up - I can't believe how fast they can work together!

They used one of the flatbed trailers from the rental shop to pick up the wood and drywall - yikes, that is a lot of building materials!

Why, yes, that is my dad perching on the top of the trusses there! At least we managed to retire the 4 foot wooden stepladder that was so precarious it was freaking even the grandkids out to see dad and poppa on there!

Who can forget the shop?

2008-06-17T14:24:00.008-06:00

Our reason for moving, the single biggest project that needs to be done before the move and actually the thing that is fitting together the smoothest (YAY!) I don't remember the exact date,
but we had the cement foundation poured for us. David and my dad did all the prep work, dug the trench (I think they called it a monolithic slab?? big deep trench around all four sides, less in the middle...) and then had a fantastic customer of theirs from the rental store do the foundation. KW Walker is a gem of a guy, and has some of the most fantastic crew working with him, they were awesome! If I can hunt down a website for him, I'll post it here, but otherwise, if you need concrete work in Denver, feel free to email us for his info!

And it wouldn't be a work event at the Zserdins without food - my mom brought donuts and juice for everyone to munch on, on our fancy sawhorse and scrap door table :-)

Painting is a family project...

2008-06-17T14:16:00.004-06:00

well, maybe it shouldn't be, but it has been here. Sara thinks she likes to paint, although it is not always exactly what we would like her to paint. Check out this monster...it took three more coats for that not to show through the paint!
It is amazing how "white" walls turn out not to be very white at all when you start to get a new layer of paint on them! We are going pretty neutral on most of the house - white, glossy for the halls and baths, washable flat for bedrooms and living areas. There are a few exceptions, but for now, just getting it done and moving on is good enough - we have so much on the plate still!

We love you Craigslist....oh, yes we dooooooo!

2008-06-17T14:00:00.008-06:00

A tiny ode to Craigslist Denver, from whence comes many random bits of our house. I need to get better pics, and as we actually install things, I will make better notes of where everything came from, but the most useful purchase so far:

This well loved wooden swing set, playhouse and slide combo. In one of those twists of small world coincidence, the gal listing this is actually a member of a Home School Group we are also members of (although we don't attend very regularly yet with the kids being so young still.)

Picking it up in Parker - the kids are already enjoying it before we even moved it!

Proving that nothing can be as easy as it seems - it was much larger than the picture showed! David had to come back down with larger flat bed trailer to pick up the main body.

In its new home, already in use that day! Even Charlie likes it, he can leap to the platform in one jump!

Our "Master" Bath

2008-06-17T13:50:00.005-06:00

In quotes because "master bath" to me has always implied it was off a bedroom, and private for just the owners of the bedroom. Ours is off the bedroom, but also off the main hall into the house, from the backyard, that will probably have more traffic than anywhere else in the whole house LOL! Oh, well, it is still going to be a cute bathroom, and means that if we are brushing teeth late at night, it won't be directly across from the kids' rooms like now.

Oddly enough, we weren't in love with the pink and yellow flowers in here, so wallpaper removal was the first line of order. Oh, lordie, I had forgotten how very much fun that is! Kristy, bless her heart, was a trooper about helping, and we had lots of fun giggling at the "steamy shower scene" with the wallpaper steamer and both of us covered in grimy paste and paper shreds.

For some reason, I don't have pics of the in between, but there was pink paint under the wallpaper. It is now a bright glossy white throughout, and next up in here is re-doing the linoleum floor with tile (yet to be picked...)

Yep, it's been over a month...

2008-06-17T13:43:00.003-06:00

...since I have blogged *shamefaced*.

I could use the excuse that we have been busy (which is very, very true) or that I kept forgetting to bring the camera back home to download pics (also true) or that Flutterby Designs has been busy and I've been needing to do real work instead of blogging (also true) but really, it is also probably just that I've been too beat to have anything witty to say here! I finally ran myself down enough to catch a nasty summer cold, so I'm home today, all alone :-) and thought I might use a bit of my rest time to catch up a bit. So here goes...

soooooo far behind!

2008-04-25T09:20:00.002-06:00

I'm woefully far behind on updating here, we have been crazy busy! Mother Nature is seeing fit to give us wild and wacky weather extremes (70 degree days followed by 30 degrees and snow *sigh*) so we are grabbing time to work on the outside shop and prepping for concrete work whenever the weather is being good for it! To add to it, I've had more business for Flutterby Designs in the last couple weeks that is keeping us hopping, too. I've got gobs of pictures to load up and lots to tell you all - hopefully over the weekend I will have a chance to do so!

These are sanding out nicely!

2008-04-02T13:31:00.004-06:00

The upstairs bedroom, which I think we are going to use as a tv/reading room instead of a bedroom, had some seriously dusty and furry carpet that we have already yanked (should have taken pics, but we were both wheezing too bad to bother - holy cats, batman!) The floors were pretty beat up, but it is wonderful what some 16 grit sandpaper and a drum sander can do! I love this built in desk- IF we can figure out how to get electricity to it, it will make a perfect little laptop area, as well as a writing desk, and maybe even a scrapbooking nook...which I'm sure to do in all that abundant spare time I gave away by opting for this house LOL!

Why, oh why....

2008-04-02T13:28:00.002-06:00

...is there linoleum over this hard wood? And why oh why are there no shut offs for any piece of plumbing in this house? It makes it ever so much tougher to take toilets out to sand floors when flooding the house is also an issue *sigh*

Shed Demo!

2008-04-02T13:04:00.005-06:00

First off, let me say I was really sad to see this go - it was such an adorable shed! We really tried to figure out some way to keep it and just add on for the bigger shop, but it was already two slabs of concrete patched together, neither of them with a deep enough footer, plus the roof slope went the wrong way. We did save the windows out of it, and some inside cabinetry, but the rest of it had to go! The boys got out the bigger equipment for this one, and I think they had more fun then they really should have with squishing it ;-) We have sorted the scraps for usable lumber, etc. and now the rest is off to the dump truck. It seems so bare back there with it gone now!The camera hogs posing with the dump truck!

We've been busy!

2008-04-02T12:46:00.005-06:00

Busy enough to not have time to blog ;-) Sorry about that! So, to catch up a bit, I'm going to do a few posts in a row today. David is out doing deliveries, when he gets back we need to go see two clients this afternoon, but in the meantime, I have a few minutes to sit and breathe!

We did lots of painting last week, it was a bit chilly and dad has had the coughing crud, so we didn't do much outside until the end of the week. Turns out the kids like to paint (or at least Sara does, Alex tires of it pretty quick) so we painted the Hidey Hole BRIGHT high gloss white (the better to wash walls!) We're leaving the tile in here, but planning on having a chunk of carpet bound to fit the room (Denver Rug Binding - yay!) I'm debating on a grass green or a sea blue, I'm hoping mom and I can go look at carpet pieces so I can get another opinion on colors! We also painted most of the "classroom/craft room" last week, in a beautiful Butter Cookie yellow, I still need to finish the white trim in there one day soon. I think we are going to leave the floors in there, they are funky "school" tile: taupe and tan, with marigold orange and charcoal gray streaks - it will be easy to clean up paint, crayons, etc. as the kids create in there, and it even sort of fits the theme...I think we are going to ask mom for the little attached desks in my grandmother's basement to put in there, and there is already a fantastic bigger built in desk that was built by the previous owner (Frank) . I need to figure out a light for here still....

Darn cold...

2008-03-22T10:39:00.004-06:00

The darn coughing crud finally caught us, slowed things down for a day or two. Why is there carpet in the vents? Sara and I just had to take a picture, it is interesting! We finished up the tack strips and removing carpet from upstairs - that leaves the "master" bedroom that we are still debating on leaving.

And just in case you were wondering how much work it is to remodel a house...the kids were in our bed to watch a 15 minute video before bedtime- I came in to tell them it was time to go to sleep and found this - two very zonked out kiddos LOL! Apparently they had done their fill for the day :-)

No more Green Grass :-(

2008-03-19T10:49:00.002-06:00

Well, maybe it isn't really such a sad thing...it definitely changed the look quite a bit all in one swoop! We have almost all of it pulled up and the pads pulled out. Now to the ever so fun task of pulling up staples and tack strips. I lost count somewhere around 500 staples, and that was before we started on the stairs!

Charlie and both kids had to get in on the action this time around- Sara actually does a pretty darn good job of pulling staples, as long as they aren't in too hard- and she did a bang up job of gathering the little bits of carpet padding left on the staples and putting them all in the trash can. Alex, on the other hand, mostly just wanted to climb on our backs every time we were sitting down somewhere ;-) We still need to finish de-stapling the upstairs room and carpet and all in the "master" bedroom, then we'll be ready to do some sanding.

Might be a day or two, though, because the weather is good enough this week to work on the outside - yay! My dad started tearing out the coop area on Sunday, we are planning on building the shop out there -if all goes to plan it will be somewhere around 16x32'- I don't know how I will function will so much space- WOOHOOO!!! I'll post up some pics of the progress on that tomorrow - for now, happy March!

Here we go...

2008-03-13T11:11:00.006-06:00

A new place, a new blog to celebrate the craziness that is! Just because we can't seem to resist- we only had one or two projects left at the Zurich Ct. house, so of course, that seems like the PERFECT time to move into someplace and start all over with remodeling. This time we really are going for the gusto - the Green Grass House is a 60 year old farmhouse in Lakewood, complete with horse and chicken zoning, a half acre yard and all sorts of personality :) The real reason for the move is to build a shop, someplace to have Flutterby Designs that doesn't involve trooping people through half of the house to get to the office. The added bonuses are two fireplaces, a ginormous garden plot already fenced off, a cute little attic room that Sara has dubbed "the Hidey Hole", well and ditch water (woohoo!) and the cutest sconces in the front room. Some of the bummers include teeny bedrooms, interesting but outdated kitchen and bathrooms, fences that Charlie may or may not be able to jump (that remains to be seen...), being way closer to a major highway than we would really prefer and gobs of flooring that needs to go.

Which brings us to the name. Why the Green Grass House? This should help clear it up:

When we were house hunting, Sara had names for the places we looked at - one was the Cat House because they had two cats there, another the River house because the yard was right on a little stream - this one just happened to be Green Grass House- I would say for obvious reasons. Alas, the green grass is coming out- with our allergies, hard floors are so much better for us, and this beautiful house has plenty of hard woods under almost everything from what we can tell so far. We were really hoping to save some to make a bound rug for the Hidey Hole, but there isn't any section long enough that isn't also pretty worn, so we will have to find another choice for there. We pulled up about half of the carpet and pads yesterday, two rooms to go today - whew!