We Also Did Some Finish Work

At the farm, there is pretty much always something that you could paint. This year, we have painted...

The trim in the living room

Yes, it's basically the same color as the old trim.

All sorts of exterior trim

Love that bucket van

And, over Labor Day weekend, the back wall of the dining room and the doorways!

Blue!

We also painted the ceilings in both the living room and the dining room, which was an absolute nightmare. In the future, remind me how much I hate painting over my head.

We also got some new furniture, which is at least exciting for us.

In the master, we found a dresser at a barn sale and some nightstands in my best friend's storage unit.

Now we don't live out of suitcases. It's like we're civilized or something.

That allowed us to move the little dresser up to the yellow bedroom, which is now pretty overnight-guest-worthy.

Who's coming to visit me?

We also got a barrister bookcase for the living room, which I apparently don't have a good picture of. And then... we got a wardrobe.

The thinking with the wardrobe is that in the bedrooms upstairs, there isn't really any good storage space -- there are no closets, and the room you're seeing above is the big one -- the others are going to be lucky to get more storage than a nightstand. So we figured one wardrobe in the hall would give some shared space to hang things up, etc.

We measured. Then I went out to Massachusetts with the aforementioned best friend to do some antiquing. We found many fascinating things that were not wardrobes.

Not a wardrobe

Perplexed Bigfoot is not a wardrobe.

Terrified goat head is not a wardrobe.

Garden-art velociraptor is not a wardrobe. I don't know how this didn't come home with me.

I don't know what this is, but it isn't a wardrobe. I hope.

 Then, after much searching, I found a wardrobe! It was the art-deco style Chris likes! It would fit in the space! And that was when my BFF said "well, if THAT'S the kind of thing you're looking for, I have one in my storage unit. I actually have two."

So then I came home and bought hers. And we measured it. We really did. And we decided it would just barely fit in the space... and then we got it up to the farm, and into the living room... and decided we weren't actually sure how to take it up the stairs.

After some false starts, during which we each ended up having to climb onto and over the wardrobe while it was half in the stairwell, we took off everything that would come off.

Now with 100% fewer doors and drawers!

At that point, we were just barely able to carry it up the stairs, slide it along the hallway, and shimmy it into position, where it is, as measured, a perfect fit with roughly one inch to spare.

Narnia not included.

So now if you visit us at the farm, you could hang things up, if we had hangers up there, which we don't. Note to self: take a few hangers up next time.

Gutteral

Another big-ish project for this summer was that we installed gutters. Well, gutter. I don't have a lot of pictures of this one because it was the kind of project where you're busy getting everything laid out and measured and dry fit and then actually fit, and then you have to try to figure out how to hold the stupid gutter with one person on a ladder and one person in the bucket van, and then you finally get it attached and then it leaks anyhow and you have to take it apart and reseal things.

You can barely see the gutter, but the downspout is kind of visible?

But eventually, we think we got the gutter sorted out... just in time for the bucket van to start making a kind of terrible noise that eventually required me to scramble out of the bucket onto the porch and the rest of the day's projects to revolve around Chris trying to fix the van so that we could retract the bucket and get the van out of the lawn. If he wants to eventually add in what was actually wrong and how he fixed it, I'm going to let him do that because honestly, I don't really remember what all was involved. It was broken, but he fixed it. Then he was able to figure out what parts it needed and fix it more permanently the next weekend.

We're still hoping to run a gutter along the north side of the house (in the picture above, you're seeing the corner where the south and east sides meet). The hope is that this will help get water away from the foundation and a) keep the foundation sturdy and b) maybe help keep water out of the basement.