The Calm in the Storm.

​Life is pretty tumultuous these days, but we’re finding multiple “eyes” in the storms. One of our most consistent eyes are the animals on the farm. There is absolutely no way you can hold on to stress with a dozen 6 week old puppies playing on you.

​August saw us finishing the majority of the work on the vaulted ceiling so we could open it up to the dining area below and install the custom lighting we built. Ceiling panels in place along with the drywall sides, trimming, mudding, and painting went fairly fast. With the wiring already in place, the lighting just required us to mount a secure anchor from which to hang the beam. Once that was in place, we hung the beam from chains (with an eye toward making the fixture adjustable) and connected the pendant lights to power. Then it was a matter of adjusting the length of the pendants to our liking.

We had long liked the idea of wrapping our living room ceiling beams with wrought iron and anchoring them with heavy bolts. It became readily apparent this was not cost efficient for our meager budget so we devised a hack for it. Gil cut metal strips from a roll of sheeting we had from another project. Then, Patti distressed them, painted each, and Gil installed them. We did splurge on some large upholstery tacks to use as our massive bolts. We liked how they looked so much, we added them to the mantle too.

The vaulted ceiling over the dining area is almost ready to open to the room below.

Lighting fixture made from one of the original cabin logs and pendant lights.

Maisy was overwhelmed by her 13 babies!

Faux iron bands around the ceiling beams turned out well.

Our mantle, made from a cabin log, looks more rustic with the faux iron bands.

Crossroads Farm viewed from the lowest corner of the property.

Faux iron bands along with massive bolts set off the oak wrapped beams.

A drone’s eye view of one of our campsites by one of our campers. Note the high creek level because of recent rains.

Starting the hip wall of the upstairs.

A foggy morning on the farm.

Black Australorp chicks to augment our fox-stricken flock.

​R.I.P.

Bruno the

Magnificent

You were a good dog…

Our building plan (after making the house livable) was to develop a punch list for each room. Once a list was done, we’d move to the next room and start a new list. As you might have noted from previous blogs, we began with the upstairs bedroom so our whole family would be comfortably housed inside. Then came the foyer since we decided common areas had the highest priority. Next came the living room and most lately, the vaulted ceiling over the dining area. Our next project area will be the office space between the kitchen and bedrooms. Part of that chore will be splitting an existing closet into a spice pantry from the kitchen side and shelving storage from the office side. The office will also need drywalling, shiplap sanding/painting, and one whole wall being demolished and rebuilt. Hopefully, we’ll have some photos of that for next month’s blog.

Between the larger projects on the farm are a multitude of smaller ones. Because much of our belongings are housed in a damp livestock barn, we prioritized one day to build storage areas in the upstairs common room. This was planned for a future build, but finding some mold growing on a few of our storage boxes accelerated the need for dry storage inside the house. So, a closet and some shelving was framed out and the transfer of items from barn to house began. This was slowed by the “de-spiderizing” process each box had to go through since Patti seems to be a bite magnet.

All this is being done while caring for the livestock we have on the farm. Feeding, medicating, moving, fencing, and (sometimes) chasing our animals has been a daily, sometimes frustrating, sometimes exhilarating process we would not trade for the world.  It’s a never-ending learning program as well that has to be adaptable to the needs of the farm as well as our ministry.

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