Have a look for yourself. Would you want this chair as is sitting in your living room?

Here’s a close-up of the fabric just so you can see how fabulous it really was.

It took a few weeks to get motivated to start the project of reupholstering the chair and to also order the fabric. After a few upholstering sessions and getting sick of looking at it my living room half completed I finally finished it earlier this week. Now I’m certainly not going to win any upholstering awards. In fact, if a the upholstering community gets a glimpse of my skills I may just be banned from any quorums, committees, clubs, organizations, or what have you. There are some parts that look like it was put together by Frankenstein, but I’m satisfied enough with the results. I can’t complain too much since this project cost less than $50 to complete and now provides extra seating in our living room.

Here is the final product from the front.

A view of the back.

And this is how it looks in the living room.

I almost forgot to point out that the girls are only wearing their socks because the shoe selection was either very small toddler size or started at youth size 3.

Violet even got to bowl her entire 10 frames with a little help from her big sisters.

But mostly she just did this. Notice what looks like flapping arms.

In other news, it’s apparently not very exciting to go shopping for space heaters at Walmart.

Speaking of which, now that I’ve got a space heater in the den expect that I’ll be posting more often on the blog because my fingers no longer break off like icicles while trying to type in our frosty den.

Here’s a Rhode Island Red. Those are the only ones that we are positive is that breed. The rest are all starting to look alike.

Another curious chick.

The girls are still pretty excited about having chickens. However, their excitement has waned a bit about doing the chicken chores each day. You can kind of see the 4′x4′ box Mike made for the chicks in the background.

As promised, I finally took some pictures around the farm and will give you a little tour. There is actually quite a bit of history to our home/farm. The house was built in 1874, and we’ve been given a little bit of information about the original dwellers including the fact that they used gas lighting at one point which was considered quite modern for those times. A large cistern below what was their dining room (now our den) collected rainwater so that they could have running water, again another high-end feature to homes of that time. We took a look at the cistern, and it’s about as wide as the room and probably 12 feet deep. Kind of creepy if you think about what sits beneath my feet as I type this. We were informed that our home is a “candidate” for the historical society. I don’t know if this is a good thing or bad. Mike says it will definitely prevent him from voluntarily burning down the house when we move out. I wouldn’t let him do that anyway. I would actually like to keep it as a summer guest home one day, so that all of our out-of-town friends and family will come visit us each summer. RIGHT?!? Let’s get on with the pictures, shall we?

Our humble, 137-year-old home from the front. There is so much that needs to be done to this place it’s not even funny which is why we are only planning to live here for a couple of years until we can build a new home on another part of our land. Mimi asks daily when that will happen because she doesn’t like drying dishes (we have no dishwasher unless you think of me as the dishwasher, then, yes, we do have a dishwasher). The section on the far right that has it’s own entrance is what we are using as our master bedroom. However, this room used to serve as a summer kitchen. Strange to think we sleep in a kitchen each night. The wall with the door was actually all open, kind of looked like a garage door. I’m assuming it was so that the heat would exit quickly during cooking in the summers.

The back of the house is actually where we park and go in and out of. Even the delivery people know this. Nobody has ever come knocking on our front door. Mike noted to me yesterday that he’s pretty sure everyone in our small town has visited our home/farm at some point in their lives. We keep hearing stories from people we meet around town.

This is a view of the farm from the back of our house. We don’t usually park over there, but we both had equipment hooked up to our vehicles from Mike’s WY trip.

The little shed right on the other side of the driveway from our house seems to have been used as a garage or maybe for fixing farm equipment. It smells of gas and oil in there, so much so that I can’t be in there for more than a couple of minutes without feeling woozy.

Here’s a close-up of the big barn. There are many rooms, levels, nooks/crannies in this building. I was amazed when we were walking through it how much there is to that place. Many years ago the farm was a successful cattle business. I think they may have even had a dairy, but I’m not certain. The farm also had numerous horses at one point. You can see off to the left there is where we will be making the permanent chicken coop.

Connected on the left of the barn is the silo. Not sure what, if anything, we can do with that thing. Mike wants to take it down because he thinks it’s dangerous. I say it’s not.

The building on the left seems to be more like a workshop which has a really big workbench inside with lots of leftover nails/screws/wood/metal. The building on the right is a cistern that used to collect water for the livestock. I have not been in there, but Mike says it is really interesting in there.

I’m not sure what this building was used for. My guess it was either used to store farm vehicles or to groom/tend to individual animals.

This building is behind the one above and is sided and roofed entirely in metal siding. From the looks of the inside, this is where they housed the horses.

Here is a view of the back of the farm from the pastures. You can see the big barn, metal barn, and silo.

Just for fun I did a video tour of the property while riding on the 4-wheeler with Mike. Warning it’s a bumpy ride and may leave you with some motion sickness. It’s also hard to hear what I’m saying in some parts due to the motor and wind.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfoc6Yx1eTU

I’ll eventually get around to taking pictures of the inside of our house. I still don’t feel it’s quite ready to reveal to the public. There are many things that still need to be put away, etc.

A few clever features stuck out to me about this company that I’ve never seen with any other furniture. Each piece of the furniture is individually slip covered. This means if that if you ever damage a section beyond repair, then you can order just that slip cover in the same fabric. Another awesome feature that was pretty much what convinced me to purchase from this company was the fact that under each cushion is a storage bin. This house has about 99.99999999% less storage than our other homes, so the extra, hidden storage was a deal maker for me. Being the incessant researcher that I am I googled the heck out of Home Reserve and also did a Better Business Bureau check on them, and they get really good reviews all around. Most people were not put off by having to assemble an entire sofa by themselves. I even found a few blog posts from moms like me who gave outstanding reviews.

Mike and I received the 6 boxes that had our sectional in them a couple of weeks before we actually put it together. They sat at his office, and I liked to show people my “sectional” and get those looks of unbelief. We found that once we got into a groove, putting the sectional together went fairly quickly. Instead of rambling on about it, why don’t I show you some pictures of the process. We actually had a lot of fun doing this. Warning: it’s a picture overload (not overlord this time).

There were 6 of these boxes.

Here’s what it looked like all unpacked. You can see up in the top, left corner the slip covers still in the plastic packaging. And to the right you can see part of a cushion (there were 2 in each box).

Each piece had the number cut out of it, so there was no confusing which piece was which.

The instructions were superbly written even showing how the individually numbered pieces looked at each stage.

Assembling each section included a little hammering and screwing (using a drill made these steps take mere seconds).

All put together before the slip covers and less the seat bottom and back.

Here is what a storage compartment looks like.

The slipcovers all went on fairly easily.

Two sections down. Only four more to go.

Viola, the final product!

We are very pleased with how it turned out. There were a few tweeks we had to make later such as the bunching you can kind of see above where your calves would rest against on the outer sections. The sectional is actually quite comfortable, and Mike and I have already spent numerous evenings laid out on it watching t.v./movies. I’ve already used 3 of the storage bins to put miscellaneous items in them. Before using the storage compartments the sectional was very light and easy to move around, but the junk inside weighs it down pretty quickly.

In case you are interested, we paid just under $1100 for the entire sectional which includes the $150 shipping. I even purchased the most expensive fabric they had, the Altima “Pet-Care” in Sand, because I knew we’d have issues with stains. It’s kind of like a micro-suede. I already know I’m insane for getting the lightest fabric available, but I really like a creme-colored couch for my home. Hence, the reason I purchased the special fabric made for messy people/animals. In the 3 weeks we’ve had the sectional assembled I’ve already erased pencil marks, removed a 10 inch drawing by Violet in her favorite medium of ball point pen, gotten rid of crayon slashes, and (I’m not kidding or exaggerating here) an entire muddy hand print, oh and let’s not forget about the blue and red lip balm. All these things came out without a problem or leave behinds. Like I said, we (well, my kids) are messy people. No matter how much I try to hide and lock away writing utensils or other stain inducing substances Violet can sniff out all these things and manages to get ahold of them the second I turn my back. Her big sisters are usually the culprits during homework time. I suppose it’s just a fact of life around here for the next decade or two. Sigh! Wish me luck keeping the sectional clean for that long.

We took a few trips to the tractor supply store to get the brooding area set up and to also start researching how we are going to accommodate the full-grown chickens a la a coop. Fortunately, we do already have a few outside barns and structures that will probably work as a coop. Mike will just need to build/modify a few things to get one chicken ready.

The girls have been asking each day when they get home if the chicks are here. I got a call from the post office this morning informing me of the arrival of a box of baby chicks. I was expecting a fairly large box, so I was surprised when the postal worker handed me this box not even big enough for my purse. I was skeptical that all 26 chicks were inside, but when I opened the box they were all huddled in one tiny corner. Violet’s face lit up when she realized all the peeping was coming from inside the box. I’m sure you can imagine how excited she has been since meeting them. I can’t wait to see her sisters’ reaction when they get home from school today.

Look at how quickly they figured out where the food is.

We have several different breeds. I’ll list them below.

Notice that Sadie is also getting acquainted as did Lucy.

Here is the breed breakdown

6 Barred Rock (brown egg layers)

7 Silver Laced Wyandotte (brown egg layers)

5 Araucana (lay beautiful colored eggs of blue-green shades from turquoise to deep olive)

8 Rhode Island Reds (brown egg layers)

We also got a free, rare, exotic chick. Not sure what that means. I suppose we will find out soon enough.

Wish us luck because I know we are going to need it. I’m feeling okay right now about having them and seeing that the brooder is not so complicated. I did kind of say to myself (a few thousand times) on the way home, “What the %&#^#$^ have we gotten ourselves into?!?” We shall see.