Year: 2020

Quite a few times lately I’ve found myself saying you can’t look at cake batter and declare a cake is ugly. You have to wait until it’s finished. And here at the school I feel we’ve moved into the frosting part of cake baking. Everything we are working on now is just frosting to the cake. (It comes to mind maybe ‘gravy’ is the right analogy, but I can’t make gravy work with my cake.)

But anyway, back to the frosting. Since we last met, we got the cabinets finished – shout out to Valley Painting and Decorating for the assist – and the countertops installed – kudos to Set In Stone for that as well! These two steps have been a long time coming, between the struggle to figure out where in the school they should live to saving up the money to pay for them. But WOW – we are so excited with the (closer to) finished project!!!

The sink came from our good friend Val’s back yard, by way of her grandmas house. It’s been sitting in our basement for a couple of years now, but it is simply AMAZING in a kitchen! And a ton of the little’s came from Menards (of course).

To save money, we did do some finishing ourselves – well us with an assist from Chicago. Why is the supervisor always sleeping????

Another awesome find is the rolling ladder. Unlike the sink, it’s still not ready for installation, but i think it’s going to work out just fine.

Spring has arrived (I think) and we are making some progress. Being home more right now gave us the opportunity to get a little creative. We had 3 doors that were original to the school. We’ve been noodling over how to reuse them since the beginning.

So thinking about what else we needed in the house, it occurred to us that we didn’t have bathroom or bedroom doors yet! (Ah-Ha! How could we have missed that detail???). The problem was, the doors are regular door height, where the door openings that we made were 9′. Yes, we did that to ourselves and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

This is where having a bit of extra time on our hands came in handy. What Kevin came up with was a Frankenstein door! He took 1 and 1/2 a door, and made one giant, beautiful slider door. It looks fantastic!

The other half of the door wasn’t in as good of shape, so if you have a door that looks like ours sitting in your back shed, let me know!! Just needs to be 32″ wide.

As for the kitchen cabinets I mentioned last time, we’ve got (some) of them here! Kevin put them in their places more or less, but we’re waiting for the rest to arrive to really put them in place. There’s gonna be a whole lotta staining going on over the next month.

As always, our good neighbors lent a hand (pre-social distancing!)

Last but not least, we want to introduce you to the new schoolhouse teacher. Her name is Ms Betty White, because she is smart, funny and a Golden Girl. I’m sure you’ll be seeing a lot more of her in the future 🙂

OK, maybe I”m being a little bit dramatic, but it would be a great name for a novel! I’m not writing a novel, just a quick update to say that progress has been made. After a looonnng pause, we finally got the drywall patches done. As a bonus, we had the mudroom downstairs finished.

Not exciting, but one step forward.

What is exciting is the creation of kitchen cabinets! After dreaming about it for years (and moving it in our minds from one place to another constantly) it’s finally becoming a reality. These should be ready for pick up and finishing very soon. More to come!

January started with such promise, we were so excited about the progress made on the bell tower, It’s still something to look at each time we come in and out.

Excited to move to the next step, we quickly started work on door trim and cleared out the upstairs so that the drywaller could come in a finish another area. We need him to do his work, so we can start on the very exciting (to me) kitchen and flooring. We were ready January 15.

We’re still waiting….

But we aren’t ones to sit still, and although it wasn’t our typical productive work, we found time to have a winter fire here at home.

And a post-Valentine’s day mattress burning over at a Farmer Geoff and Kristen’s (formerly Farmer George’s place, now being revitalized by his kids).

Next month should be more productive. If we get the drywall done (fingers crossed), the kitchen cabinets should be done in 30 days. Here’s hoping the next post has some great new things to see.

In case you didn’t guess, I have GREAT news about the Bell! It’s in!! But before we get there, remember where we started?

First, there was this…

Then, a little bit of work up top…

And inside…

The next essential step – add the bell…

Fast forward to some prep work…

Now finally….hooray!!

How did we get it up there? Magic? Levitation? Extremely strong bell throwers? Surprisingly no to all of those. Truth be told, we went back to an old resource…call in Mom and Dad (and Dad’s car battery powered electric winch.) Watch all the action here.

And a final scene if you’re passing by, you can see the bell back where it truly belongs.