I realized I forgot to explain a few things in Friday’s post. We were working on the kitchen for a while, so I got a little lost on what I’d explained before and in the process skipped over a few few things.

The Cabinets: With the exception of the pantry and open-faced cabinet that I built, the rest of the cabinets are the original dark oak cabinets that were in the house when we moved in. We were lucky that the old cabinet footprint and the new cabinet footprint where just close enough to work out with a few filler boards strategically placed. We removed the cabinet doors and all the hardware when we started. All the wood was wiped down with a liquid sand, primed, and then painted with several thin coats of a semi-gloss cabinet paint. The hardware was wire-brushed down to bare metal on a bench grinder with a wire wheel and repainted – the hinges white and the handles black.

The Chalkboard Cabinet Door: The main pantry door doubles as a chalkboard and is the only door I had to build. The panel of the door is 1/4 plywood that has been painted with chalkboard paint. If you haven’t worked with chalk board paint yet, it’s pretty straight forward. It’s sold just about anywhere you can buy paint and most places now offer a white base that can be tinted – just name the color. If you want to get fancy, there’s also a magnetic chalkboard paint, though the reviews seemed mixed on it.

Trim: I don’t think I mentioned it anywhere, and I can’t find any before photos, but the original wide kitchen trim had been removed and replaced with a standard baseboard sometime in the eighties. Unfortunately, the original trim is long gone. Fortunately, it’s a simple design – a 1 inch board and a piece of quarter-round – and we were able to bring back the original look.

The Stove: No it’s not your eyes, or the lighting, or the photo. The stove’s not white. It’s not tan, either. It falls in the realm of some sort of bisque that looks white against dark brown and yellow against white – it worked with the dark cabinets. When we first moved in, the refrigerator and microwave where that color as well. They both failed within the first 6 months and were replaced with white appliances. (There was no dishwasher until we made the spot to install one shortly after moving in, so it’s always been white.) So that leaves the lone range, in bisque. As long as it works, it stays – and since that’s my stance on it, I’m guessing the thing will never die.

You may have forgotten – I know I did – but we still had a few things to wrap up in the kitchen before we could call that project finished. With the holidays past and the cold weather limiting any time outside, I was finally able to focus on adding the last few details – namely that last cabinet.

When we originally tore everything apart, we got rid of a broom closet in the corner. I had already added shelves to convert it to a pantry, but it was still clumsy at best.

Since the plan was to refinish the existing cabinets, we were left with a gap where the old corner closet had been. The simple thing would have been to buy a pantry cabinet, slide it in place, and be done with it. But, the opening was an odd size and our door pattern is no longer manufactured. To find something close would have cost more than what we had invested in the entire rest of the project.

Instead, I rounded up the extra doors and hardware we had left over from rearranging the cabinets and built the cabinet we needed. (This portion has been done for a while now.) The top and bottom doors are original cabinet doors. I made the center door and painted the panel with chalk board paint. You may have noticed this in a past post or two.

Now the only remaining issue was to fill the wall space between the wall cabinet and the pantry. This time I didn’t have any leftover door panels that would work and moving the lone wall cabinet wasn’t an option. We considered leaving it open or simple shelving, but opted for an open-faced cabinet – and I finally finished it yesterday.

Since it’s been so long, here’s what things looked like when we moved in…

And once the old floor was torn up, new underlayment installed, and cabinets painted…

And once the floor and base cabinets were in…

And finally, finished…

So, what’s next?

Two weeks ago the DW found the first of the pullet eggs. Over the next week, we’d find an egg every other morning… slightly larger than the day before. A pretty good guess – there was one hen doing all the work. Still, the kiddos were able to collect enough eggs for the Sunday morning breakfast, though it took until Monday – good thing it was a snow day.

The first home raised egg with the last grocery store eggs.

Last week was a different story. Eggs started showing up every day. Different sizes, different shades, and (unfortunately) at different times of the day. Three or four of the hens are laying judging by egg color and size. Though all five hens are the same breed, there’s still a drastic difference in the shade of brown each one seems to lay. We’ve seen dark brown (like the picture above) and a light cream (see the center egg below).

The last grocery store egg (upper left) with the home raised eggs.

The size of the eggs have improved steadily, and we now have at least one hen laying a standard large, or extra large egg. The rest should get there in a few more weeks. Timing is still another thing. With the extreme cold, we’ll check every couple hours or so and find eggs at random times. It’s a little frustrating to head outside at 6 a.m. to find an egg in the nesting box only to discover it’s cracked open on the opposite side because it’s frozen solid. Though, I won’t complain. We’ve been lucky that all of the eggs but two have been laid in the nesting box. Hunting for eggs may be fun on Easter morning, but not every morning.

We were reconnected with the civilized world late Monday afternoon. For those of you that have never experienced what blowing snow can actually do, I thought I’d share this (you can click on the picture to see a larger version):

It took a road maintainer with a large v-blade about 30 minutes to cut this path. It’s only one lane wide. The drift on the left hand side is somewhere around 12-14 feet high. We only received about 3 or 4 inches of snow on Sunday, but that was more than enough for the high winds to play with.

The unsettling part of all of this is that we’re not even to the first of February yet. If 4 inches of snow and a stiff wind did this, just imagine the mess we’ll see if we get a “significant” snowstorm and a little bit of wind now that we have the ditches piled full.

Just in case you aren’t sick of seeing pics of snow, I thought I’d share a few shots of what it looked like here yesterday afternoon compared to what we woke up to this morning.

The view from the living room yesterday

Same shot this morning

Looking into the pasture yesterday

Same shot this morning

There hasn’t been a car down our road since about 3 yesterday. Based on what things looked like yesterday morning, I’m guessing there’s a 3-4 foot drift blocking the road just before it gets to the highway. On a positive note, it’s only 125 days until the first day of June.

It’s been twenty weeks since I was called to the post office to pick up a chirping shoe box. The excitement for the kiddos over the fuzzy day-old chicks is long gone at this point, but thankfully not their interest in raising the chickens (though it has waned a time or two – cold weather and the holidays will do that).

Potato Boy with a 4 day old chick

We survived the “ugly duckling” phase where they looked like some type of early bird from a dinosaur movie and wanted nothing to do with any of the kiddos.

The chicks at 5 weeks

And now at 20 weeks we have loud cackling hens.

The hens at 20 weeks

So what happens after twenty weeks?

Yup… the chickens start paying rent.

Well, let’s be honest. One small egg is a long way from paying rent… but it’s a start. As the hens continue to mature, the eggs will get larger and production will be more consistent. The five hens should produce two dozen eggs a week.

Of course the kiddos were excited. My nephew “B” was over playing with Lulu when the DW found the egg. She missed Lulu’s initial reaction, but this shot still gives you a pretty good idea – and the ending is pretty good, too.

And just in case you’re curious… I asked the kiddos over supper what the plan was for the first egg. Instead of a chorus of “I want to eat it,” or “we can’t eat it,” I got the plan – the kiddos agreed to hold on to the egg for a couple more days in hope of getting a couple more and having eggs for breakfast Sunday morning. Sounds good to me.

When it comes to answering the question of how Peanut is doing, there’s a bunch of different factors the DW and I take into account. Her blood work, mental and physical development, diaper “output”, and appetite are just a few of the things we track. The most telling, and easiest to understand, though, would be Peanut’s weight, or growth chart. Everyone who’s taken a child for a routine check-up has seen the standard growth chart and likely heard something along the lines of “your child is in the 60th percentile for weight.” Well, we (more specifically, Peanut’s doctors) have been tracking Peanut’s weight and trending it compared to the national standard since the day she was born and each time she’s weighed at the UIHC a new “X” goes on the chart. Peanut has managed to gather quite a few “X’s” at this point.

The chart is fairly straight forward. The numbers across the bottom from left to right are for age in months. The numbers running up the right hand side are for weight in pounds. If you’re more of a kilogram kinda person, they are along the left hand side of the chart. For reference the 3rd, 15th, and 50th percentile are marked on the chart. The areas in red with a corresponding number were added by me. Here’s what they are from:

Spot 1: Peanut was born well below the 3rd percentile. The sudden jump in weight was do the the large amount of fluid she had retained while she was sedated and paralyzed. The weight gain was brief. Once Peanut was off the sedation and started moving, she quickly shed all the extra fluid weight.

Spot 2: Peanut’s gain was starting to slow. This is the point we started adding solids to her diet. Most notably, this is about the time Peanut’s bottles were replaced with the “green bean shake.” Peanut jumped from below the 3rd percentile to sitting nicely on the 15th percentile with this change in diet.

Spot 3: This area shows just how much Peanut struggled with the bacterial overgrowth in the portion of her intestines that would ultimately be removed during her reconnection surgery last October.

Spot 4: Peanut’s weight at her last appointment on Thursday – her first check-up since truly getting her appetite back post surgery. She’s now 20lbs 8oz! Hopefully this is a sign of things to come.

And if gaining weight wasn’t heard enough on its own, Peanut’s burning even more calories now that she’s dancing. Just check out her reaction to one of Lulu’s birthday cards…

Sassy and sweet…all rolled into one lil’ fireball….that’s our Lulu! Happy 4th birthday, sweetheart!

Click here for a look at Lulu through the years

Sissy has been asking me to loft her bed for as long as I can remember. My response has always been the same – I’d loft her bed if she was willing to move from a full sized bed to a twin. The idea of losing all that extra sleeping room was normally enough to table the idea for at least a few weeks. That is, until I built a loft for Potato Boy last year to free up a little more space in his room (his room is quite a bit smaller and he was already sleeping in a twin bed). At that point, the temptation was too great – Sissy was willing to trade her bed for a loft. I had to stick to my end of the deal.

I had spent some time looking at different designs before building Potato Boy’s loft. I ended up taking four or five different plans and melting them into one that would work for me. Since it seemed to work well for him, I made a couple of small changes and stuck to what worked.

The loft is mainly 2×4 and 2×6 pine lumber that has been sanded smooth. I was able to do all of the sanding and most of the assembly before I brought any of the lumber in the house. Once the pieces where in Sissy’s room it only took a few bolts and a handful of screws and everything was complete – except for the paint – which we’ll get done in the upcoming weeks. Sissy was too eager to start sleeping in it to wait another couple days for us to paint it.

While I didn’t get the loft painted yet, I did take the time to rework and repaint the chest of drawers Sissy had in her room. Several knobs and one of the drawer guides were in need of replacement, so while I had everything apart I covered up the drab tan with a couple coats of bright white.

I forgot to take a “before” picture, but you can get the idea from this old shot of Sissy’s room. If you look closely, you’ll notice the top two drawers didn’t close completely at that point. I had to rebuild the guides to get things to close again.

Sissy’s big on “Paris-themed” items for her room right now, so the DW even found a couple pull knobs with the Eiffel Tower printed on them.

It still amazes me what a can of paint and a little time will do. But it has created a problem – once the DW saw how this little project turned out she added 2 night stands and a dresser to the list – good thing there’s plenty of winter left.

I think I’ve mentioned before that the DW and I keep a list of improvements/additions we’d like to make to the house and around the acreage. Some of them are fairly straight forward and are fairly major projects. There are days where it seems the list is getting endlessly longer instead of shorter, but we’re happy with the progress we’re making. Over the last couple weeks, the DW and I took another hard look at the list and made a list of what we wanted to accomplish this year – our 2014 Home Improvement Goals – you might say.

1) Insulate the Attic: This was at the top of the list prior to the recent cold snap and all the prerequisite projects keeping us from adding insulation to the attic are now complete. It’s no secret that most old houses don’t have enough insulation and our house is no exception. The only reason it’s not done already is because to do it right we need to hire a contractor to spray foam insulation against the attic ceiling. Unfortunately, that’s one project that I can’t do. The insulation will be the next step in finishing the attic for a family room somewhere down the road.

2) New Electrical Service: Like the insulation, wiring in an old house can be a little shady as well. And just like the insulation, this is also a project where I’m at the mercy of someone else – albeit my brother’s the electrician. I have no problem with outlets, lighting, new wiring, switches – even three way switches, but when it comes to replacing the entire box I’ll happily just assist. While most of the wiring is in decent shape, the box is an old style box still using fuses that we want to replace with a proper breaker box. It will give us a chance to spread out the electrical load appropriately. At that time, we’ll also replace the main service wire bringing electricity into the house.

3) Main Floor Flooring: When we tore up the carpeting in what’s now the dining room to find the hardwood flooring, the DW and I agreed we wanted to work on refinishing it soon. The floor runs into the kiddos toy room, so while we’re at it we may do both rooms at once. Once we’re finished making the dusty mess that always comes with refinishing hardwood, the stretch goal is to replace the living room carpet as well… we’ll see.

4) Refinish the Main Floor Trim: You’ll either love the idea or hate it, but the DW and I decided to trim the house in white – it actually already started with the work we did in the kitchen. The house still has about 85% of the original trim, but is missing some key pieces in places. The 85% is in 3 different shades of brown and the finish on some of it has broke down to an “alligator” finish. I can recreate most of what’s missing, but getting all of the colors to match would be a nightmare. Plus, the DW and I simply like the white trimmed farm house look – convenient, right?

5) Finish Fencing Off the Pasture!

6) Remove Old Trees and Plant New: The tree issue is still lingering from last year. The remaining trees should come down based on age and condition. Though that’s the hard work, it’s still the easy part. What’s difficult – at least for the DW and I to agree on – is what to plant and where to plant it. For shade trees, the list is fairly short: red oak, sugar maple, sunset maple, or maybe hickory. From there, it’s a question of where to put them so they’re out of the way of future plans. (There’s numerous other projects like this one that don’t require much capital or time invested to complete that we want to accomplish as well this year that we didn’t bother to list. This is the only one that will require extensive forethought so not to mess up.)

So there it is, our six major home improvement goals for the year – all subject to change based on a hundred different things that could come up between right now and the end of the year.