Vacation in Sitka

I wrote my first long post using the blogger app, then had to change my privacy settings to allow photos, and when I came back to the app, the whole post was gone. Ugh! Instead if typing a lot, I'll just say I'm having a great time with great friends in a beautiful place. I'll sayi it with photos!

Reflections on Rural Living

Before moving to Kettle Falls to start our dream of Happy Bear Farm, the smallest place I had lived was the Twin Cities (well, I lived in St. Paul) which have a population of a little more than 3 million people.  I have now lived here for 7 months and it is DEFINITELY different.

First of all I think that Jason and I are both a LOT healthier.  Since I am not working (and now that we are in our house with a working kitchen), I have been cooking basically all of our meals.  The restaurants that are in town (the good ones anyways) are only open Wednesday-Saturday so we don't really have many eating out options.  Because I am making all of our meals, we are sticking to our modified paleo diet.  We eat meat, fruit, vegetables, nuts, and seeds.  I call it modified because we occasionally have rice and I eat goat cheese.  Jason and I feel a lot healthier and I am back to my San Diego weight (I gained about 10 pounds when we first moved here because we didn't have a good kitchen in the first apartment we had and we ate a lot of processed food).  I love the magazine Cook's Illustrated and have been cooking 2-3 times a week using their recipes.  So our food is healthy and delicious!

Another thing that I've noticed is that Jason and I are big fodder for gossip amongst our neighbors and their interest is apparent and sometimes in our face.  For example I think that at least 4 of our neighbors has asked us how much we paid for the house.  When we were busy with contractors going in and out of the house, it wasn't unusual for a neighbor to stop by and ask what work we were doing and ask for a tour.  Now that it has warmed up and we are working in the garden, cars noticeably slow down on the dirt road and look at the garden we're putting in and some stop to see what we're planting.  I am not used to being so interesting.  They are very nice about it, it's just different.

Days can go by when I don't leave the house.  It's about a 15 minute drive into Kettle Falls and the only reasons that I ever go there are to go to work (if I get a sub job), go to the library, or go to Meyers Falls Market (the natural food store, which is great but really small and lacking in a lot of our regular food stuffs).  Once a week (at least) I drive into Colville (about a 25 minute drive) to go to the bigger grocery store Super One.  They're like a small Safeway or Cub Foods (about a third the size), but they have a small organic section.  We're slowly making friends but they're generally busy people and we don't see them that often.  Last week I left the house twice-once for grocery shopping and other errands and the other time for a fruit planting workshop.  I used to rarely be home.  I like our house.  I like making it into a home.  It's just different.

Finally Sundays are a different time here.  In general this community is fairly religious but no one has been preachy or proselytizing.   On a normal day we see 5-6 cars go down our dirt road, but on Sundays we see at least 20.  People going to church, people going to see family, people coming to visit, etc.  Also very few businesses are open on Sundays.  There is one hardware store (out of 6 in the area) that is open and Super One is open.  I think that's it.  Nothing else is open.  During the week, most businesses close at 5 or 6pm.  But most of them at 7am.  I have been called by people at 7:15am to ask my opinion about something.  This is considered "no big deal."  Most days I am up by 7:15am, but in my city life I NEVER would have called someone this early.

I like living here.  I love our house, our garden, and our dreams for it.  We're starting to meet people and hang out regularly with them.  I have found a political outlet by chairing a subcommittee in our local Slow Food chapter to organize for I-522 to label GMOs in Washington.  Things are good here, it's just different. 

House Renovation Hiccups Part 1

I have been meaning to write another blog post for weeks, but it has been really busy here at Happy Bear Farm. 

After closing on the house, we had Peter at Haus of Hard Wood come in and put in hard wood floors upstairs and on the stairs and refinish the hard wood down stairs.  They did a great job and it looks great!

The stairs in progress

I realized that I don't have any photos of the floor, but this one of my friend's son shows how good they look!

After Peter finished, we moved into the house.  We didn't have our furniture yet so we stayed in a blow up bed.  We had to take the hot water heater out of the house so that Morgan (who did our linoleum and tile) could put in new flooring in our laundry room.  For some reason (we found out later it was because the septic was full) when you would run even cold water anywhere in the house, water would come pouring out of the hot water heater hoses (even though the water was turned off to the heater).  This meant that although we HAD cold water, we couldn't run it in the faucets unless someone monitored a bucket under pipes.  This was our first big hiccup.  Luckily we had the creek and we "Little House on the Prairie"ed  it and brought buckets of water up to the house.  We also ate out for most of our meals.  Morgan made getting our laundry room floor a priority and after 3 days we got our hot water heater into the house.  Luckily we had the hot tub!!

Yay for new floors and hot water heaters!

The flooring is called Marmoleum and that color is called Orange Cocktail.  We had originally wanted a different color but it was on back order.  We had a few more hiccups with the water heater.  Jason planned on plumbing the water heater himself and there were a few issues with pipe size and fit.  He learned that in plumbing, getting something on as tightly as possible is often a mistake.  Finger tight is good enough.  Living far away from a decent hardware store didn't help matters.  It took us a few more days to get the plumbing right.  We had now been without running water for about 5 days. 

Jason got the plumbing to work!

We were so excited to get hot water!  We turned on the water and turned on the hot water heater.  We waited about 15 minutes and although we had running water, we didn't have any hot water.  We waited another 30 minutes. We still didn't have hot water.  Finally we opened the electrical box and turned the thermostat all the way up.  We still didn't have hot water.  By this time we were really frustrated.  In the morning we called a heating and cooling company (their number was on the hot water heater) and when they came out, they told us that when you have an empty water heater, you need to fill it completely before turning it on or you will blow out the electrical components.  Now we know!  It felt great to have a hot shower!

We Haved Closed on Happy Bear Farm

It has been a busy couple of weeks.  First Jason got sick with some sort of flu or cold.  I also finally got my WA teaching license and jumped through the hoops to be a substitute teacher in Colville and Kettle Falls.  I've had a handful of calls to teach.  We've also been continuing with the repairs to the new house.  Then last week I got sick, I finally went to the doctor yesterday and got antibiotics for a sinus infection.  Yuck!  But the exciting news is that we have FINALLY closed on the house.  What a great Valentine's Day present!

So far in the house we have completed the following repairs:

• Torn out all of the carpet, carpet liner, tack strips, and staples.
• Peeled out all of linoleum and ripped out the particle board underneath.
• Pulled off the counters and leveled them to get ready for the granite.
• Dismantled the island and the kitchen desk.
• Moved all the appliances into the garage-we hope to sell them.
• Taken out the wood stove and the propane and patched the wall where the chimney went outside.
• Installed a wood stove in the garage/shop.
• Chipped out the floor and shower tile.
• Put in pigtails for all the lights.
• Had the walls textured and painted.
• Repaired the wood storage area under the stairs.
• Fixed the drywall in the pantry.
• Repaired the chimney and re-framed it to code.
• Dismantled two bathrooms
• Taken apart all of the closets.
• Had the granite delivered and installed in the kitchen counters and window seats.

There's not too much left for us to do.  In the next 2 weeks we have people coming in to refinish the hard wood downstairs, install hard wood on the stairs and upstairs, redo the floors in the mudroom, put in slate in the entry way and for the wood stove, and completely redo two of the bathrooms.  Although it won't all be finished, we will be moving in at the end of the month.  We're so excited and happy.  I am including some pictures of the progress that we have made.

There used to be tile and a wood stove there!

One view of our new granite counter tops and the patch where a chimney used to be.  It's kind of crazy but they cut through a stud when they put in that chimney.

Another view of our new granite counter tops and granite window sill and our under mounted sink

Close up of the sink

Jason with our new HUGE laundry sink-it's 36" wide and 24" deep

We've had mice getting into the house from behind the sink, so Jason put in new plywood bottom and is going to patch the pipes to keep out the little mice.  We've gotten 5 in the traps. :(

Can you believe this is the master shower?  They only had drywall behind the tile. 

It's kind of dark, but the window seats are the granite from the counter tops.

We re-framed the chimney on the second floor so that it fits to code.

The old wood stove from the house is now in the garage/shop.

Update on Renovations to HBF

We made this video for Jason's parents and I am sharing it with you all.  We're slowly but surely working on the renovations for our new home. If you'd like to follow along, you can see how we spent Super Bowl Sunday.

One step Forward

On December 26 we finally heard back from Bank of America.  They made us a counteroffer!  This was great since we put in the offer in October and hadn't heard a peep from them.  We were ready to accept the offer when Dane, our real estate agent told us that the sellers had already rejected the counteroffer.  It seems that B of A wanted the sellers to pay the difference between what they owed on the house and our offer.  The sellers didn't want to do that, that's why they did a short sale.  So Dane told us that we might as well make a counteroffer since it would be going back to B of A whether or not we accepted the offer.  Hopefully they will accept sometime this week.  In the meantime Dane told us that we could go ahead and get the inspection and we can start calling contractors to get estimates for the work that we want done one the house.

The house passed the inspection with just a few minor issues to be taken care of but when we met the inspector at the house, we realized that there was a small problem.  No one had shoveled the driveway all winter.  And the county had plowed in the driveway while they were plowing the road (at least the county maintains our road, we weren't sure about that).  So because we will be having people at the house this week to give us estimates AND we are really aching to get into the house, we decided to shovel the driveway.  Now this week it has been cold (in the 20s) and this winter is has snowed a few times and the snow has melted a bit and refrozen, so basically the driveway is an icy mess.  On the first day Jason and I spent 2 hours using snow shovels and realized that they weren't strong enough for this job.  But in those 2 hours we got Jason's car into the driveway.

Can you believe it took us 2 hours to just shovel that little bit?

Trying to shovel the snow.  Those shovels were woefully inadequate for the task at hand.

Next we decided to get more heavy duty shovels to be able to hack through the ice and do better.  The next day we made it to the concrete slab which made shoveling a little bit easier.  Now there was room for my car and Jason's truck.  We took the day off from shoveling on New Year's Eve, my arms and back were killing me.  And yesterday spent another two hours shoveling.  The concrete slab was easier to shovel than the gravel so we got that almost uncovered.  I think that this week we should be able to finish shoveling the driveway.  Jason is working but I have time to go. 

Making progress slowly but surely!

 Maybe we need to buy a snowblower!

Remodeling Ideas for the Homestead

While we are waiting for Bank of America to accept our offer on our house, Jason and I have spent a ton of time dreaming, imagining, talking, and planning the remodeling we will do to make the house OUR HOME.  One perk of renting a fully furnished apartment is that we have a TV with cable (something neither of us has had for YEARS) and we have become HGTV addicts.  (What can we do to get crashed?!)  Yet when we watch those shows, the remodels seem much more drastic than what we want to do.  We're not going to knock out any walls or anything like that.  Our changes are mostly cosmetic. We are always looking for inspiration.

Jason and I spent Christmas in Las Vegas with his family.   Jason's family has a lot of experience with real estate and decorating houses and they had a great way for Jason and me to get ideas for Happy Bear Farms.  We spent two days going to model homes and open houses.  Walking through those houses we got a ton of ideas for things we want to do once we finally get the house.  I used my iPhone to record things that we might want to incorporate in some way into the house.

By putting the tile in this way, it makes the bathroom look larger than it is.

I really like these hanging lights.  I might want them a little darker in color so that the color shows through a little more.

We're going to tear out the island that is currently in that apartment and put in a new one that is something like this. We like the butcher board top and shelving on the bottom for all of our pots.  We also want stools for an informal eating area.

We want an oven like this-gas stove, electric oven, with a griddle burner in the middle.

I LOVE the granite that they used for this sink, but I wish they hadn't broken it into tiles.  GREAT COLORS!

Well we are still waiting to hear from Bank of America, but in the meantime we're dreaming about the house!  If you have any design ideas, let us know!