A Room with a View!

Daniel has almost completed reroofing the house, he only lacks the facia board and the drainage. It looks really nice and seems to be holding up well with the weather (Knock on wood!). I got up the nerve to go up through the attic to the roof! The attic wasn't as scary as I thought and the view from the roof is amazing! The pictures don't do it justice but I'll put them up anyway!

Let it snow!

So it snowed in Kansas! 8 inches on Tuesday! Thankfully it stayed long enough so that I could play in the snow this weekend! Please notice that the snow people have recycled metal parts, including 14 pack stomachs! The girls love the snow, except for when their ball gets buried and they can't find it! Daniel and I are looking forward to Christmas break when I will get to be at the farm for 16 days, with the exception of being in Oklahoma for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

Oops....long time gone!

It's the beginning of October and I have seriouslly neglected the blog! I was absent from the farm for most of September for one reason or another but have been back up the last two weekends and have been working hard. An update on the farm would go something like this: the tomatoes were delicious and bountiful, we finished off the metal containers with 30,000 pounds of metal, we have painted several rooms in the house, and finally figured out where the awful smell was coming from! Daniel has now moved to the farm and has been working hard cleaning up the basement and the "garage." He will be tackling the roof soon so please say a little prayer that he does it safely! He will come back to Oklahoma for home OU football games and I will go to the farm on the other weekends! A lot has been going on, but we have failed to take the camera with us the last few months! Hence, no pictures. Thankfully we will be moving all of our belongings from the apartment and the storage unit in Kansas into the farmhouse next month! Although I won't be with it, it will be nice to have all of our stuff in one place! I will try to take pictures of the fall foliage next time (we may however be skipping Fall considering snow showers are being predicted for this Sunday)!

Oh What A Day!

Our first wedding anniversary in Kansas will be more than memorable. As we were putting a new pump in the well we could see a storm brewing to the west! Kept on working until Daniel said it's coming and he was right! 80-100mph winds took us by surprise! Daniel rode out the storm in the hay barn that he had just fixed weekends before and I made it to the house. It was needless to say the worst storm either of us had witnessed in our 30 years! Lots of trees down, gutters off the roof, windows broken out, heavy metal rolls moved hundreds of yards etc.! I took some pictures of the damage, but it hardly does it justice. We were lucky though because some people had significantly more damage. The storm took down 2 miles of power lines and the transformers! The tomatoes took a huge hit, but I restaked as many as I can so we'll just have to wait and see how they do. The picture of the sky is looking out to the east after the storm passed.

Dumpster #2...

IS GONE! Bring on dumpster number 3! We didn't get the numbers on number 2 as far as weight because Daniel was too busy getting reprimanded by the nice gentleman that we are getting the containers from. He was not pleased with the way the wire was put into the container! OOPS! We think we will fill this one and then probably take a break from the metal collection so that we can focus on some of the other projects!

TIRES, TIRES, TIRES!!!

We finally got rid of the majority of the tires...at least of the ones that we know of. We also took another load to the dump....so if you were planning on exercising on the rusted out exercise bike that had been sitting outside for who knows how long, you may need to find an alternate form of exercise!

While we were away...

SKUNKS moved in...right next to the house! Shadow reminds us of this everytime we give here a kiss on the nose. She got sprayed almost 2 weeks ago and has had multiple baths, but still stinks. The internet says there are two types of dogs: those that learn from their experience and those that don't! Shadow better learn! Daniel thought he would light the skunks home on fire and then shoot it as it came out...the great white hunter got nothing as the skunk was not home during the invasion!

As the Garden Grows

7/25/09 The garden is growing like crazy, the blooms have changed to small tomatoes, and the rain has been coming down in buckets this last week. The plants survived a hail storm with minimal damage, but now I'm hoping the uncountable amount of tomatoes won't split because of the amount of rain! I spent most of last Saturday pulling weeds and getting the area cleaned up. I had hoed the sides of the garden and grandpa wanted to know what I was going to plant! I had to laugh because I have more than enough to keep up with as it is!

Our first garden at the farm! I was supposed to get 30 tomato plants but accidently got 120!

We, Dan and I, planted the garden over Memorial Day weekend. It's growing like crazy and we have lots of green tomatoes. Looks like I'll be at the farmers market or on a corner sometime soon!

A different life....

Here is a picture of our new weekend getaway...the Hoffman Hacienda. It is going to require a lot of patience, elbow grease, sweat, tears and money, but we are in it for the long haul. Home Sweet Home! Grandma Reva had a great quote the other weekend...she said "It's a great life if you don't weaken!"

After many weekends of piling various metals into the metal dumpster, it was taken away this past week. It weighed in at 12,880 pounds! Too bad we couldn't have done this last summer when the price of scrap metal was over $200 a ton! We feel much stronger for having lifted so much weight into a container. I guess the John Deere helped a little at the end. Dumpster two has now been delivered so we'll be working on getting it filled. I don't think we'll have any problems!

Memorial Day Weekend

Walt, Kevin, Bobby, Dan, and Linda all came for the long Memorial Day weekend. The guys did lots of work including fixing the low point in the lane, knocking down several dilapidated buildings, and then of course setting them on fire!

The Current Hacienda

Here are pics of the house from this summer.

Many of you have asked to see pics of the house that is at the farm....so here it is in all it's glory. Keep in mind it was built in the 1870's and has had little work done to it in a long while.