sometime it's just not pretty....

Lest you start to think that I'm just another "pretty picture" blog :) or that I only show you the edited version of life here at the farmhouse, rest assured I show you the good, the bad, the ugly... and this is ugly!!
We've been having record rains here in the Northeast, rivers are flooding across our state and region. Even though our house sits on the top of a hill the ground is so saturated that the basement began to "retain water."

(Before I go any further, let me say that I am very grateful that this was our mere inconvenience, as many homes across the region were reported to have had up to 8 feet of water in the basement plus flooded houses.)
In one area of our basement it was a good two inches. Dan used the shop-vac to remove 160 gallons of water last night, and then this morning Dan and our wonderful, fabulous painter/handyman Seth removed another 250 gallons and put in a sump pump. For my Southern family and friends who aren't familiar with this animal it involved having to cut through the concrete floor, digging down about a foot and a half and placing a submersible pump in the hole that removes all the water from underneath the house when the hole fills up with water. Did I mention it's not pretty?!!

This is a sump pump.

Dan's worktable (we found it at an estate sale in Dallas- isn't it a great table?!) had to be moved to put in the sump pump. You can see the pump underneath the worktable towards the back wall.

Okay, maybe a couple of 'fun' pictures.... !
Pile of vintage caps and old ceiling medallions, plus extra harps that we use in making lamps.


Antique cash register stand that Dan uses for small nuts and bolts (also found at an estate sale in Dallas). Old radiators taken from the house are in the background.

It turned out to be a really good day, as Ella got to go to her favorite store...Lowes!
Ella loves Lowes- even more than Petco!! To watch her wiggle and waggle into the store you'd think they were handing out treats.... well, actually they do give her dog cookies!!

That's one happy girl!

Then the day only got better, when we had to go to Home Depot too!!

Luckily it is supposed to be in the 70's this weekend, so we look forward to drying out!!

May I whine???

It's been a rough week. We are in finish mode, so problems at this point are all big issues. We wake up every day knowing that there will be at least three forest fires to put out when we get to the house. We are emotionally and physically exhausted. We feel we are in a constant, daily fight for "our" house. I don't have the energy to tell you all the problems, and quite honestly I just can't bear to put them in writing because it makes them all too real. Let's just say my face has broken out, I don't sleep , I have fever blisters and my back is doing this stress thing it does... goes out for no reason, well other than stress that is! Needless to say I am very purdy!! Okay, now I'm done with the whining (but not the wine!) portion of this post. Thank you for your patience!

I will now show you some good things that have happened around the house!

As I mentioned in my Kitchen Ingredient post I found some reproduction hardware that are a near perfect match to the original antique iron bin pulls that are on the built-in to the right of the kitchen fireplace. They arrived today and are perfect! They are unfinished brass and I will paint them to match the iron. I ordered some other pulls from another company that were similar and were actually iron, but the detailing on them wasn't as crisp, so I went with the brass. They will go on the island. The hardware on the perimeter cabinets is polished nickle. Did I mention they're solid brass and $5.69 each! Such a lucky find!

From the same company, House of Antique Hardware, I found these great brackets that I will add to the sink side of the kitchen! I love how they change the feel of the room.

Door on the right is the door that I designed/drew out for the french doors in the kitchen and the master bedroom. The door on the left is what I got. Hellllloooooo..... can you say 'not to scale?' Oh my head! The corrected doors were installed today. The doors open out. We talked about out-swing doors, but I decided I wanted them in-swing somewhere along the way. I told GC this, but somehow this didn't get told to the window/door company (and what a surprise GC doesn't seem to 'remember' this conversation!)... I will say; however, (and please don't tell my GC!) that I am really liking them! They take up less space inside and from my research they are the norm in Europe! We have lots of wind at our house, so I am working on how to secure them while open.

All of the floors in the farmhouse (with the exception of the new Carlisle floors in the dining room, the kitchen and the master bath) have been stained and have four coats of low VOC tung oil on them. The minute they were able to be walked on (booties only at this point) the painters moved in to do finish coats, so I don't have many pictures. This is one of the guest bedrooms.

This is the dining room. The floor in this room had been changed to oak at some point. The rest of the house is pine, so we took it back to pine. Come to find out we have a mix of flooring, which was common as they would use whatever was available to them at the time. The whole process has been a huge leap of faith as the stain literally changes throughout the entire process. I really like and trust the floor guy who was recommended by Carlisle, thank goodness! My goal is a medium brown with yellow/gold undertones showing through. Because we have lots of red pine mixed with our eastern white pine it first read RED! Floor guy kindly returned my phone call last Saturday night when I called in a panic because my floors looked red! He assured me (mind you he had already told me this, but 'seeing' it made me forget everything I had heard!) that the floor would change color throughout the staining and layers of tung oil, and then even after it was dried the color would settle down and the color would evolve. And I'll be darned if it doesn't have more golden tones than it did just two days ago. Again... a huge leap of faith! In the end the floors are really beautiful, and work well with the paint colors (I promise a paint post is coming!)


New floor going down in the master bath just today! Isn't the beadboard sweet?!