Our Office, plus Charlie rocking out!

We never took any pictures of our office in the first year or so of living here, so I don't have any before pictures.  But I remembered this video Cliff made of Charlie our lab mix, which gives you an idea of the room.  
Originally the room was a covered porch, which the previous owners turned into a bedroom.  Using chipboard on the walls, paneling on two walls and brown paint everywhere.  Also the floor was just plywood, nothing else.  They covered the plywood with carpet, which smelled like dog and looked as if it had never been vacuumed.  So out it came and in came large Bacova rugs.  Bacova is a textile company, here in Alleghany County.  The make textiles and accessories for places like Lowe's, and Menard's.  Since my husband works there he often gets in on employee sale days and we can get a 9x12 rug, with a slight tear in it for $12. So below is the video of said room with a Bacova rug.

 





Shortly before we got married, Cliff's father came across a ton of Oakwood pieces that are rectangle in shape and originally intended to be sides of hospital beds.  They were free to a good home and he thought they would make nice flooring.  So the two of them spent a weekend installing this new floor, basically by gluing down the wood as if the were tiles.  I originally bought a blue color that looked great in the store, until I applied it to the walls.

 

Not to long later, my mom had mixed up some left over pain from her house painting jobs and created a tan color of sorts and so I used it to repaint the room.  It is better, but I will probably paint it a third color sometime.

Before and After

Here we have the part of our back yard, which was just dirt some grass and weeds.  When it rained, it became one long mud puddle.  So, we put down paving stones for a walkway, I moved some of the millions if Iris plants that we had, to line the back of the house. And in between the stones I planted sedum, taken from my mom's garden in Maryland.
 

Vegetable Garden

This was our first garden in the house.  We grew tomatoes, yellow squash and zucchini.  It was small but manageable.  Except the watering part.  The first freeze we had living here caused our outside faucet to freeze and burst.  I came home from work to find water gushing everywhere under the deck.  An extension pipe was installed under the deck, from the house to the picket.  The pipe was not wrapped in insulation and we didn't know about it, so the resulting burst.   We had a plumber "fix" it temporarily, just so it wouldn't happen again and we would worry about it in the spring when we needed it. But that didn't happen.  That first spring I watered without a hose, carrying jugs of water to water the plants. This past summer we finally had it properly fixed.  We moved the outside faucet to come right from the house, so it would not do this again. We also had a frost-free faucet installed.

This year we decided to have a raised garden bed.  Using some of the 2x4's from the faux wood cabin wall, Cliff built the bed.  We put a liner down to help keep the weeds down and filled it with top soil and a mix of garden soil.

 This year we have tomatoes, swiss chard, oregano, chives, pepper plants and asparagus.
 

And the swiss chard is the first item we harvested, all grown from seeds!  Yummy!!!

Winter of 2009-2010

 This past winter well was the snowiest and coldest, Virginia has seen in at least 15 years.  I believe we had over 40 inches of snow; we had about 14 snow days from school.  In the month of January we didn't attend one full day of school due to 2-hour delays or cancellations.  Luckily we were stocked up with wood, as seen in some of the photos.  The woodstove kept us warm and we only had one frozen pipe this winter!  Every winter in the past, we have had to deal with the kitchen sink pipe freezing. When the temperatures get below freezing, the pipe under the kitchen floor freezes somewhere.  We have tried heat tape, tossing boiling water down the drain and even putting a heater under the sink to see if it would help.  But the only thing that really works is for the temperatures to get back above freezing. Oh the joy of doing dishes in the bathtub!

The above photo is Cashton's first time seeing the woodstove at work! 

He quickly fell in love with it, just as we have!