Well, it’s taken a few days to recover but the marathon of work while Stefan’s parents were here has come to a close for now. We still have a few other small project that we are working on (like the mudroom which I’ll post about in a bit) but we accomplished some very big tasks over the 3 days they were here working with us. I know you’re curious about everything so here goes…

On Wednesday, Doris (Stefan’s mom) & I started painting the base of the house. Stefan and I picked out a color last year that we thought would end up close to the sandstone on the house but apparently the lights in the store played some tricks on us. The color still turned out to be nice, just not quite as dark as we thought…

Here you can see our started progress on the part of the “sockel” we repaired last year but never got around to painting…

And voila! We have a fully painted base that instantly made the house look better. We still have to patch over a hole where they put the drainage pipe from the bath we added upstairs…but we’ll get to that soon enough. We’re still trying to decide on what color to paint the board that will hide it but also allow us to get back in there quickly should we need to access the pipe.

The guest house also got a fresh coat of paint and is looking massively better. We still need to pick up some green paint to take care of the new window frames…and build some shutters to cover the windows we no longer use – but one thing at a time…

And then the painting of the shutters on our house began. If you go back to the photos of the main house above, you’ll remember there used to be a simple flower design on the shutters. We thought this was just too plain for such an amazing house so we found a stencil that we thought would suit the house much better.

First we (read Doris) repainted the shutters with a color very close to what used to be on them…and then wsing one of the colors from the trim running above the house, Doris stenciled on the new design. We absolutely love the way it turned out and feel it gives the house a much more grand feeling now. Of course we still have all the shutters on the front and other side of the house to do…but the shutters on the front have to be replaced because they are extremely weathered and just not up to being sanded down and repainted. But thankfully the shutters on the alley side of the house are in perfect condition and will only require us to buy more paint so we can finish them up.

Part of the reason for this frenzy is because we are hosting Stefan’s 30th birthday here on June 14th and one of the tasks was cleaning out the barn so we can put some tables in there should the weather not be too great on the party day. Thankfully this task didn’t take as long as we thought it might and we finally remembered just how huge this barn is when it isn’t full of junk!

For the party we’re going to get a roll of outdoor carpet to lay down so we don’t have so much dust kicking up while people are in there…

And one of the finds in the barn was this little bench which will get a fresh coat of paint and will hide a bit of the wall here until we get the vines down and start refinishing the walls of the storage building…a project for who knows when. Speaking of storage rooms, I did some work in them on Friday too since we had once again reached the point of not being able to walk into any of them. Not good. But a couple hours of work and they are looking great again – and we can actually find things in them!

Here was our trash container after we’d started the barn clean-out. I didn’t get a photo of it after that because they came to pick it up earlier than expected yesterday….but we managed to fill it up most of the way again. It seems that the trash here just never ends.

Another little project I took on was putting up a shelf in the pig stalls which has become a storage area for all our building materials. Things were just piled everywhere which prevented us from finding anything – an extremely common theme in this place!

And, yes, there was more. One of the projects the guys started on Thursday was putting down floor trim in the guest house. It became a more complicated process than they’d hoped because most of the walls in there are still not 100% straight and some of the boards we bought were also a bit warped…but where would the fun be otherwise, right? Now the guest house is looking quite finished (aside from the closet which is still a scary situation which we will not be taking on just yet either). But you may notice there is a cabinet and TV missing from this photo. We hijacked it for our own bedroom because we just don’t have that many guests…and when they are in there, they’re usually ready to pass out. We’ll probably get a smaller TV to hang on the wall in there at some point – but hey, we’re not made of money here folks! 😉

And since I don’t think they have been photographed before
….here are the mounted shower heads in the guest house. Look good, right? We haven’t used them personally yet but we hear good things.

So a big thanks goes out again to Stefan’s parents who kept us going through all this. Where their energy and enthusiasm comes from, I do not know. But there are more working marathons already in the works (yes, apparently we have lost our minds) but to be honest, we’d like to have as many things done around here as possible before the baby comes so that we don’t have to worry about too much the first 6 months or so and can just enjoy the new addition to the family. And then, of course, we need the baby to grow big and strong quickly because we need another helper around here! Things go so much faster with 8 hands than with 4!