Spring Chores...More than usual!

Finally back again!!  I've missed writing my blog.  Seems this Spring is a time of fixing up and redoing many little things we have long neglected around here.  Our latest project, after the new floor in our living room, is the painting of the bedroom floor.  So much 'stuff' to move to get to the floor !  Our bed is a real old cannonball bed with the round wooden orbs on all four corner posts.  Originally it was a rope bed but many years ago, after offering the highest bid, not much at the time, something like $10. at the local Church Auction, we hauled it home and Dennis revamped it so it became a full bed instead of a 3/4 bed.  That meant we had to make a new headboard...the old one was pretty bad anyway, and make the whole thing wider.  Then later he made a platform for our new mattress. This thing is HEAVY !!  It takes at least 4 weight lifters in good shape to move the thing!  With the help of our son in-law Paul, grandson, Nate and Den and I plus a hand-truck thingy which I 'drove' with one side of the bed up  on it, we got it over to the other side of the room that was all cleared off.  The painting didn't take long but the drying took just FOREVER !  The house is circa 1860 and the old wide board floors are so nice to have.  We had covered them all these years with a wall to wall carpet.  Then we had to do the moving thing again with the bed to paint the other side of the room.  Finally that dried and we could get things back to normal.

Lizzie kitty had to be kept out of that end of the house while the paint dried.  And we had to vacate to the 'Hayloft' which is our summer bedroom or the guest room off at the other end of the house.  It has no central heat, but a Franklin stove does a great job if you bother to light it !  (only a couple sticks of wood at a time or it cooks you out!)  So we spent a week as guests in the hayloft.  Yes, it was once a loft for the hay needed for the family cow and horse.  The floor was a 'floating floor'.  In those days it wasn't such an uncommon thing.  In the late summer, when haying time was finished, the floor was lowered and the dried hay was pitched in through the hayloft door which was on the second story of the building.  Lowering the floor made it cozier and warmer for the animals for the winter. It has always been in the raised position all the time we've been here except for the time one corner gave way and let that corner of the floor down into the workshop!  Thank the Lord nobody was in the workshop at the time!  Now it is a solid floor that can no longer be raised and lowered. This is one of the three buildings moved to the property and all hooked together.  One can go from the main or first structure to the ell to the woodshed and on to what is now the workshop with the summer/guest bedroom above it without going outside.  Good Yankee ingenuity.  The former woodshed is now a bathroom, coat closet and a stairway to the loft.
It is good to be back to normal again, and Lizzie thinks so too!  Here she is having a little visit with her red squirrel friend.

Besides all the fixing up stuff and spring cleaning in general (which I have been kinda lax about for a couple years), it is also our time of the year to visit our dentist and doctors for annual checkups etc. So I really have been a  busy cleaning machine!

It is still pretty chilly here in the early morning so we are keeping the wood furnace going and even the kitchen wood cookstove when we first get up.  This means keeping the furnace wood cut and at the ready.  Den has a great system for this.  The wood is put into the large open area of the basement, the part under the 1960's addition, in 4 foot lengths, stacked and ready to cut into furnace lengths.  He does this sawing in the fall and again in the spring...all inside and under cover and dry. After sawing, the cut pieces are loaded onto a dolly and wheeled to the other side of the cellar where the old wood furnace resides. He says it gives him something to do in his spare time.  Here's a picture of him tonight doing his thing down in the 'wood room'.

So I will find time to slow down soon.....get outside.....pick some dandelion greens and get back to my usual spring life.  I have a baby quilt to make by June.  Remember, Yesterday is history, Tomorrow is a mystery, and Today is a gift.