June 17, 2015

New Weathervane

The sun is so hot right now (100 degree days).  Our air-conditioning went out, of course, but my brilliant husband remembered we had a window unit stored in the barn and fixed it in the kitchen.  Luckily, our upstairs bedroom has a mini-split, so we have somewhere cool to sleep.  Oh well, the world doesn't stop.  My husband got a weathervane for his birthday and chose to put it on the barn. We have continued to work on items for our youngest's apartment and are in the process of making an end table and a platform bed.

After/before stacking chairs

I have reupholstered four stacking chairs in a black suiting fabric with a shiny surface, and painted the metal part silver.
I also came up with an idea today of making a coat rack out of a scrap piece of wood, some old knobs and some silver paint. I finished a pair of curtains and two pillows for the chairs.  Most of this stuff I am posting on my pinterest page, so you will get a better idea of how it looks together if you look there.  There is a link on this page. We are picking zucchini squash, yellow squash and raspberries right now.  The beans are almost ready to be picked. Don't forget to check out the updated picture of the Solar Water Heater collector.

Coat rack from spare wood and knobs

Hercules and Phoenix

New pillows that match curtains

June 8, 2015

Homemade TV Antenna

Table made with drop leaf cocktail table

What a glorious day!  Today is my husband's birthday and I am so thankful for another year with him and hope there will be many more.  For his birthday he got a rooster weathervane for the barn and a waterfall rain gauge.  Weather station old fashioned style!  We may be working on putting them up tonight.  We are almost done with the table we were making for my youngest.  (See the previous entry for a link to the Ana White site).  I am so proud of us!  It's amazing how well things go together when you use each others' strengths.  I cut out the wood, my husband put it together, I shopped for the items and sanded, my husband worked the Kreg Jig, and I will be painting it with my daughter. I like the way my husband gets things together much better than me.  I am a little bit of a perfectionist (cough, cough) and am just fine with letting someone else do it with better skills than me when available.  As my husband is also a perfectionist, I trust his work.  The table is turning out so well!  I absolutely love the Kreg Jig!  It makes those wonderful pocket screw holes from the back of the wood so the screws are not seen.  Beautiful! I also worked on a TV antenna made from wire clothes hangers.  You can view the youtube video I watched to figure out how to make it here.  I was amazed that it did work better than the one we had bought (we got two more channels - even though we are out in the country).  It didn't cost me any money to make, I even had the uhf/vhf connecter in my basement that we had gotten with a piece of equipment.  Once I finished and found out it worked, I had to paint it to fit in better, making sure the washers protected the wires that were supposed to remain paint-free.

June 5, 2015

Lots of miscellaneous things are happening here on the farm.  The potatoes are about ready to dig, raspberries are ripe, blueberries are ripe, the garden is coming along nicely with corn, squash, melons, tomatoes, pepper, basil, eggplant, carrots, cucumbers, romano beans, sunflowers,and okra.  The asparagus is done, the strawberries are taking a break, the blackberries are ripening, the grapes are forming on the vines, and the hops are growing.  The fruit and nut trees are looking good this year with the exception of one of the almond trees and a cherry.  The fig trees started over from the ground this year.  The little crepe myrtles are doing well along the driveway.  The water hyacinths my kids gave me for the pond are blooming. 

Our youngest child is moving to her first unfurnished apartment, so we are trying to help her gather some furniture. In looking at ideas for furnishing a very small apartment, I loved the drop leaf round storage table from Ana White's site.  We are attempting a similar version starting out with a drop leaf cherry cocktail table, making the shelving component, and putting the two together.  The next steps are to add wheels, remove the Queen Ann legs from the coffee table and attach the shelving unit, and paint the bottom assembly black. We will work on the platform bed next. We plan to make it with 2 x 4's (more economical and less weight in case we have to help her move a few times.) We are also going to make the legs longer so we can fit in a drawer piece that we have leftover from a twin Captain's Bed that my mom needed without the drawers so she could fit in a trundle bed.