Projects, (O)Possoms, and Puppies

 
Another week has flown by!   It is so strange how fast each day passes here.  We barely get started on school,  then suddenly it’s lunchtime. We go “to town” to run an errand or pick something up, and by the time we get back it’s time to start dinner.  

This week my mom and I re-tiled the entry way. 

Tile cutting level: Master

 

My mom is no stranger to a tile saw and we have tiled many a bathroom together so this job was easy but still took forever to get everything level and perfect.  (as perfect as possible when the subfloor has a high spot and the existing space for the tile isn’t plumb to the door.)

The kids are having a blast.  They spend so much time outdoors.

 

Toads!

 

Caterpillars!

 

Buttercups!

 

Dandelion chopping.

Throwing rocks into puddles (I realized that they have never had the opportunity to do this before!)

 

First time gardening.  Paige is so funny, she wears her overalls EVERY SINGLE DAY.  I try to wash them at night for her.

 Reassembling the playhouse from the move and planting flower seeds.

 

Deer in the front yard.

More trash collecting, sorting, and wood burning.

One evening, after it had rained in the afternoon,  I looked out the window and saw fog!  Just laying there on our field!  It is was spooky and magical at the same time.    The pictures don’t do it justice at all.

 

Ember is still pregnant.  She is like a ticking time bomb and whenever she disappears for a little while everyone looks for her hoping she is off having her babies somewhere in the house.   She is really a wonderful cat.   (better than the two we brought with us!)

She likes to sit on pillows.

We moved the mother cat with her babies from the chicken coop to inside so the babies will grow up around us and be friendly.   The mama, Missy, is happy to be inside the house I think – even though she is contained to a cage.

Our feral cat issue is ALMOST resolved.   We have caught all but 1 on the wild cats.  The remaining male is very sly.   We have not been able to outfox him since he last escaped one of our cages.  We are rigging up a snare trap with a net.   I am excited to try it out and see if we can get him.

We did catch a large opossum in one of the traps.  Wow, what ugly little creatures they are!   This guy was fun to look at and then we let him go.   He quickly lumbered off into the woods.    I am afraid that one of these nights we will catch a skunk.

Because of our cat trapping endeavors, the fine folks down at the Hot Springs Animal Shelter know us well.  I have driven there and have interacted more with them than anyone else in AR yet.  They are super nice and it's a great shelter.  We have been very impressed with them.  Because we have frequented the shelter so often, we saw that they had a group of puppies that were very cute (and very inexpensive!!!!)   They were too young to be adopted when we first saw them but after waiting a week and half they were available for adoption yesterday.   Josh picked out two and brought them home!  They are not from the same litter.  The brown is a female, hound mix and the black is a male, lab mix.

It has just been decided that their names are Lance and Lucy.

This little girl has stolen my heart for sure. 

.

Chickens and goats, here I come! (It will be a while still,  we have too much going on at the moment)

Our house has a huge wasp problem.  Years of neglect or perhaps complacency, has resulted in several, and I mean several wasp nests in the eaves of the deck.   Perhaps I am naïve but I refuse to accept that there is nothing we can do and just let them rule our outside space. We are to subdue the earth, not let it terrorize us!   I went to battle and killed over 30.   There was probably more screaming and ducking than I care to admit.  The kids cheered me on. 

I feel like we made a good dent in them that day.   I sprayed their nests and have seen very few since.

My mom and I went to a Goodwill, they don’t hold a candle to the AZ Goodwills but they are better than the Tucson Goodwills.  While there, my mom bought this power wheel for the kids.  (The ones that can’t drive the Mule, ha)  They love trucking around the yard.  Man, these kids are spoiled!

Very soon I will post a video blog tour of our house and land.  I want to be able to document the progress and show anyone interested what we’ve got going on.

We made it!

 What a week it has been!

We left our house in AZ in tip top and spotless condition and put it on the market the night before we left. 

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4009-W-Dailey-St-Phoenix-AZ-85053/7945187_zpid/?mmlb=g,1

We had several showings over the weekend and accepted one of the offers that was over asking price.  We are still in escrow but everything is going smoothly and we are set to close at the end of the month if no issues arise.

It was strange pulling away from our house that last time knowing that in just a few minutes showing were scheduled and strangers would be walking through it.   I loved that house.

The drive out here went as well as could be expected,  uneventful and the kids were good but it was brutal.  It's just SO LONG.   We stopped at Flagstaff, the petrified forest, Cadillac ranch and for a quick parking lot visit with Josh's friend near Wichita Falls in Texas. 

The cats traveled well but Gandalf did go pee in Josh's car.

We finally arrived at our new home on Sunday mid morning.  (we had left AZ on Friday morning)

My parents arrived to the property a week earlier and set up their temporary home until they are ready to build.   They had been sending us pictures of different things so we knew that the house is in  rougher shape than we had seen/remembered from our quick walk through last month

Nothing terrible but just, dirty and old and needing replacing... and trash, the prior owner left a TON of trash!  We've already had big bonfire.  There will be many, many, many trips to the dump. It is beyond our comprehension at the way the people just throw threw their trash out in the forest.

I knew before that the floors needed help but upon our arrival we decided that they need help sooner rather than later and since we had a few days before our moving trailer would be delivered, I decided to save a few thousand dollars and rather than replace the floors with vinyl plank( which I had in our old house and loved) I would just sand and re-stain the existing wood floors. There are, or were, huge gaps between some of the planks that my mom and I painstakingly whittled down shims to custom fit each board crack to fill in the gaps.  Besides replacing, this was the best way to repair as caulk, or wood putty would crumble and break down over time.  It turned out well I think..

Taking out the yucky tile entry.

My mom and I got up early the next day,  drove to Little Rock to rent a floor sander and started right in on it.   It was a LOT of work to sand these floors. Claire, my dad and Josh all took a turn when my arms couldn't fight that thing anymore.

  

 Staining them was easy and putting the polyurethane coat was pretty easy too.   We ran into some hiccups and ended up needing to put down a second coat of the satin finish but I am so glad we did.  I am pretty happy with the results however,  I do not understand why people glorify wood floors. 

 

They are so fussy.

There are MANY home improvements that need to take place soon. Apparently the people before us either didn't have a level, or the level they did have was broken.

After the floors were finally done,  I had a chance to explore outside a little and we have spent some time exploring our land.

This little cat, that is yet to be named, had kittens our first day here. 

 We moved her to inside the chicken coop to keep her safe from coyotes and to keep her with the kittens.  I am not interested in bottle feeding kittens right now. 

We gained another sweet cat,  Ember, we call her.  She is a sweetheart and a prissy princess.  She is also pregnant and will have her babies any day now.  Josh is sure she will have them on our bed. She loves to sleep ON Josh in bed.   If anyone in the area happens to be reading this and wants a kitten,  please let me know. 

The outside cat problem is worse than we thought.  We counted at least 13 wild feral cats.  My mom and I got some traps from the county animal control and caught 7 in one afternoon.  We had to stop because we ran out of cages to put them in. We took them to the shelter today and then caught 2 more when we got home. 

The kids are loving the property.   They run around and play more than they ever have before.  They are sleeping in a lot later too!

Claire is the most excited about the Mule.

 

(It's my parents' but she chooses t o believe it is hers)  She drives that thing any chance she gets. 

  She is always eager to drive the trash to the bin by the barn and gives rides frequently.   This is a trip to the barn where the trash and mailbox are,  and then she drove on the road beyond on the main road.

My dad, (Poppy) has been enjoying the tractor and has been mowing, clearing brush, and collecting trash and junk from the various dumping sites and cleaning up the property.  

The previous homeowners ended up keeping the dog that we were supposed to take.  We found out later that he was a naughty dog and the electric fencing that is all over the property was to keep him in!  We had assumed it was to keep coyotes out!   We decided that this was a blessing and now Josh can choose any dog he wants. 

The weather here has been glorious.   It is chilly in the mornings and warm in the afternoon.  It is raining today which means we have had more days of rain since we arrived here than we did the entire year in Phx.   I can't believe that we have bulbs growing in our yard!

   

My favorite time of day is just before dinner, about 6:30, everything is warm and golden and beautiful. 

Well,  that's all I have pictures of for right now.  Next up; exploring the barn, putting in upper kitchen cabinets, re-tiling the entries, snake control, pond dredging?,  well water testing,  more cat escapades.  Further down the line, (but not too much further I hope!) gutting both bathroom showers!

End of an Era

 

Today I closed a chapter of my life. 

Today, after 15+ years,  I said good-bye to Big D Floor Covering Supplies.

This job has been a huge blessing for us.  I have worked both full time and part time as our family has changed and grown over the years.  The company has been generous to me in their flexibility and allowing me to work from home (even in pre-covid times).  It has been good and I am thankful but I am so happy to not have to work. 

The only sad part about leaving is saying good bye to my boss, Jeff.   I have worked with Jeff longer than I've been married.  He is the nicest guy anyone could ever hope to meet.   He will always, always, always do that right thing and he is never too busy (even though he actually is) to help anyone with a problem.  I am blessed to have been able to work with a man having such integrity, patience, and a servant's heart. 

Today I had to say good-bye to my friend, and I will miss him greatly.

Me leaving work:

Me leaving Jeff: 

We are moving to Arkansas!

 We are moving to Arkansas!

Now there is something I never thought I would say!

I have never been open to the idea of moving out of Arizona.   Anyone who knows me knows that if it's cooler than 73 degrees, I am freezing.  I also have not wanted to leave Arizona because I am very close to my parents and would not want to leave them.  However,  my dad retired last year and my mom told me that if Josh was ever led to leave Arizona,  they would be willing to come with us.  It has always been my dream to have land and animals and be more self sufficient. I realized that  this might be possible if we moved out of state. I dreamed and waited and dreamed some more and watched far too many Homestead Rescue episodes.  I have been entertaining thoughts of goats, chickens, beehives, selling goat soap, milk, eggs and honey from a small homestead for quite a while now and have a nice collection of books on such topics.

Then 2020 hit and not only did the kids lose most of the activities that they loved, but we also had the most miserable summer imaginable (144 days over 100 degrees and 2 days of rain the entire year) and it was cemented in my mind that I would be happy if we ever had to leave.

Last month a job opportunity came up for Josh in Hot Springs, Arkansas.   In early February the church flew me and Josh out to interview.  We did not know if he was the only one or if there were other candidates at the time.

A member of the church owns a beautiful cabin on Lake Hamilton that he often loans out to family and friends and we were able to stay in it for the 3 nights we were in Hot Springs.  We felt so pampered!  We had several meetings with the pastors, staff, youth staff, and elders.  It became very clear, very quickly that God wanted us there. The church and job are perfect for Josh and for us as a family.  It was like they had a missing puzzle piece that he fit into perfectly and vice versa.  We couldn't ask for more.

On a day that we had a few hours of free time, we met with a realtor and looked at houses.  What a disappointment!  All of the houses we looked at were over 20 minutes from the church, and in horrible areas, (neighbors were either junk piles or dilapidated mobile homes) they needed a TON of work and not anything that we had hoped. I was so discouraged.  We were told to look more north of the city (it's nicer up there) but we had scoured Zillow for many weeks leading up to this trip and we knew there was nothing else out there.   That night I was sick to my stomach knowing that Josh would probably get this job  - which we wanted! But where would we live? We were flying home the next day so I felt pretty hopeless.  I prayed "God,  this would be a lot easier to say yes to if we had someplace to live or even a hope of something nice."  I had also been praying all along that if He wanted us to move out of state, that it would be so clear we wouldn't doubt if we were supposed to or not.    I kid you not, right after that, I logged onto good ol' Zillow for the 7 thousandth time and this house popped up that we had never seen before - even though it has been listed for 30 days. We made some calls and were able to get an appt to see the house the next day on our way to the airport.

The entire drive up there I held my breath just waiting to turn into some rural slum road but that never happened.  The drive was gorgeous.  The houses nearby were just nice, well-kept homes on rolling hills of grass and trees. 

As soon as we pulled up to the property I knew it was the one. The homeowner was there which was great.   She was really talkative and sweet and has our same taste in style.  I wouldn't even have to repaint! 

Honestly, we barely looked at the house, we were way more interested in the land.  The property is on 20 acres,  it has a couple of great places for my parents to build their house.  It has a beautiful creek, a pond, pastures, forests, an 80 year old barn, chicken coop, hog pen, a structure for goats, a lawnmower/tractor/backhoe that my dad is really excited about, there are even 9 or 10 beehives on the property that a guy owns but she lets him use the land and he gives her honey in return. The real kicker was when Josh asked about why there where so many cats hanging out on the back porch. (they were really beautiful cats!) The homeowner told us that two of them are hers but the others she just feeds and when they have kittens she finds homes for them!  *audible groan from Josh* We told the homeowner about our kitten rescuing brigades, she was very pleased that if we bought her house we would take care of them. We were blown away by how perfect everything was for us and it was only 14 minutes from the church!  There is not a single stoplight between the two.  

Do you know what the chances are of finding a property that 4 adults are equally excited about?  With plenty of land, everything I could ever dare to hope for and more, AND be only 14 minutes from Josh's work? 

 Josh got the job 2 days later, the offer on the house was accepted the following day.  The homeowner asked if we would take her big, pyredoodle. (Pyrenees Mountain Dog/Poodle) She can't take him with her where she is moving, so we said yes!  (This also fulfills my promise that I had made that the first animal we would get on our homestead would be a dog for Josh - because he wants one so badly)  

The whole trip and experience out there was just amazing.  It is so clear that this is what God has for us, Not even a moment of  "Are we doing the right thing?" has crossed my mind.  I feel so spoiled by all these blessings and still can't wrap my head around it all. The best thing of all is that I won't have to work anymore!  I plan on blogging much more and sharing our struggles and triumphs as we learn to live a homesteading life.

It will be hard to leave our friends, family and networks here in Arizona. We will miss our home state and those we love in it.  We will have a place for guests so anytime you want to come for a visit and stick your hand in a hot spring, just let us know!

How strange it will be to not know ANYBODY or ANYTHING in this unknown land of Arkansas, but in the words of Bilbo Baggins, 

I think I'm quite ready for another adventure.

My Solar Oven

My solar oven is complete!  This has been an off and on project for me for the past year. Actually, I dabbled in it for a few weeks about a year ago and then did nothing for a year until now. 

 It started when I bought a wine fridge at Goodwill for $20.  It was the perfect size, black, and had a lovely, double-insulated, clear, glass door.  I was able to get it to reach about 250*, however, I learned that refrigerators aren't made for heat.   The inside bubbled up and I could literally smell the cancer coming out when I opened the door.   I threw the fridge away, kept the door, broke the glass out of it so I could use just one pane of the tempered glass, and then got to work building my own oven with the least amount of toxic materials that I could.  

I wanted it to be big enough to fit my big pot that I use almost daily and a cookie sheet or bread pan at the same time.  

I made a frame out of 2x2s and used some luan that we had hanging around in the garage for the sides.   (Funny side note: I had to go to 3 different Home Depots and Lowes to find 2x2's because they were literally out,  and one guy told me they don't come in that size!)

There is a 1.5 inch space that I lined with an emergency mylar blanket before adding the insulation. 

For insulation, I bought 2, big, down feather pillows at Goodwill when they were half off.   

Here I am stuffing handful after handful after handful of feathers into the insulation space.  By the end of the feather stuffing stage I decided I am a pretty weird person and was questioning my life choices. 

The sides and bottom are PACKED TIGHT with down feathers.  I just stuffed some foil on top to keep them from popping out.  Our garage looked like I had killed 100 chickens. Josh loved it. 

I must say that this also took about 700 more screws than I originally anticipated because the feathers were packed so tightly that the boards were bursting at the seams.

I lined the inside with a few layers of foil, and the bottom with black felt so the black will absorb the rays instead of reflecting them back out through the glass. 

 I used a nicer wood to create the frame of the face and attached the glass to a hinge with epoxy. ( i can't drill through the glass since it is tempered)


 My dad had the metal clips to hold it snugly to the gasket. 

The gasket around the edge of the glass is a silicone cooking mat that I cut into strips.  I think I am going to need to find something thicker though. I have a feeling that air is escaping between the glass and the silicone since it is not very thick or squishy.

For the reflectors, I bought corrugated plastic boards at Michaels - 6 different times so I could use a coupon on each one.  ( I made Claire check out a few different days to hurry up the buying process.)

 

 I probably spent a total of 37 hours trying to figure out what angle I should cut the boards at so that the fit together AND sit at a 60 degree angle to the face of the oven. Turns out it was 60 degrees - I'm not sure if that is common knowledge that I should have known or if it is just happenstance.

I got higher quality emergency blanket at Walmart that has plastic, tarp-like backing on it.  I thought I was so clever by ironing the tarp onto the plastic boards so that the plastics would melt and meld together.  This did work beautifully, however, the heat caused the board to curl.  I decided to keep it and see if it impacted the reflection negatively or positively.

The rest of the panels I just used double stick tape to attach the blanket.  I will attach them more permanently after I see how the curved panel does.  I have a feeling I will need to remake that one.

 I put the whole oven on a moving cart so I can easily move it and turn it to keep it in the optimal position in the sun.

 After it got up to 250*,


I put our first real test food in it.

In about 20 minutes the cookies looked done and were brown!  This surprised me that they got brown and a little crisp around the edge.

                                                       My official cookie taste tester

He said it was good!

Between you and me, he doesn't have very high standards so I tried one.  It was fine but it had a little epoxy flavor (from the hinge).  I am hoping that that will go away after the oven gets hot a few times and it off-gasses.   None of the kids noticed it though.

I also was able to cook a pot of rice that we will have with dinner.  It took about two hours.
The picture didn't capture it but there was some beautiful steam.


(the rice did NOT have any strange flavor at all and the texture is excellent.)


This is testing during January with few hours of sunlight and 65 degree highs.   I am excited to see what it can do when the sun doesn't set until 8pm and the high is 115*. 

Well, there we have it.  It needs a few tweaks but for the most part it is done!  Oh, and I desperately need to figure out how to attach a handle to the glass for easier opening. #burninghotglass