I am delighted to have found such wonderful tenants. They are really working to make the place look great - updating fences, using the barn to its capacity, looking after the house...like WOW! What a change from the past attempts. Makes me happy.
But wait....the silver lining has a cloud. It's the neighbors! Seems that my tenants had had battles for neighbors about a number of issues...its so sad. We have a boundary line dispute need to move water pipes and fences and overall a huge amount of stress. Makes me very sad.
One day I hope we can get through all this and that the black clouds of this farm in Colorado will have a silver lining. More details will come through once we are on solid ground with a few isues...for now all I can say is STRESS and its costing us a pile of money that we wanted to sink into Maine projects.
Then the Murramarang news.....
The Farm in Maine give me a huge amount of joy. Its a long slow process to get anything done as we share the responsibility to look after kids while one of us works on projects. Since the last blog entry we have been working on a few issues:
Working on the kitchen....it has been out with the old and in with part of the new :) Demolishing the old kicthn was a much bigger task than we thought. It was built to withstand a bomb bast - and took a lot of strong arming to get out.
Jen stripped off all the horrible wallpaper and we reclad some walls then painted the ceiling white and the walls a pale yellow - again to brighten up the place.
The next step was installing a new floor over the evil old tiles. We picked up a load of flooring from a discount store that looks like old barn timbers - a little aussie gum-like in look. After doing all the floors in Colorado, this was an easy task to get in.
We then went and ordered all new cupboards from Home Depot and started to install them to give us more bench space and functionality. We found that we needed a new fridge in the process...as the old second hand one just kept leaking water!
The new cabinets were easy to install - even when the walls were just horrible. The new bench tops were more difficult, but seemed to work out ok for us.
Now the big task is to paint all the cabinets and doors - a work still in progress but we hope to have completed by the end of October!
While all this was happening we decided that I really needed a better dedicated office space instead of spilling into a corner of the lounge room and garage. The only place to do this is the basement - in which we have water issues. So the first step was to work on the water. We bought a dehumidifier and let it run n the basement fro around a month. This was an amazing breakthrough - the basement lost its dusty musty smell and really dried out. We now run the machine a few days a week - and it seems to keep the place dry. The next phase is to install a good sump and sump pump - and we hope to do that through winter and before the major thaw (and basement flooding) season starts in spring.
We started the office space in one of the basement corners and decided to be safe, we would build up off the floor so any water that gets into the basement can flow under the floor and be captured by a sump pump in the future. We build the stud walls and lined them with plastic, so the office is almost a plastic box. We installed a new basement window (upside down I might add - dumb arse Gary!) in a hole that had just been boarded up with planks.
It is still a work in progress, but we hope to have it functional by the end of October - even it not really finished off completely.
We also made headway on getting the hay loft in the barn back to a working place - the doorway had be boarded over in the past. A new door way has been made - and just needs a door and a clean up inside to have a space ready to use for storage (hay or otherwise).
So lots happening on many fronts....lets hope winter is not too harsh and we can continue to get the inside of the farm buildings finished and working!
