October 30, 2021 – Fall has come! The weather is cool and crisp, but still sunny. We seem to get energized with the change of the seasons!  We were blessed to have American persimmon trees on our property. Generally, you know they are ripe when they fall to the ground. John shook the tree every few days and collected the fruit that fell. He deseeded them and froze 2 full gallons of the flesh!  The garden is still producing too! Look at this tobacco pepper plant! We bottled more tobacco vinegar.

Sundays are tractor days – we don’t like to work on Sundays, but there’s just something about being on a tractor that is not work, but brings us so much joy!  John spent most of the day after church one Sunday scooping out dirt from our shallow pond to build up where the apple trees will be planted. The pond was mostly dry, but he still managed to get mud slung all over the tractor – that just adds to the joy!

Our drywall guy came back and mudded the rest of the house. It is amazing how much better the house looks. We can’t wait to start painting. We are going to wait for the ceiling texture to dry and paint that first, then we will move on to the walls.  We painted samples all over the house to see what colors we like in the different rooms. Because it is a small house, we are going to keep the color scheme the same. We think we are going to stick with the grey, sage and terracotta colors.

We tiled the shower in the master bathroom. We decided to install the tile vertically to help make the small shower look bigger. We found the decorative brown tile at a discount tile shop to accent the big grey tiles and to tie in the oil rubbed bronze fixtures. We will also use this tile for the baseboards.

Katie was able to sneak away for a long weekend with some friends to go to a Ukrainian Egg “retreat” in Ohio.  She visited a Ukrainian museum, the house where The Christmas Story was filmed, put her toes in Lake Eire, and spent 3 days working on Pysanky (Ukrainian Eggs).

Back at the farm, we had some leaking around our fireplace, so John tuckpointed the outside of the chimney and installed a new chimney cap.

John used his creativity to create these wonderful pendant lights. We are going to have 2 of them in the living room, 3 in the kitchen, 1 in each bathroom and 1 over the mudroom sink.  We could have only purchased 2 lights for what it cost us to build these 8! We pride ourselves in our thrifty creativity!