December 31, 2021 – We made so many HUGE advancements in the house this month. We replaced the front windows in the master bedroom. This room was the living room when we bought the house and it had a huge picture window.  We took out the window (it was broken, anyway), and built up the wall to give us privacy. The new windows are clean and bright and make such a difference in our bedroom.

After considering all our flooring options, we decided to keep the concrete as our bathroom floor and to paint it to look like tiles.  In the guest bathroom, Katie put a few coats of base paint down, then taped off squares, and painted the floor with various colors of the terracotta. From a distance, it really does look like tile!

Katie tried to paint a stencil on the master bathroom floor to make it look like tile. All the videos make it look so easy.  Not so. After several tries, and painting over failed attempts, we settled on a marbled grey look with single terracotta stencils here and there. The benefit of painting the floor is that if we decide we don’t like it, the cost to change it is minimal.

The bulk of this month was building cabinets. We built 26 cabinets for the bathrooms, mudroom, and kitchen (including our 9-cabinet 7-foot tall pantry!). We only are going to have 1 upper cabinet in the kitchen to keep the open feeling. Most of the lower cabinets in the kitchen will be drawers.

Christmas was very different for us this year. We did not put up a Christmas tree.  It was just a little depressing knowing that we are still not in the house and we really did not want to decorate the apartment again.  We did put up a few other decorations, though.

Since Nicholas had to work Christmas (he’s a Deacon now), we decided to wait until last Monday to celebrate the holiday.  We all traveled to Tulsa and had a wonderful Christmas celebration with Eric and Amy at their home.  Each of the “kids” got a Lego model in their stocking and we had a contest to see who could build theirs first.  Amy won!

As we close out this year, we are not where we thought we would be, and that makes us depressed. We are losing steam and just want the house finished. We called this blog, Undaunted Farming. The farming part is still undaunting, but we are getting a little daunted with the house. But, as we look back at all we’ve accomplished and all the hurdles we’ve overcome – way more than we knew about when we purchased the farm in late 2019, so we are not hopeless. Happy New Year!