Two weekends full of fun projects here at the Shenk homestead. One of those times when you think you will just get a few things done but end up getting a lot accomplished! Im going to do my best to recap the weekend of the 14th but to be completely honest I know I won’t remember it all! Especially after the weekend we just had. The comedy of it all is strong for all the events that happened on Sunday. So let’s start with two weekends ago.
The weekend of the 14th was mainly spent cleaning up around the homestead because it was too windy for us to attempt to do the last of “Leaf Day.” We started out by cleaning out our Goat Shed, where we had a lot of bunnies running free in the space. It didn’t take as long as we really thought it would so we may have been excited to be able to move onto other projects. What started as clean up day, slowly turned into poop day. Haha! We then went to the little brooder shed that we have set up for new chicks, ducks and turkeys. It didn’t take long to clean that out but it was a nice reset for the future little animals! Then we were off to cleaning the rabbit poop! Some was a little too wet to use on the garden so we put that into the compost pile. But the rest was perfect and we used that to cover the garden beds and help take care of the soil. We ended the night with smoked pork that was slowly smoking all day.
Now this past weekend. Oh what another fun weekend! It started with finishing the “Leaf Day” in the front yard and cleaning off the roof of the house. Once we got all of that cleaned up we kinda went our separate ways. Jeremy started on projects that he wanted to accomplish while I just kinda went with where the wind took me. The next thing I knew I was cleaning out food and waterers and put them in the chick brooder to keep organized. Then I wanted to clean up some of the greenhouse plastic that had started to break apart from the sun and weather. Ive been meaning to take out a trash can to just simply walk around and pick up the random bits of the plastic so we can get the homestead cleaned up. So that is exactly what I did but then the next thing I knew I was taking one of our hoop houses covering down too. I found out a tad bit late that Jeremy was hoping to have it last one more year but I just sped up the process apparently. Whoops! Once that was finished I went to the garden and pulled out the last of our raised framed garden beds. We are officially on the no till front and do not have to worry about structures. In the past few years we had issues with rats wanting to nest in the wood structures so removing them was the only option. Once that was done I joined back in helping Jeremy and he took down a tree to expand space in our next big project plans!
Sunday…. Oh Sunday…. What a day. Let me buffer with two things. 1) we usually take Sunday as a slow day so we can rest some before the start of the work week. We work from home but we do homestead and actual business work all of the time. So one day a week we try our best to spend it resting our bodies. 2) I had been working on carpet cleaning my daughters carpet for 5 days at this point. I was growing tired of this process not working. Here is where the story picks up.
Saturday night after a pretty tiring day of busting butt outside we came inside and I returned to check on the status of Skys carpet so I could start the next round of carpet cleaning if needed. Jeremy came to me and said “It’s not smelling better and I hate to say that I think we may need to remove the carpet. But here is the thing…. Everything is already removed from the room so it would be best to just rip up the carpet now since we are set up for it.” We agreed that that would be the best course of action but I had asked if we could wait to remove the carpet until we picked up flooring to start the project. Now we enter into Sunday. We went to two different Lowes in hopes to find specific type of flooring but we found out that they did not actually have it in stock like we thought as it showed it was on the website. We ended up with purchasing some flooring that a was higher priced than originally planned and slowly we came to terms that this project was first off unexpected and secondly higher priced than we planned. Once we arrived home we quickly grabbed some late lunch and then got to work on ripping up the carpet. Immediately we were surprised when we found that there was beautiful Oak hardwood flooring underneath. Seriously what a beautiful surprise that was! But this also meant that we had to make the trip back out to Lowes to return all of the flooring we had just purchased and now needed to pick up supplies to just refinish the floors. So instead of spending $550 we managed to spend $200ish. Once we rented a sander we headed home to start the process. We started at about 6:30 pm when with sanding the floor and then we got the stain applied to the floors and let it set over night. Monday we started with Polyurethane and proceeded to apply the second coat before we headed to karate with the kids.
Finally this morning, Tuesday, we were able to clean the floors, walls and doors so that Sky could start moving all of her stuff back into the room. She has officially gotten everything in and is finishing up organizing her space. We struggled in the hardware store when it came to picking a floor color but thankfully she ended up liking what we went with. Sky loves colors, I don’t blame her, but mom wanted to keep it more on the grey tones. If she could, she would change the colors in her room every other month. We let her change her old room colors probably every year or so for 3 years. So now it’s something I know is best if we just take the reins and give her guidance. Help her with narrowing down the options and then wait. We cant push her to have something change or she freaks out. But now that we walked with her on this and she understood what moms thinking was, she actually loves the color more than what she was originally thinking! She continues to say she likes the floor and she also purchased a little area rug for the space. This project has come to an end for now, we will get back to the trim another day but for now we can say it has been finished.