Going up!

The wood, that is. Jeremy put up some trim to start and yesterday he started putting up the wood. I'm so excited I can't stand it!

This somewhat bizarre shot is from the floor in the bedroom doorway, looking up to the ceiling. We're putting pine tongue-in-groove paneling on the walls and ceiling. We're going to be painting it white when it's done.



I didn't mention before where we got the wood from. I'm pretty sure Jeremy found this guy on Craigslist (not surprising). He lives here in Minnesota, about two hours north of us. He cuts the wood and mills it, dries it, does whatever needs to be done to turn out some fantastic wood products. We got wood ready for flooring, wood ready for the paneling, trim wood, and wood for new stairs. Jeremy and our wood guy had a conversation about supporting local business and small businesses as they were loading the wood onto the front porch.
One thing we've both really enjoyed about this wood is how real it is. Not that wood flooring/paneling from Home Depot or some such store isn't real. But it's too perfect and would never have an end that looks like this:





Our wood is beautiful and has a lot of character. It is going to mean an absolutely beautiful space to live in.

While I've got you here, just thought I'd include a couple photos of what it looks like outside. I'm so used to it, I forget other people are just getting rain or having temps in the 50s!


(good luck finding our raised beds under all that snow!)


(or any mushrooms for that matter!)

Another guessing game

It has been even longer since I talked about our quilt. I got the first two squares done in October as well as cutting out all the pieces. I think I sewed some of the triangles together but then other projects intervened. And, as any of you quilters know, a big quilt means a lot of monotony. Nothing like sewing 100 or so of the same pieces to each other, over and over and over - and then ironing, over and over and over. One must take breaks.

But I was inspired again after Christmas and took up the project again.





These were from last week and I've gotten farther along than that since then.

The big question now is, when will I finish it completely?

Jeremy is really hoping it will get done by the time we move upstairs (which could be as early as mid-February!) I'm not sure if that is possible, but I can quilt crazy-fast when the mood strikes.

My only goal is to get it done before August. If it turns out to look as cool as we're hoping, I'm thinking about entering it into the state fair.

So here's the guessing game: Everyone make a guess as to when you think I'll finish this thing. The person who comes closest to the date will get ... some sort of prize I'll think up later. =)

Guess...

Guess where we are?

a. a lumber yard
b. our house

Answer: our house of course!



It has been a whole month since I talked about the house! Can you believe it? Not too much has happened in that time. We finished the insulation and then we had to put vapor barrier up. The electrical is working and mostly installed.
Jeremy decided to shim the floors after a lot of back and forth. He decided that though it would be a pain, it would make things a lot easier in the long run. The floor has some major dips and sags. It would have been easier to deal with this when the whole floor was open and there weren't any framed walls up - but back then we were still thinking about keeping the floor as it was. Oh well.



We ordered the wood for the walls and floor and were just waiting for it to arrive. It finally arrived yesterday.







We have to wait awhile for the wood to adjust to the temperature and humidity of the house, and then we can start installing wood! Wahoo!

Christmas, part II

As promised, I'm back with more Christmas photos! I just wanted to show off some stuff we made for Christmas gifts for Jeremy's family.

First, here is a small quilt I made. My favorite part about this is that I had almost all the fabric already on hand! I love getting new fabric, but I also really love just having what I need already there. I had to get the frog backing, but only because it just HAD to have frogs on it!





I also had in my stash some really light weight, soft cotton so I made a stack of hankies.



Remember back to October and the couch cover I made for Jeremy's sister's family? They wanted pillows to match it so I made these with the leftover fabric (and some green fabric they found). They are ridiculously girly. Victorian I believe Meg called them.



Then a neighbor down the block gave me several yards of this material and I realized it would fit perfectly - so I made a second pair of pillows for them.



Jeremy's brother got these pillows - made out of flannel. The red material came from a man's shirt I picked up at the thrift store.



Our niece wanted a teapot and tea cozy so we found this adorable set (on Craigslist of course) and I made a chicken tea cozy to go with it.



And lastly, Jeremy got a bunch of belts at the thrift store and made this cool sword belt for our nephew.





After we gave it to him he found two other attachable sword things to put on it and came out with something like 5 or 6 swords and daggers and knives and a shield (all wooden I believe). He was pretty excited.

Chicken Stock

We are big believers in not wasting things and one of those things that people often (incredibly) waste are chicken carcasses. It is incredibly easy to make great chicken stock from the bones of your chicken feast (or turkey stock, vegetable stock, fish stock, meat stock, etc!) You just throw in the old carcass, some veggies, some herbs, and some water - then simmer it for awhile and voila!

The problem for us is where to put all that chicken broth. Usually Jeremy freezes it in some large and medium size glass containers. When they're fully frozen I remove them from the container (which is not easy, let me tell you) then we pop the giant chicken broth ice cubes in plastic bags in the freezer. Then when we need a little chicken broth we go through a long process of thawing and chipping and thawing and hacking at the giant ice cubes till we get enough broth for whatever recipe we're making. Aargh! It can be a long and frustrating process - though not enough to make us buy chicken broth from the store.

Imagine our surprise and delight when I found out last fall that we could can chicken broth! Now it seems perfectly obvious (I mean, you can buy cans of chicken broth at the store!) but for some reason it was a surprise.

Canning chicken broth, we realized, was one way to help out in our freezer challenge. Jeremy found several chicken carcasses and a duck carcass in the freezer and a bag of chicken feet - which is an excellent addition to stock (we get them from a local farmer). He made a ton of stock.





We also rescued a number of containers of frozen chicken broth and thawed those out to can as well.



After processing them in the canner, they made this funny popping sound for a good 10 minutes.



We got 16 quarts of chicken stock. Now we can just grab a quart off the shelf and we don't have to bother thawing them out! Wahoo!!

An icy new year

We got a last minute invitation on Thursday to join a friend over at Minnehaha Falls. (The same friend who led the sky candle adventure last year.) She would be ringing in the new year behind the ice curtain of Minnehaha Falls - lighting candles, reading poetry, making wishes for the new year, and we would be able to see the full moon rising. We were in!

We bundled up in warm clothes and climbed down the rather treacherous stairs, hopped over a "no entrance" sign, and trekked over to the falls. It was amazing...

On our approach to the falls - it was still a little light out.














As we climbed out of the valley we looked back and saw one of the candles glittering (on the far left). You can't see the candles lighting up the ice sheets because there are some enormous lights just over the falls - keeping everyone safe in the dark I'm sure...


The moon was enormous and butter yellow when it first rose.



bonus pic: it has been very cold here the last couple days - hello January! With windchill it has been down to -35. These gorgeous ice patterns formed on our windows yesterday and they've stuck around all day

New year, new title, new look!

Welcome to the newly renamed blog: Adventures in Urban Homesteading. (Sadly, Little Homestead in the City was taken!) I’ve been meaning to re-title this blog for some time now. I had the perfect idea for the new blog photo and making the change depended on getting that photo taken. But… 6 or 8 months later, I just don’t think I’ll ever get that photo taken!

So I dug through the photo archives and came up with this collection of photos instead.

Why the change, you ask? Well, it just makes more sense. This blog hasn’t been about culture shock for a long time. There isn’t much more to say about how different it is here in the Midwest, compared to the Northwest. Even if there was, I’d rather not dwell on it.

This blog has been more about cooking, preserving, sewing, keeping chickens, building root cellars, and of course building our own little homestead.

We really are just getting started, just exploring the tip of the iceberg of urban homesteading and urban farming.

In the future (this year, next year, 10 years from now, who knows) we have lots of ideas and plans:

• Jeremy wants to get goats – but first we have to convince the city to allow hoofed animals. Then we can make goat butter and goat cheese and have goat milk (for Jeremy to drink and me to use in recipes).
• Jeremy wants to get bees and make honey and beeswax candles.
• We are thinking about raising rabbits.
• Jeremy thinks a pig would be cool too, but I’m not so sure about that!

Other things we want to experiment with making:

• Chapstick
• Laundry soap
• Bar soap
• Hard apple cider
• Wooden toys
• Crates from the lathe we pulled out of the upstairs
• and more!
  

I have plans for more quilts and more sewing projects (but Jeremy says I have to get our quilt done first!). We hope to finish the upstairs rooms and build a root cellar. Jeremy has started planning the garden for this year. We are making plans for fruit tree additions to the yard, more flowers, and converting the garage to a year-round mushroom growing building. And hopefully somewhere in there one of us will get a job!

Thank you to all my loyal readers – lurkers and commenters alike. May this be an exciting and fulfilling New Year for you, as I hope it will be for us. Happy New Year!

(And no, I'm not going to change the url - sorry for the confusion, but I really don't want to start a whole different blog!)