Our Farmhouse Kitchen Renovation: Part 1

These two pictures above are what the kitchen in our side wing downstairs looked like when we first started working on things. You can see where the cupboards were in picture 1 and the chimney and door to the main house in picture 2. Though, that's a little misleading, the door actually leads to another little hallway/entryway that is STILL technically in the side wing, with an opening into the main house (the room we currently use as a dining room). Below you can see what things looked like after the walls started getting torn down.

Here is the back corner (remember the pink walls and cupboards? Yeah, Not anymore!)

These pictures are a few years old, things have been on hold for awhile for a number of reasons, but recently have picked back up! Here are some updated shots! We gained another 6 feet or so length in the room by tearing down that wall to the right!

Here you can see we've busted through the wall (when I say "we" I mean hubby with my oh, so helpful assistance of staying out of the way) - If you look closely at the left, hanging in front of the window, that's a piece of the ORIGINAL tin ceiling (!!!!!!!!!!!!! You have NO idea how much I love that original tin ceiling!!!!) We pulled that entire section of ceiling down, and TOGETHER (yes, I put in some grunt work on that part) we hauled it outside, and then hubby, SUCCESSFULLY pulled the tin off the ceiling piece we pulled out! He salvaged it, and took it apart, without destroying ANY of it! We will be using a piece of the crown molding part to repair the tin ceiling in the room we CURRENTLY use as our kitchen, that will become our home office (the entire tin ceiling is in one piece in there except for one side the crown molding was damaged) and the rest of the panels will become a sort of "backsplash" behind our counter in the kitchen! YAY for Repurposing original materials!!!!

Here, you can see the entire right side of that wall has disappeared, no more doorway, and my new kitchen is officially about 6 feet longer than we had before! When we FINISH things, the left side of the room will have a counter that goes around the corner and a big work island just about where the chimney is... to the left we are building an addition full of windows and our dining table will go in there!

 Here you can see, the chimney and the wall are completely down... still a long way to go, but getting there!

When Disgruntled Appliances Attack

So this week I've been working on my new schedule/routine. I really hate the word Schedule, seems too FORMAL. I'll be posting about that as a Guest Post over on Small Business Success later this week or early next week, so look for that there... Anyway, back to the routine stuff... Part of my new routine, is to work on Meal Planning, so yesterday I went through the pantry, fridge and freezer to see what we had and then headed over to Pinterest to see what I could do with it. I found some great new recipes and today's dinner is supposed to be Slow Cooker Cilantro Lime Pork Roast from I Believe I Can Fry, which I had started to marinade last night and had to sear and put into the crock pot this morning.

So I've got pork in the frying pan, the bowl with the marinade on the counter beside me, and I'm reheating my coffee in the tea kettle on the back burner (we use a french press coffee maker and I got up late this morning so MY half was cold). The pork gets done, coffee is finishing up, I reach up onto the shelf above the stove, where we keep miscellaneous appliances and gadgets, to grab my crock pot (you see where this is going yet?), and as I'm pulling the crock pot down, it's caught up in a casserole dish and catches onto the edge of our old deep fryer.

We haven't used said deep fryer in about a year because we were given a bigger and more functional one, so this one (that used to be used Oh so frequently) has literally been sitting up on the shelf, collecting dust... feeling lonely, probably hoping and praying each time we reached up there that we would grab onto it's handle and lovingly pull it down, wipe the dust off, apologize for neglecting it for so long, and, well, you see where I'm going with that...

Anyway, the deep fryer apparently decided that since we have neglected it for so long, revenge is in order. The fryer comes FLYING down AT ME, and APPARENTLY the genius that put it up there, neglected to remove the last batch of oil that was used.... a YEAR ago... I wonder who that was?

So yeah, 1 year old, used, probably rancid cooking oil comes FLYING out of the deep fryer... Luckily for me and my cat-like reflexes (Guffaw!) I was able to jump back and out of the way of the airborne oil particles. It DID however get ALL over my kitchen, stove, counters, pots and pans, WINDOW and floor.... did I mention we have CARPET in the kitchen? (Eh, don't forget, we are in the middle of renovating this century old farmhouse, lol, its an old scrap of carpet laid down to help insulate us from the basement because we have no actual floor boards lol)

And GUESS whose name is on KITCHEN duty according to the Family Chore Chart this week? You guessed it... Momma. *Sigh*

On a more positive note... guess which disgruntled kitchen appliance will be getting cleaned up and then finding its way to the Yard Sale box? ;)

Family Chore List (Printables!)

Chores are a big struggle in our family. We have 6 people living in a pretty cramped space, and the brunt of the housework has been left to Mom and Dad. I've never understood how it is fair for four kids to TRASH a place, just to turn around and expect the two people who work all day to make sure that they have food to eat and a roof over their heads to also pick up after them. No way kiddos!

We've tried a variety of chore charts in the past, sometimes they work for a bit, sometimes they don't work at all. Boredom seems to be the biggest culprit for the ones that work for awhile and then stop working, so I devised this plan for a chore chart that rotates the tasks so that each person in the family has responsibilities in ONE room for ONE week and the next week they move onto something different.

Obviously, you may need to tweak this to suit your own family's needs, but it's highly flexible.

I started by creating colored slips of paper with the names of each family member on them (I cut an index card into 5 slips because only 5 of our family members are big enough to participate in actual chores right now - Colored them with a light colored marker and wrote names in black)

Then I worked on cutting the lists in half (they print two lists per page, landscape format)

After cutting the lists apart, I positioned them on an old cork board that we had laying around unused, I attached them with some push pins and then randomly assigned everyone to a room, as seen below:

I didn't add my youngest to the chore chart, though after speaking with hubby this evening, agreed that she should be added as a "helper" to someone else. These lists are formatted so that there are three DAILY tasks, to be done... every day... and then one task for each day of the week that is a "weekly" task. Each person's name will rotate clockwise to a different list on Sunday evening/Monday Morning to the next room list and they will work on that list through the week. The youngest, when she's added will go with someone else and her name will more COUNTER-clockwise, that way she is working in a different room and with a different person each week, to help her learn how to do the tasks as she get's older.



As the house gets bigger and SHE gets bigger, other rooms/areas will be added to the list and she will get her own list to do.



For families that are bigger, you could double up people in rooms (perhaps highlight jobs in different colors so one person does half and the other does half?) or if your family is smaller, double up the lists, so each person does two rooms or something similar.


This works well for our family!


Just print the lists (takes 3 sheets of printer paper) and cut them in half. Then create your name markers and set your board up! Click here to purchase your copy of the printable lists for just $0.99!