Vintage Home and Farm

Ever since we bought our old farmhouse, I've been slightly worried about how difficult decorating a living room with knotty pine walls might be. I shouldn't have worried. What a cozy-looking living room we have, with these 73-year-old solid knotty pine walls. Knotty pine walls are coming back into style. While there are many articles out there about how to paint knotty pine walls, we figured it was worth a shot to see what the space looked like finished, as we could always paint the walls later if we decided we couldn't live with them. So far, so good - I'm pretty happy with how our vintage knotty pine walls look in the living room at this point. I haven't hung any pictures on the walls yet, but as you can see from the living room photo above, the space actually doesn't have a dark depressing feel at all. The darkness of the walls and floors is offset by a white ceiling, light-colored area rug, and white trim around the floors, windows, and doors, which c...

The community where I live shares a number of resources, among them being three big piles: compost, manure and mulch. The compost was just announced via Nextdoor to all our neighbors as being ready for the taking.  Since I'm new to the area, I was especially intrigued and went over to check it out. The compost and manure piles are quite large; the mulch not so much, but that will change as the fall season progresses. There is a ready supply of manure all year long due to the community barn, thanks to the four horses and American Spotted Ass who live there.  (I love the loud Hee Haw that the ass makes whenever its owners show up. We can hear him all the way across the field where we live, since our house is near the barn.) A handful of community members are the owners of the animals and share responsibilities for their care.  The manure is scooped from the barn and field and carted over to the pile, where it cures all year long for use in everyone's gardens. ...

We called upon VanDyke Hardwood Floors out of Port Angeles to refinish our 73-year-old wood floors.  The beautiful and original wood floors extend the full upstairs of our house, covering about 1,500 square feet. VanDyke Hardwood Floors uses a BONA dust collection system that made a dirty job much cleaner.  As you know from my other posts, the previous owners of our house had pets that had left urine stains everywhere.  I was glad that the dust from sanding was being trapped inside the BONA dust collection system.  This kept the house mostly free of hazardous airborne particles that could potentially have caused us health issues, especially since we were living downstairs in the house while this work was going on. I was also careful to turn off our HVAC system while the sanding was going on, so that any dust that escaped would not circulate throughout the house. Most of the urine stains were removed simply by sanding off the very top layer of the wood...

One of the first issues I researched when we bought our house was how to get dog urine out of wood under carpet and linoleum. We knew that the former owners of our house had multiple dogs and cats. When we bought the house, there was a strong pet urine odor that deterred other buyers.  We were confident, however, that we could get the smell out and restore the house. And we did.  Here's how: Remove all the old carpeting and linoleum. It is amazing how much odor was removed just by hauling out the pee-soaked carpeting and tearing out the linoleum.  These floor coverings in our house were at least 20 years old, and had sustained damage from a number of pets. In tearing out the floor coverings, we could more easily see what kind of damage we were dealing with.  Below, you can see where the dog had peed and it soaked under the edge of the floor covering, which in this case was linoleum. Consider whether you need to clean the floor. One area of our house ...

Prior to painting the kitchen, I needed to determine how to remove wallpaper border.  Our wallpaper steamer was packed away somewhere.  Since this seemed like a relatively small job, I decided to go about it using a scraper and Zinsser DIF Gel Wallpaper Stripper.  Through trial and error, I discovered a few tips that made the job easier as I went along: How to Remove Wallpaper Border: 5 Important Tips 1. Score the wallpaper really well before applying  the wallpaper stripper. When I started out, I had only purchased the wallpaper gel. Zinsser makes a good product: When considering how to remove wallpaper border, I didn't consider the need to score the paper.  Scoring the wallpaper means scraping a sharp edge on it to break through the surface, which allows the gel to soak in better.  Unfortunately, the job took a little longer because the first part of the wallpaper border that I sprayed the stripper gel on didn't have any scoring in it....

When it was time to remove the carpet from our vintage house, I learned all about how to remove carpet tack strips from hardwood floors.  I thought I'd share the steps we used, as our goal was to not tear up the floors in the process since we planned to refinish them. We hired two strong men to help us remove the old carpets upstairs in our house. It was among the best $200 I ever spent.  That's really hard labor, as I could see by how overheated and exhausted they were after the three hours they spent busting their butts getting that carpet out the door and into the dumpster. (And I should mention -- the previous owners had pets and there were many urine stains on the carpets -- we were so grateful to the workers who helped us get these nasty carpets out!) Once they were done, the next chore was a tedious one: remove carpet tack strips from the hardword floors.  We had a total of 1,000 square feet of wood floors that needed attention.  Four of the seven ro...

At the end of almost every day, we go outside and enjoy exploring or taking a long walk. Sometimes our walks take us under apple and plum trees, where we see if we can reach any more of the ripe fruit just ready for the taking.  On those days, if we've got apples, we head into the community barn, where we stomp an apple into a few big chunks and then feed the pieces to the horses.  Mocha, Holly and Bugsy come eagerly over and leave slobber on our hands as they quickly gobble up the sweet fruit.  Patches, the donkey, makes a loud, jealous braying noise, HEE-HAW, HEE-HAW, obviously angry that he can't reach the gate from his pen.  But I guess he has not learned his manners yet, and so he's secluded there in the corner.  Usually we also encounter a neighbor in or around the barn or community garden and so we visit awhile. Other times, we head on down the road, over the bridge and along a path that runs by the creek.  There, we've recently seen salmon sp...