Bathroom #3

It's hard to believe that we've actually built two bathrooms at the farm at this point. The posts on the first one can be found here and here. Bathrooms are always my favorite part of the house for so many reasons. A: They are so intricate and you pack so much into such a small space. They really are the most complex room in the house (well, maybe that and the kitchen) B: They are fun to create and lay out C: Face it - sitting on the pot and showering are two of life's leisures and you should enjoy them D: Do you need more reasons?

Here are some pictures of the different stages...

The Carter's finishing up the cement board installation

Jeremy working on the grout

The final product

Looking toward the toilet and sink

The tile and sink were all products of the Habitat for Humanity ReStore here in San Diego. The medicine cabinet (which you can't see) and the light were also salvage products from Jeremy's uncle in Arizona. The toilet, tub and faucets were the only things that were new. The toilet is an Aquia Toto II Dual Flush, the same one we had in our old house and installed in this house when we moved in. We've used it for years and already know we love it! It seriously saved so much water when we first made the switch in our old pad - 0.9 liters per flush if you use the small button. That's HALF what a normal water-saving toilet uses. I can also vouch for the fact that um, the small (#1) button does the job perfectly fine for everything I've ever seen go into it, if you get my drift. More pictures and posts of the rest of the construction coming soon!

Our Bathroom...the stuff of dreams.

We have built a bathroom!

You may remember that we built another bedroom a shed/office on our property. We impressed even ourselves with how great it turned out. You can read more about it here.

Now there are two fantastic structures on our property! We have built the most awesome outdoor bathroom, right next to the studio. They sit side-by-side, two miniature architectural wonders (at least for us, who are all surprised that these things became reality... better than we ever imagined.)

Many thanks to Ron, Jeremy's uncle, and all of his skillz. He really made this bathroom, while at least I sat back and watched (I think I was actually out of town.)

There are many amazing features of the bathroom, of which I will let the other farm members blog about. I will simply comment on my favorite. The clawfoot bathtub.

There are a few things that I routinely search for on Craigslist. (Are you surprised?) One is a clawfoot bathtub. I have dreamed of having a clawfoot ever since I visited this amazing hostel in the wilds of South Africa, and partook of an aromatherapy soak. This was a clawfoot tub brimming with water heated by a woodburning stove, essential oils and flowers. I soaked in one of these, under the African stars, in the middle of the savannah, and it was magic. Obviously, I've wanted one myself since then.

The problem has been their exorbitant price, and thus my searches on craigslist. One fine day, I saw an ad for... be still my beating heart... a FREE clawfoot bathtub. It must be too good to be true. I thought to myself. Maybe rotting out or completely rusty. I emailed her, and this was her response:

"Yes! If you want it, I will give it to you at no cost. We just want to get rid of it. You must come right away, however. I will give it to whoever comes first! It is a nice old tub. Was in a house I lived in during college. House burned down and I got tub for free. Have held onto it for 30 years hoping to put it into our new house. My husband said NO!"


It was still a risk, but we sent the guys into Alpine (where she lived) to pick it up. I always get a little nervous when picking up Craigslist items, because you just never know if it will be a waste of time. Finally, the guys reported that they got it, and I could tell by my husband's voice that it had not been a waste of time. Hooray!


Overjoyed, we welcomed my dream tub to the farm! It was rusty and needed work, but it was solid, and had the most amazing lion feet. So we stored it outside by the studio, where it sat... for months... waiting for some attention.


Finally, as the bathroom was getting built, Kim and I decided to tackle the restoration. I called around and asked about getting it professionally restored (there's a cool place in San Diego that will come to your house and restore it for about $300) but in the end we decided we could do it for much cheaper.


We brought it into the backyard, flipped it over, and began washing it out with Barkeepers's Friend and some steel brushes.

We found this on the bottom, but Kim searched the Internet and couldn't find anything about A & O Manufacturing Company in Louisville, Kentucky. If you know anything, fill us in. And check out the date: Nov 12 -- 95...that sure ain't 1995.

These are the claw feet. Aren't they lion-y and Narnian? I love them.

There was much debate about whether we should paint the tub, and what color. In the end, we all liked the rust and decided to leave it in it's natural state. After the good scrub out, we screwed on the feet and placed it in the bathroom. That was the extent of our renovations.


The trickiest part was getting the shower kit for the clawfoot. Not an easy or inexpensive piece to find, and even though we got one, it seems to be made for Victorian hobbits, so my tall husband has to duck about two feet to wash his hair.

But nevermind that. We got this incredible, original clawfoot bathtub for FREE and it looks absolutely fabulous in our bathroom.


The bathroom being as it is (part greenhouse, part bathroom) I think the aromatherapy soak under the stars could be a reality.

Bathroom

Some of you may not know this, but we've been a one-bathroom community since we moved in this past November.  Four adults (at times, 5) and two kids all sharing a tiny 5' x 7.5' bathroom.  That's a lot of poop, not to mention the towels and toiletries.  Although everyone has been a fantastic sport about someone inevitably in the shower when you REALLY need to pee, or small kids walking in while some adult is trying to shower, we really would love a second bathroom somehow.  We don't have a heck of a lot of money, but we are good with random ideas and recycling old materials.  BJ came upon this picture of a greenhouse bathroom that has been an inspiration to us:

Recently, a friend of Jeremy's parents was replacing all of their old windows and french doors, so we nabbed them specifically for a project like this.  We also came upon an old claw foot tub that someone was giving away on craigslist and it happens to be in decent shape.  The last thing we really need is a composting toilet so we don't have to plumb it in to the main sewer system.  About a year ago on craigslist, I came across a really good deal for one and thought we might use it for something like this, so we picked it up.  This is what it looks like:

You can find info on in at the sun-mar website here.  Unfortunately, the toilet really has to be on a raised area so that you can put the composter somewhere below it, like in a regular house with a crawl  space or  somewhere with a raised subfloor.  If you know anyone that might be interested in this awesome toilet, let us know!  It is still in the box and everything, just really doesn't work for our purposes.  We really need to get something more like this:

This unit is all rolled into one so it works on something simple, like a slab of concrete.  So the exciting news of the day is that we finally broke ground and got a slab poured!  Hopefully in the next month we will be proud owners of a second (modified) bathroom.  It will provide some relief (haha) for the needy and just give us all a little bit more much-needed space.  

Nick pouring our slab!

A revisiting of priorities

We, at this farm, have the tendency to get ahead of ourselves.  Yes, yes, it's true.  In case you did not gather that we are a group of people who are likely to make rash decisions and jump into things, well, we are.  About a month ago at this time, we were ready to be fully immersed into the animal business.  We began building our goat pen, pulled out our donated bee box, talked about how we could hurry up with the rabbit project AND we ordered a couple dozen hatchlings from McMurrays so that we could get our meat chicken production under way.  We made a broody hen veerrrry happy by letting her officially hatch our first clutch of even more chicks (because we thought that the two dozen coming were not enough) and we now have clutch number two incubating under another broody.

Take a step back.  This new month rolled around and we've realized that we really need to prioritize and not do a million things at once.  Not because we don't want to, but because we physically can't!  We don't have unlimited time, resources or money.  We need to *sniff* reign ourselves in and take things one step at a time.  We have this shell of a trailer sitting in our front yard that is going to be AWESOME in a couple of months as we pour our resources into making it a modern "room" to add to our landscape.  This is a necessity!  Before we can really swing into expanding things to grow or raise, we need to be comfortable in the amount of space we have here.  So, for the next couple a months, hopefully we will be able to keep a good log of the progress on that.  The sooner we get this done, the more quickly we can move onto the rest of the list.  And although we've put our own goat acquisition on hold, we have an awesome neighbor who let me milk theirs last night!  I'll be counting the days...

Help us order our next projects!  What would YOU do first?

1. bees
2. goats
3. rabbits
4. greenhouse (we got a bunch of AWESOME old wood windows donated)
5. tilapia

Looking ahead.

Just getting off of an interesting week of change.  One kid is finally getting over her sinus-to-ear infection with a hefty dose of antibiotics (sigh).  This past week a big change occurred for all of us!  We have officially grown our farm numbers from 4 adults and two kids to 5 adults + 2.  Yes, yes, we acquired another adult somewhere along the way.  Colin will be living with us for a period of time.  It's very exciting because he is really into the FARMING aspect of all of this, and since none of us really have the time and energy to put as much as we'd like into it, he will be the designated farm hand for the next few months.  We've got projects on the drawing board and hopefully will be able to really make some movement towards feeling like a real farm!  Aside from our poultry endeavors and some rogue fruit trees we've managed to stick in the ground, we've been pretty lax about this food production thing.  It makes me so sad when I have to buy salad and chard every week!  This is all stuff that God has given us the ability to grow ourselves with nothing more than a little tenderness and time, yet we still haven't put seeds in the ground.

Another big change that happened last week was that I finally QUIT my JOB!  This is a big deal, and I'm still hyperventilating a little.  It seems that since I've started there, it's just been so tough for me to achieve any type of balance in my life.  It's a super high stress job and it's been difficult for me to manage and still feel good about the dedication I've been giving my friends and family (non-existent to some of you this past year, I know!  And I feel really bad about it, and that's going to CHANGE!)  My last day is the end of this month.  I will be entering the world of personal chef-dom, so if you know anyone that is interested in having a fantastic chef make all of their meals every week, send them my way!  I also hope to begin teaching more fitness classes and just be a better mom, wife, and friend in general.  BREATHE.

In the next week or two we will finally be getting our travel trailer!  Initially we had put some money down on an old vintage Airstream, which didn't pan out.  Turns out my gramps has an old 1960-ish Travel-Eze sitting on his lot that he offered to donate to our farm for free!  It's gonna need some TLC, but we can't wait to get to work fixing her up.  Here's a pic.  I don't for some reason have any full pictures of the thing, but you can get the gist.

We will be having a celebration next weekend for some of our friends that are moving to New York.  It's a fantastic opportunity for them and we are of course thrilled, but it's always so bittersweet to say goodbye.  I suppose it just means we'll have to take a trip out that way sometime soon!  We have friends in Boston we've been meaning to go visit as well, so maybe this will be the nudge we need.

I promise to look back soon and post those pictures and the turducken process.  Take care!

Flooded!

Here are some good rainy pictures from in-and-around the farm!  Quite exciting times for a usually rain-less San diego.

During the day that day (Wednesday) we also took the girls downtown to hand out donuts and coffee/tea to San Diego's wet and homeless.  Once when we were giving food to folks down there, one of the homeless guys mentioned this idea of hot coffee on a rainy day and how fantastic it would be.  Jeremy has wanted to do it ever since, so we spent our morning running around for a giant coffee maker and 300 donut holes.  It was all actually very worth it.  We made some cold homeless quite happy.  I don't have pictures of that to share, though!  I always feel weird taking photos of them.

I know there is so much to blog about - I really want to fill you in on everything from now over the past month!  Sarah's got all of the Thanksgiving photos so I'll let her post them.  It was fabulous and we had a great time with friends.  We are officially moved in, though not totally organized.  It's been a transition for sure, but I think we were all really ready for it.  So far, so good - loving every minute of it and really loving the people that we've jumped into this with.  I can't believe it's already been over a month!  Whew - 1/12 of a year down =)

Cheers!

Shed

The shed is almost completed!  There are more pictures in the slide show on the right, so you can see what the free standing unit itself looks like if you haven't seen it in person.  This is J. finishing up some of the flooring.  It's got a floated bamboo floor, thanks to some overstock from his dad's shop.  Thank you, Wooden Floor Co., Inc!

We've just been pouring all of our spare time into 1) trying to finish the shed and 2) packing up and sifting through all of our stuff.  It's nice to be able to stretch it out and try to organize and get rid of stuff as we go.  We really need to whittle out any excess, so if you need anything at all you might want to ask before you go buy anything...

Jeremy mentioned yesterday that Andy told him there is a 90% chance the short sale will go through.  I guess I just (stupidly) assumed that since it got approved, there was no way it WOULDN'T go through.  Silly me!  I guess either way, we are out in the next two weeks.  There's really no way we can get 95% ready to move and then just unpack and stay here.  It's now or nothing.  Fingers crossed that everything pulls through, though, because I'd really much rather see someone who really wants this place get it instead of having it sit uncared for AND getting slammed with a foreclosure on our record.  We've loved this house, and cared for it and poured a lot of our energy into it for the past few years.  It would be more than a little heart breaking to just see it be one of the thousands that sit empty in this wreck of a market.

A time of excitement, of change, of movement and purging.  Emptying out our old life and jumping into the new.  It feels good to clean out all of this dust and throw away all of this trash.  Let's keep moving!

The Farm: An overview.

In case you were wondering what, exactly, does our farm consist of? Is it a dairy? Do we raise livestock? Do we have any food growing/harvesting?

The answer is... no, yes, maybe someday. Our farm is a bunch of projects. Some might call them ideas...dreams...or just plain craziness.

Here's a quick overview of what we got going on. Hopefully each of these items will become their own blog posts, whenever the guys decide to start blogging... hint. hint.

The chicken coop. You've heard much about this endeavor. Which also includes turkeys.

Our Chicken Education Program

Yes, those are chickens in Trader Joes bags.

Our Composting system. Thank you Colin.

Our Garden... in progress, obviously.

Our orchard, so far.

The studio/detached bedroom.

And our hill, which we're currently taking ideas for.  

 

Did we mention communal living?