Building Building Building

I think my friends (both on the net and off) as well as coworkers, acquaintances and finally even my friendly post man don't actually believe me.  The question always arises in various forms: What did you do over the weekend? How did you spend this summer? What are you plans for the autumn?

The answer is pretty much always the same: building.

So this is what we were doing last Saturday (our Sundays being saved for family walks and hikes).
 

We built an outside shed for the new bar-b-que that we bought earlier this summer. It was a little bit of an investment and we intend to keep it for quite some time to come, so that means building it its own house where it can hibernate during the wet, wet winters we have.

My apologies for the unfinished picture.  We did manage to put a sealed roof on it as well, but I forgot to take a picture of that. What can I say? Both my hubby and I were  so tired after building this that we actually bought 'store-bought-pizza' (Oh My!! The Horror!!) and slept for almost a full hour on the couch afterwards.... 

It seems to be my curse in life that I am an effective painter.  Which means that this will forever be my job.  As my father used to say, 'No good deed should go unpunished.'

Need I say more?

In any case, I was able to prime all sides of our Grill Shed, all the while lifting roof materials up to my hubby, telling the kids they could not go in and watch TV, making jugs of juice to drink as well as pots of coffee for hubby (Norwegians should take their coffee intravenously if you ask me, but that's another blog post), and washing and hanging up clothes.

But it got finished, and our bar-b-que will live to see many happy summers.

 

Other projects that are waiting to be finished:  above are foundations forms for a cement wall.  We're waiting to next paycheck to order the cement.  (Both hubby and I have made enough cement by hand and we're really tired of it.  This time we're phoning the cement truck).

It is on this wall we will be planting a small hedge.... and will be having an eating area just behind this wall and in front of our house.

This wall should have been completed over a year ago.  It was my brother-in-law (digging and foundation expert in our family) who had started helping us build the foundation forms.  He spent one weekend with my husband and started building the forms, and then was diagnosed with cancer the week after that.  And six weeks after that he was gone. In our grief, we just couldn't go back to working on it even after months had passed.

When my husband did finally get to finishing the forms last autumn, they weren't strong enough. The result was that the forms broke and the cement spilled sideways, which can be seen above.  With the help of my father-in-law, we built a second form on top of the first unsuccessful wall and finished the job.

This raised flat space will also be covered with concrete, and then layered with stone tiles of some form or another.  We are thinking of uneven, natural shapes, but this is not something we will be doing this year.

Finally, we have dreams for this area on the side of our property.  Where the cars stand we would like a garage.  And to the right of the swing set (which will probably disappear in a year or two at most) we dream of having a glass winter garden.  These are pretty big dreams at the moment, and we are not quite sure how we will finance it (I need to sell at least 5 times as much soap as I am now.... and I don't think this is possible under the restraints of being a mother and working wife like I am at the moment), but the two of us get so much joy simply talking about the dreams.  

It's been said in many different ways by many different people, but the line in Amanda Marshall's song rings in the back of my head as a constant these past couple of years: The joy's in the ride.

A Tour in the Kitchen of My Cabin

Many have been asking about what it looks like on the inside of our cabin. I had never thought about writing posts about this, but after thinking about this it seems like a very good idea.

Our cabin, both inside and outside is a mixture of old things given to us by our forefathers/grandparents and new things. All of these things are placed on all of the remodeling we have done/are doing. Even though I have never met most of the people we have inherited much of these items from, if it wasn't because of them, my husband and I would never be able to rebuild our cabin and provide something for our children to carry on in the future.

This cabinet we have hangin on our walls is actually a small part of a large cabinet system that my husband's grandmother had in her living room. It was so big it stretched across one entire wall and on some places reached from the ceiling down to the floor. This was the only piece of 'fine' furniture that she had, though by our standards today it is not fine at all. The wood is actually quite thin and we've had to support it on the bottom (an extra plank has been set on the bottom and it has been re-enforced on the inside). But when we extended our kitchen and had no furniture to actually place in our extended kitchen, this fit the bill.

Each of these glass doors can lock, but the keys were lost long before we inherited parts of it. You can see on the right hand side that we need to use small pieces of paper to keep the doors from swinging outward. :)

Above is our washing area. To connect to running water costs an awful lot of money, plus you have to pay the entire cost for someone else to build a sewage system of some type. This will not be happening in our lives. However, we can have the running water come up to our doorstep and simply go out and get it for almost free. So considering we'd rather build ourselves for our children, the choice was pretty easy.

But what I wanted to point out was the red coffee thermos that has been washed and is airing out. It is known as an 'elephant' coffee thermos, as this was the brand of coffee thermoses that was made in the 1950's and 60's. They stopped making them a long time ago and are no longer in existence. My entire Norwegian family say that these are the best coffee thermoses and that you cannot have better tasting coffee if you use anything else. (I for one don't drink Norwegian coffee, so I have no comment on this opinion).

This is the last elephant thermos that is in use in the entire family (and now I'm going out to my mother-in-law's extended family as well). While I can't say that this thermos has actually saved us money, it has certainly kept my husband very happy and cheerful during the 13 summers we have been married and have been working on remodeling our little piece of paradise. I take extra pains to carefully wash the glass on the inside of the thermos (which hold the coffee warm), and it will be a very sad day when this thermos makes it's way to thermos heaven.

Pretty much everything you see here has been reused or inherited from somewhere. The large wooden plank that makes do as our kitchen countertop is actually saved wood that was originally used to make doors before metal doors became more popular due to lasting effects and home saftey issues.


The baskets, knives, sives, bread box, green paper towel holder, crocheted hotmats and carved wooden egg holders (these last two are hanging in the corner against the wall by the fridge) were again inherited from my husbands grandmother who passed away a few years before I moved to Norway.

The coffee maker and toaster are actually ours from when we were first married.... but the toaster has actually been destroyed and thrown out in metal recycling - it stopped popping up toast and clearly became a fire hazzard. We certainly didn't want anyone else to start using it.



This is the last item in our kitchen that has saved us a lot of money.... the stove which again has come from my husbands grandmother. I do believe it's from the early 80's, which doesn't feel that old to me considering I grew up in the 80's and remember it as one of the best times of my life. But I have to admit that perhaps the 80's is not as recent as I remember it to be. :)

In any case, it was another thing that was given to us that we could use even though it wasn't the fastest or the shiniest and because we have done so we've had the oppurtunity to build on other aspects of our lives.

I will continue with more pictures of the things that have been given to us that either helps us or makes our little piece of paradise a bit more special.