Baby Face Tuesday

For our second installment of Baby Face Tuesday, we have Storm and Meadow, stray puppies that found their way into our family in May of 2011. You'll see more of them in a later post. They are so big and healthy looking now. Very nice dogs. Here they are back in May of 2011.



Things I Love: Monday Edition

Retro-Inspired Appliances!

I DO plan on getting a cool retro stove like this (above) someday. It will have to be electric though, not gas as the one shown above.

I would also love an old wood cookstove, like this:

Honestly, I just want one of these for decoration. THAT'S how much I love them!  

AND, I would like a pot-belly stove in the kitchen, as there is a vent pipe there already, and it would sure help heat the kitchen. Plus, I like the way they look.

Having three stoves in one kitchen isn't too much, is it? :-)

Furry Friday Picture

Zoe

Things I Love



Vintage Magazines!

Critter of the Week: Mocha

Welcome to the first installment of our Critter of the Week feature. This week we honor Mocha, our sweet rabbit. Mocha was born April 12, 2010.

Mocha and his siblings at a few days of age. Mocha was the only brown one.

Here he is with his mother, Starlight.

So cute! 

When we moved to our farm, we tragically lost Mocha's mother when the neighbor's dogs ripped the rabbit hutches open and killed her and another rabbit. Thankfully, Mocha only sustained a gash in one of his hind legs and an injured front leg. He's not 100%, but is functioning like a normal rabbit and is very happy in his new home. Mocha loves celery and carrots, and when you throw him an alfalfa cube he chases after it! He's very entertaining.  

And here he is now.

Baby Face Tuesday

This is either Holly or Molly (I can never tell which one is which!)- twin doelings born to Dolly in March of 2010. Holly and Molly are 3/4 Nubian, 1/4 Toggenburg.

The View

Our house faces East and one of my most favorite things is watching the sun rise every morning.

Vintage Wallpaper

Here's a peak at the cool wallpaper found under the wood paneling in the girls' bedrooms.

Bedroom #1:

This is the more "modern" of the two wallpaper layers.
This one was a blue and gold pattern and had the actual glue-on paper backing.



This was the bottom (oldest) layer.
Has cloth backing and was nailed on with "millions" of tiny nails. I love this one!

Bedroom #2:

Beneath the sky-blue wood paneling in this bedroom was, again, two layers of paper.



Newer paper is the pastel colored one on top; older, cloth-backed paper is
the bright red, green and gold on bottom. So pretty!

The Upper Floor & Closet Project

The upper floor of our house consists of two large bedrooms, a small unfinished closet that connects both bedrooms, and an "attic" room of sorts, which is actually a room above the kitchen.

After pulling off two layers of wallpaper (of which I saved a couple of samples- just because I like old things), the first thing we did to the upstairs was add some new electrical outlets and lights/ceiling fans, as there was virtually no electricity on the second story.

My four year old loved to help rip off the old wallpaper.

My handy husband cutting in some new outlets.
The original walls in the house are all solid tongue and groove boards.

We then framed in nice sized closets in each bedroom. There will be "nooks" on each outside end for shelving, as well as plenty of storage space inside the closets themselves.

This is the not-quite finished framed in closet in the 12 year old's room.
See the bricks from the original chimney? So cool!

The Green and the Bare

I'm so looking forward to the green of summer. We've had beautifully mild temperatures considering it's January... and our grass is still green for the most part. But I hate, just HATE, seeing the dead-looking, bare trees.

I can't wait to see this again:

The View

Furry Friday Picture

Breakfast time!

Outbuildings, part 3

The garden shed is located behind the house.
It's actually two separate rooms- the one on the right has a concrete floor- the one on the left has a dirt floor.

The Shop Building
This unassuming building is actually quite impressive on the inside. Large area inside shop, partial concrete floor/partial dirt floor. You can't tell it from the picture, but on the left side there is a huge area accessible from the outside pens and chutes. I use this area for the goats and they love it. It's a very cozy place for them.

Outbuildings, part 2



This is a wonderful, multi-use barn. The inner part has stalls/pens that we've
yet to figure out what animals they were used for. There is a breezeway
connecting the west side and south side areas.
I'm currently using this barn mainly for the chickens and rabbits.



For lack of a better name, we call this the hay barn. It's a large metal building. In one corner (not shown) there are the remnants of two animal stalls- not sure what those were used for. As you can see in the picture, there is some damage to the roof that occurred during a tornado that ripped through the area in January of 2011.

Outbuildings, part 1

Inside view of the horse barn. Most of the stalls only
need minor work. We'll be bringing my horse home in the
spring... he's currently being boarded at my parent's farm.

Our farm was a dairy at one time.
The milk barn, shown here, is a good, solid, block building.

The View

Captain Jack

Immediately after closing on the property, we acquired a new dog. Well, really, HE acquired US. He showed up one day when my husband and I were working on the well, and he stuck around ever since. Jack is such a good dog- I cannot imagine how anyone would've dumped him. But he loved us and needed us, and he wasn't going anywhere.

Well...

My handy husband doing some measuring.

Right off the bat we had well trouble and had to replace pretty much the entire system... pump, wiring, pressure tank and gauges. It was quite the learning experience and much simpler than we had anticipated. The farm actually has two wells on it (three if you count the hand-dug, rock-lined, hole in the ground that we found in the "freezer building"), and we plan on getting the second well up and running eventually to supply the barns and outbuildings with water. 

This is the "freezer building"... a building that housed two huge deep-freezers and shelves for canned goods. If you look carefully in the lower right hand corner you can see a plastic bowl being used as a makeshift cover over the hand-dug well. The well appears to be about 25 feet deep or so. We intend to get a hand pump for use in emergency power outages, which would render our main well useless.  

The Move

Our little herd of dairy goats, enjoying their first tastes of a new home.

Moving was tough. With four kids and a menagerie of animals, you can imagine how much "stuff" we had! But we were only moving about an hour away, so multiple trips wasn't out of the question. The animals were the last things to be moved. The goats didn't care in the least and were excited to have some young trees and shrubs to devour. The chickens had a rough time moving because of the scorching mid-summer temps, but once they settled in they were quite enthralled with all the grasshoppers that had infested the property and became quite content.

At the time of moving, Blizzard, shown here, was our top rooster.
The move was especially hard on him and we nearly lost him to heat stroke.

Our journey begins...

Welcome to Twelve Acres! I hope you enjoy your time spent here... I know I do! Twelve Acres came into our lives June of 2011. We happened upon the "For Sale" ad one day and completely fell in love with this 1934 farmhouse and surrounding barns and pastures. I will be using this blog as a sort of journal- as we remodel, build, fence, dig, till, and grow our way to having our very own slice of Heaven here on Earth.

Our farmhouse the day we first saw it. Love at first sight!