2018 Home & Garden Tour Part 1: The OG
I love to create things. Like food. You may have noticed that by now. But I love to create other things as well.
I’ve always loved to write; To craft stories with my words. And to take photos of beautiful things. Things that I create. Things that grow wild. Everyday things that are made beautiful through a camera lens when composed in just such a way under the right lighting.
After all, the combination of my love for creating all of the above was how this blog first came to be!
Yes, I love to create things that make the world just a little more comforting and beautiful and nourishing, for the mind, body and soul. And that includes creating a comfy, cozy, beautiful home.
In fact, when I first started writing this blog, I thought I would write more about creating a sanctuary at home. Because I’m sure I’m not the only homesteader who, uh, spends most of her time at home, amiright??? So, in my opinion, it should be a beautiful space where we feel good and where family and friends are welcome to kick off their shoes and join us at our table.
And also because, for me, that’s part of the appeal of homesteading: That unbeatable down-home comfort you get from a place that’s warm and welcoming while also serving up good, wholesome, nourishing food that’s grown, prepared or preserved right there on the property. There’s something safe and secure about a cozy, warm home that also produces enough to be at least somewhat self-sufficient. It gives me the warm fuzzies. Am I the only one?
But I haven’t written much about that since I started this blog over a year ago. Ya know why? Because I struggled to create this type of space in our old house. And quite honestly, I was a bit ashamed of it!
In theory, it was a charming house that was perfect for us when we first moved from the city 3 years ago. A 100+ year-old farmhouse on an acre of land (plus more shared with the neighbours across the yard). It was the perfect house for us to learn many of the skills and lessons we needed to learn over the past few years, both homesteading-related and otherwise.
But it came with many challenges too.
This Old House
The view from the front: Drywall makes its seemingly permanent home on the front porch. Plants brown where the sun beats down all day without reprieve and a bucket (originally intended for weeding the front garden bed) sits on the front walkway where it was left midway through weeding two months ago. A noisy, busy highway runs by the front of the house which makes this mama shy away from much activity in the front of the house.
After laying vacant for years, the property had succumbed to many weeds and pests that we always struggled to manage. And the house itself, while full of character and incredibly charming in its own right, was still old. And drafty. And full of decades-old carpets and curtains and wallpaper and furniture that was all due for a good cleaning (or a complete renovation).
To be fair, that’s what we were doing there: renovating. Ryan and I were blessed by friends who own the house by being allowed to live there in exchange for doing work on the place and keeping it from being taken over by rats (which we almost achieved).
And while we both kept the house running, Ryan worked on remodelling the upstairs while we were there. So we were also living in a construction zone. All. The. Time.
There have literally been baseboards sitting on our stairs there for the past, oh, probably 2 years. And drywall and tools on the front porch which we never used. Oh, and we haven’t had a shower there since February (it’s now September) because the beautiful old cast iron tub got pulled out to be refinished and we still haven’t finished the upstairs shower for various reasons. (If you’re wondering, yes, we still found ways to bathe while living there!)
Another thing we really battled with was the lack of storage. Being a 100-year-old house, there was only actually one closet in the whole house when we moved in. Because, ya know, people didn’t have as much crap 100 years ago.
But it turns out that we do have a lot of crap (that we are now trying to purge as we transition to our new house). And we had nowhere to store it. So we improvised and put shelves in the hallway and turned the sunroom into the storage locker/recycling depot/fridge and freezer area, since the old kitchen also wasn’t built to accommodate a fridge since they didn’t exist yet.
And so we faced the ongoing battle of trying to organize, shuffle and live amongst the clutter. And yes, it gave me major anxiety at times.
Looking into our old kitchen: Exposed pipes run up the back wall to the upstairs bathroom. The wall has been unfinished since we removed cabinets and countertops to accommodate the new plumbing. On the left, the hose from the dishwasher we rigged up runs into the sink to discard the water and a makeshift countertop sits atop the dishwasher we added to the kitchen. The cabinets are all open and utensils all hang from the walls. And the countertops were always cluttered, even when they’re clean!
But despite some of the storage issues and having no space for a fridge, the kitchen was still my very favourite space in the house. After all, it’s where I spent the vast majority of my time. And so it’s the one inside area that I did end up photographing.
I loved the kitschy wallpaper, the cozy breakfast nook, the open cabinetry and even the half burnt-out christmas lights we put up the first Christmas that we lived there and never took down…
But I especially loved the pantry.
Because while 100-year-old houses have no need for refrigerators, they absolutely must have pantry space. We were delighted to find the large, under-the-stairs pantry hidden behind the fridge that was there (before we opened up the pantry and moved the fridge to the sunroom), and realized it hadn’t been opened in roughly 3 decades before we arrived!
We knew this because we found magazines from the 1980’s and the owner confirmed that was most likely the last time it was opened for use.
The pantry was, by far, the thing that was hardest to leave behind.
But the rest, while charming in nature, was cluttered and unfinished and impossible to keep clean, no matter how many hours I put into it each day.
So I never wanted to really open my home to the world. I never wanted to photograph it because just getting it in order to photograph could sometimes take hours. It was just that kind of place.
Why I Finally Decided to Open My Doors
I think it’s important that I share this house with you… “The OG,” as I call it, because it will forever be the original House & Homestead. In fact, you might have even noticed that the logo for my website is this exact house. Maybe I’ll change the logo someday, or maybe I won’t. But this will always be where the journey really began.
It’s also where we first started gardening, and where we’ve had every success and failure as gardeners and homesteaders so far.
This year our garden has definitely been more of a failure than a success with us moving and not having time to dedicate to it in the summer months. The weeds have taken over. The plants are mostly dead or dying. And volunteer squashes, tomato plants and other seedlings have sprouted everywhere. Our little garden has, in essence, re-wilded itself. And like with just about every other space on the property, we just haven’t had the time to invest in keeping up with it all.
So we’ve accepted it for what it is and let nature take its course, still grateful to have cucumbers and beets and onions and herbs and the odd tomato still clinging to the dying, neglected vines.
Over at the greenhouse, we’ve lost our battle with the weeds. While the horsetail isn’t nearly as bad as it has been, the blackberry bushes we cut back last year have wrapped their thorny brambles around the little greenhouse like something out of a Disney princess movie.
The little wooden walkway has gone back to the land and the Queen Anne’s Lace has grown up inside the greenhouse and now bows over the squash plants that I planted too late, alongside the lettuce I’ve let go to seed. Sigh.
Elsewhere on the property, the perennial fruit trees and vines are doing fairly well. But they’re in need of some TLC too. The grape vine is decades old and has grown right up into the tree beside it, so now you need an orchard ladder to harvest the grapes.
And the apple tree; Let me tell you about this big ol’ Gravenstein apple tree…
This baby is roughly as old as the house itself, so somewhere around 100 years. It stood for 100 years without incident! And then, two winters ago while we were living there, we had one of the heaviest snowfalls we’d ever seen in this area, and the weight of the snowpack destroyed the two largest branches of the tree.
So the owners had the gaping hole in the tree that was left behind filled with concrete. This summer it rebounded and gave us apples once again, though not nearly as many as it did the first year we were there. Indeed, it seemed like it was just something else that went into disrepair while we were living there.
And yet there is much to be grateful for everywhere. Even the looming shadow of the old, broken apple tree on the drought-stricken grass at the end of summer is a thing of beauty not to be taken for granted.
One of the shining stars of living on this property: The view of the huge backyard we shared with our neighbours. (Technically it belongs to them, but they took their fence down years ago when the original owners lived there. They’ve been friends of the family for over 40 years!)
The House That Made Us Who We Are
Yes, this house was a challenge. A beautiful challenge that was meant to be. And while I always wanted to create a beautiful space here, I felt like I was just never able to get it to that place. And I never wanted to open my doors up completely and share the clutter and the mess and the weeds with the world because I felt it reflected poorly on me.
But I realize now that it is beautiful in spite, or maybe even because of this. Despite some of the hardships we faced in this house, it inspired me to create more than I ever thought I was actually capable of. It’s where I learned to garden, to can and preserve, to make candles and body products and herbal remedies from things grown right on our property. It’s where I learned how to create a blog where I could share my stories and recipes and love of homesteading with the world through words and photographs. It’s where we created our family, which continues to grow.
And although I’m so, so happy to be in our new place (our first house that we actually own!), there will always be a special place in my heart for this old house; The house where we gardened and cooked and preserved and created; Where we battled weeds and drafty walls and constant clutter and never enough storage space; Where we lived and learned and laughed and loved and lost.
Yes, in spite of all this, or perhaps because of it, this house will forever be the house where it all began. It will always be the original House & Homestead; The place that shaped us into the people -the family- we’ve become. And that makes every pile of clutter and patch of weeds totally worth it in the end.
Oh, and I think it makes for some pretty beautiful photos, if I do say so myself;)
Click here to read Part 2 of this post: Our ¼-Acre Rancher.
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If you haven't checked-in lately, the last week or so, we've sorta been in the trenches of homesteading and life over here. While some make it out to be glamorous all the time there are high's and low's just as there are in life.
With all that's going on, I've been making a point to find my way back into the garden, which is not only needed to feed my family, but also for some personal spiritual nourishment.
I just want to take a minute to love on my favorite veggie today, Broccoli! 🥦 It's one we plant over-and-over and I'm leaning into its abundance this year.
Not only is it one of my favorites, but we've also found it's one of the easiest veggies to grow so if you haven't tried it or added it to your garden yet, there's no better time than the present.
I've got an entire post on How to Grow Broccoli from Seed here: https://thehouseandhomestead.com/how-to-grow-broccoli-from-seed/ if you're looking for any tips or tricks.
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Can I be honest?
Sometimes you've gotta take a step back and look at the life you've created for yourself and ask yourself "is this truly what I want?"
The other day I shared about losing two of our rabbits this week to Rabbit Hemorrhagic Disease. The stress of losing them comes amidst a backdrop of heightened tensions around here...
From work pressures for Ryan to me trying to run a business and handle a very fussy, colicky 2-month-old (and a very busy 6-year-old), to things ramping up in the garden again and all of the other million things that need to get done (including multiple loads of laundry a day thanks to more spit up than I ever knew a baby was capable of producing), I finally felt like I was ready to crack this week.
Oh, not to mention we're doing this all on next to no sleep thanks again to our sweet boy.
I know this is all part of what we signed up for, but when it all happens at once, it can feel completely overwhelming. And when I'm completely overwhelmed and stressed out, that's exactly when I get sick too, which is exactly what happened a couple days ago.
Then yesterday (Saturday) I woke up feeling awful and decided to scroll Instagam as I nursed Noah. I saw other mothers with 6, 8 or even 10 kids somehow keeping it all together getting three square meals on the table every day while managing to keep a tidy kitchen and find time to Instagram about it.
I saw other homestead bloggers reaching new levels of success in their business that I can only dream about right now. And as I sat there in bed, covered in spit up with a ravenous baby nursing off me as I tried to console him, I felt sad for myself in that moment that I couldn't live up to the folks I was comparing myself to.
Later in the day I had to work, so Ryan took the kids to the beach and I stayed home. And I felt sad once again; Sad that I was missing out on yet another weekend with my family because I had created a life where I now have to work weekends just to keep up.
But the silver lining was that the work I had to do yesterday forced me out into the garden, and it was probably the most soothing thing I could have done for my soul.
(Continued in comments…)
Sometime homesteading looks like homegrown vegetables and freshly laid eggs and sourdough rising on the counter.
And sometimes it looks like tears when you have to bury one of your animals 😔
Ryan went out to feed the bunnies yesterday and Flopsy -our little black and white bunny- was laying dead in the pen. There was no blood, other than a little bit by her mouth. Seems like something internal happened. We’re not sure what.
Evelyn helped lay her to rest yesterday. It was a hard weekend for her. First she stayed with grandma and went with her to put her sick, 17-year-old cat down. Then she came home to the news that Flopsy was gone.
But I believe she’s more resilient because of it. We talked to her about how death is a part of all life, and allowed her to go through the stages of grief and process it however she felt she needed to.
Homesteading isn’t always sunshine and rainbows and snuggly barnyard animals. Homesteading teaches us hard lessons and helps us to become stronger and more resilient by challenging us daily.
Yesterday was a sad, hard day. But I’m glad we got to experience it together as a family.
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It’s that time again...
The time when things begin ramping up in the garden, the barnyard and the home.
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It’s also time for a brand new issue of Modern Homesteading Magazine, and boy do we have a good one for you…
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Visit modernhomesteadingmagazine.com to login to the library and read the spring issue (current subscribers) or subscribe for just $19.99/year to read this issue and gain instant access to our entire library of past issues!
#modernhomesteading #homesteading #selfsufficiency #springonthehomestead
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Theme of the Month: ADIDAS
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What are you planting this year? Anything new you've never tried before? Share with me in the comments!
Ever thought about growing mushrooms at home??
A great EASY way to get started is with one of these mushroom grow kits from @northsporemushrooms
All you need to do is cut open the pack, spray with a little water (the kits even come with a handy little spray bottle), and then sit back and watch the magic happen!
And seriously, watching mushrooms goes does feel a little like magic because they grow so fast you can practically see them growing, no time lapse necessary!
The mushrooms are ready for harvest in just a few days. No gardening experience or land necessary! Even a newbie homesteader in an apartment in the city can grow these babies!
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If this reel intrigues you, you can grab your own mushroom grow kit (along with time of other mushroom related products, including fruiting blocks, outdoor log kits, medicinal tinctures, capsules and more) at northspore.com. Use code HOUSEANDHOMESTEAD for 10% off your order!
And if you haven’t yet, be sure to check out my interview with Louis Giller of North Spore Mushrooms in the winter issue of Modern Homesteading Magazine. You can also find my recipe for Lion’s Mane “Crab Cakes,” along with other delicious mushroom recipes and an in-depth feature on medicinal mushrooms including Lion’s Mane, Reishi, Chaga and Cordyceps in the winter issue.
Visit modernhomesteadingmagazine.com to subscribe or login to the library and read the current issue.
Mushrooms really are pure magic, don’t ya think? 🍄 ✨
#mushrooms #mushroomhead #shrooming #eatyourshrooms #mushroomsaremagic #modernhomesteading #urbanhomesteading #homegrown
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Check out my shopping tips, what I do and don't buy, and where and who I like to buy from here at this link https://thehouseandhomestead.com/healthy-grocery-shopping-tips/ or at the link in my bio.
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Check out the recipe here https://thehouseandhomestead.com/low-sugar-mango-jam-recipe/ or at the link in my bio.
Let me know how the recipe works for you, and if add in any additional fruits to change it up!
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