On giving things away…

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When I was teaching in Ft Wayne, I complimented one of my students on her lovely blue earrings. She said her daughter sold jewelry and often gave her pieces and would I like to have them. Well, yes, I did indeed like them enough to want them and I offered to buy them but she said no… and at the end of class she gave them to me! I love them and really appreciated Joan’s generosity.

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FYI: These are made by Silpada and if you are interested, you can click here to contact Joan’s daughter, Amy.

The thing is that it’s especially nice to be generous, and it’s also nice to accept generosity. I try to do both well. In this case, I will remember Joan every time I wear these earrings, which will be often!

 

From the funnies…

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I love Pearls Before Swine; I read it every day. I particularly like today’s strip…pb140818

While I am not a person who has kept a life-list of the books I’ve read, I am a person who used to think that my stuff was so good that of course my kids would want it! All of it! And that they would treasure it all as much as I did. Sad to say, that’s just not the way it has worked out.

It’s not true of everything. Our kids do have quite a lot of the furniture, dishes, etc., that we have moved on from. But there has been much more that they have said no to when I tried to give it to them. At first, my feelings were the tiniest bit hurt, but I got over that very quickly.

In the same way that I have some wonderful things from my Grandmother’s house and from Mom’s, there is a whole lot more that I happily walked away from. Why should my stuff be any different to my own kids?

What we do now is tell the kids to put their name on what they want. The rest I’m weeding through and making go away as the spirit moves me. FYI: I suspect that this fall I’m going to be putting some of my ‘famous’ quilts up for sale. I have run out of room for them and they need a good home. I’ll wrote more about that in a few weeks.

PS – Stephan Pastis did give me permission to show today’s Pearls Before Swine in my post. How cool is that, that he replied!

Inside and upstairs at the Woods…

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I did remember to take a before picture of a window sill to give you an idea of what some of the walls looked like before being painted. I do so love what a fresh coat of paint adds to a space!

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There is an upstairs loft in this house…

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Next year I’m going to paint the floor up here, and will probably give the wall that is currently painted a fresh coat of paint. We are going to ignore the sloped ceilings. It’s a cabin-like space, after all!

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Rather than putting mattresses in the house, Steve is putting plywood into twin bed frames. He’s going to purchase inexpensive inflatable mattresses that folks who spend the night can use with bedding or sleeping bags. It’s seems cleaner to us to do it that way, less dusty. Wouldn’t you agree?

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Here’s the view from over the railings. The living area looks happy. I had the chairs feet-up on the dining table and it’s not totally tidy, but you get the idea. I can tell already that I will want to clean the tops of the ceiling fan blades. I wonder how I can reach them…

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The screened-in porch is just outside that big front door.

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And, lastly, here’s one of the downstairs bedrooms, with one bed platform, a table, and reclaimed lamp… All we need are some more bed platforms and the Woods will be good to go!

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Outside at the Woods…

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This post is mainly for my Mom, who asked me this morning why I hadn’t show pictures of the outside. The property is not really visible from the road. As you drove over a small hill, from the road, this is what you see. There’s the new shed on the left. The Woods house is down in those trees. You can see the front of Steve’s pickup, which is backed up to the door of the screened-in porch…

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Here are some recent before pictures of the porch. Trust me when I tell you that these before pictures are way better than it looked a few weeks ago. I should have taken pictures of it then. Sigh.

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Today, Steve finished cleaning up the porch. Yay! All it needs is a welcome mat!

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There is a bit of loose screen to fix—later, when it’s cooler out.

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Barns and farms in Indiana…

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I had no idea that there were so many Amish and Mennonite farms in Indiana! Last week I landed in Ft. Wayne and then was driven to Elkhart. It’s about a 1 1/2-2 hour drive through lovely country. If we had stopped the car every time I wanted to take a picture, I’d still be there :-). As it was, I took photos with my iPhone from a moving car. (Side note: my iPhone takes a really good picture!)

In many pictures, you can see a reflection on the windshield that I took the picture through. It adds something to the photos that almost make them more interesting…

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Farm buildings don’t have many windows or doors. Each building is comprised of big, simple shapes. The colors, and the way the colors change in shadow, are mesmerizing.

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There is something, too, about the weathered nature of these buildings that make the so much more interesting. The owner probably wishes that this barn was scraped and painted, but I like looking at it the way it is.

We stopped to take this photo, and the next one. This is a small building off to the side of a much-large farm building complex. I found out that the Amish will often paint the trim around the doors like this one below, or in a similar fashion. I see hearts when two doors meet!

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This is the larger structure…

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You know, I love the look, but I have less-than-zero desire to be a farmer or to live in the country. That said, I am really, really happy that there are those among us who are called to grow the food that we all eat. If that’s you, thank you!

 

More from The Woods house…

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I wish I had taken some before photos of the living area of the Woods house back in May… you’d really be impressed now! But I didn’t. You’ll just have to take my word for it that a major transformation has taken place.

Mostly we threw away the stuff that just had to go, and then I cleaned up the space. Everything with upholstery was too dusty and dirty to keep. The carpet remnant was gross. Some of the chairs and tables were too rickety to trust… It’s all gone now!

The walls in this part of the house had one coat of paint already, but the ones I could reach got another coat of bright white paint. The wood walls and high ceilings are going to stay the way they are.

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The turquoise is the new coffee table, at least for now. It adds a nice pop of color and it’s already there. The wood chairs are solid, but the webbing in the seats had rotted away. Steve cut plywood to fit and I found cushions at Lowe’s. They are very comfortable now!

The upstairs is big and will mostly be used for beds. It gets hot up there in the summer.

There is a wood stove that will be wonderful on cold winter days (and nights). This area is way, way cleaner now than it was just days ago.

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The black chairs will have blue cushions to match the other two chairs. I spray painted the old, stained lamp shade white—it’s on an interesting lamp on the table. There is another shade that I’ll spray paint when I go back to paint the bedroom.

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The dining table and chairs are solid and comfortable.

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Steve and I both are pretty happy with the results of our efforts. This is a nice place and should see more use now :-).