Category: House & Homestead

The shift of seasons always brings a lot of feelings to light. On one hand, it’s great to be done with winter. On the other hand, the growing season stretches long ahead of us, and this year, it seems especially uncertain.

After a few dry, dusty, windy spring days, I grew tired of being grumpy about the weather and decided to find the joy in spring. Unsure about the promise of green grass or growing crops or even flowers, I tried to focus on a sure thing – it will soon be patio and deck season! Beverages and burgers always taste better in the great outdoors.

To cheer myself up, I scrolled through my phone for inspiration, and even did some virtual window-shopping on Amazon. I found patio lights, tiki torches, outdoor rugs, planters, gazebos, pergolas, extensive collections of furniture, signs, umbrellas… I let my imagination really go to town and put all sorts of different items in my cart which I would delete later on. The sky was the limit and I refused to let the windswept practicalities of our homestead confine my lofty online patio ambitions, darn it!

Well, all good daydreams come to an end, so after a while, I deleted my cart and went back to life in the real ranch world. Of course, over the next few days, any phone app I opened made many purchase suggestions that fit in with my empty cart history. I avoided the clickbait with frugal determination. When the forage and fiscal future seem unclear, it is not in my nature to invest in deck décor that I most likely would have to retrieve from the neighbouring fence line at some point this summer.

I did, however, invest in children’s pain relief medicine, a common household item that we needed to stock up on.

“Your shipment of two bottles of Tylenol will arrive on Monday,” notified Amazon. “Sounds about right,” I thought. “And your 8’x 10’ patio carpet will arrive next Wednesday,” Amazon continued.

What’s that, now, Amazon?

It turns out my empty online cart was a little fuller than I thought. Looking back through the order, I was annoyed to find that yes, I had indeed just ordered 80 square feet of patio adornment. If there were any silver linings in this dusty cloud, at least the cost was in the two-digit price range, and not one of the fancier, three-figure priced rugs I had browsed. Still, I was irritated at my mistake.

True to their word, Amazon delivered my unplanned purchase to our local auto parts store, which accommodates such large, cumbersome, and incredibly obvious parcels. I hoisted the lightweight (i.e., wind-vulnerable) rug onto my shoulder and made my walk of online shopping shame out to my vehicle which was barely large enough to cram the ridiculous rug into.

I tend to be an avid supporter of local shopping, and found one more reason why local is better than virtual: I may not have realized I was buying this item online, but I darn sure would have thought twice before I stuffed a physical tapestry into a 3D shopping cart and wheeled it through the check out.

The carpet is still in the package, tucked away on my deck.

Cheers to a summer of good times on the deck… and if it applies, cheers to awkward, flimsy, unintentional impulse buys.

These days, it seems like our house is constantly in a state of transition. When my husband and I first moved into our two-bedroom house, we were the lone occupants. We didn’t have a lot of “stuff” yet, we weren’t physically in the house that often, and there seemed to be ample space for us and our things. Fast forward twelve years and we’ve found our occupancy has nearly tripled yet our house hasn’t increased in size, which means we’ve had to get creative…which causes some chaos.

There are few sacred spaces in our house that haven’t done double duty at one time or another. Our porch was deconstructed to be recombined with our laundry room. Our living room was a makeshift nursery when we initially brought our daughter home from the hospital. Our current master bedroom was formerly our kids’ room which was originally the room we used to dump everything that didn’t seem to have a place of its own yet. Even our bathroom once functioned as a makeshift kitchen when we were renovating.

Our office has probably been the most itinerant of all spaces. It started out strong with a room all to itself on the main floor. I could toss in a load of laundry, or start a meal, and still be able to complete a few tasks in the office just a quick walk down the short hall. When we had our twin boys, the room morphed into an office/baby’s room combo, which worked surprisingly well considering those two spaces make strange bedfellows. I do recall working away on our tax returns under the supervision of our sleeping infants. Twins can’t share a crib forever though, and after five months, we needed to set up our second crib which meant the office was on the move once again, this time downstairs. Having an office in the basement has a few benefits although I can’t think of any at the moment. I will admit that it is nice to have a dedicated space for an office and one that has a door on it that is regularly closed. It is a bit trickier to multitask with other household chores while I’m working downstairs, and I also worry that I will miss a visitor when I’m out of sight. However over the years, I have spent countless hours in this room. If the volume of material I can cram into an office were a measure of achievement, I would say the room has been wildly successful.

Our house is evolving once again and it’s time to move our three kids, who have been sharing one room quite magnificently, into two. The boys are anxiously looking forward to spreading their wings and getting their own space in our former guest room downstairs. Our daughter has the idea that having her own room will involve a lot more pink than was deemed appropriate earlier in her shared accommodations. What the move means to me is translocating the guest room into the office, which first needs to be cleared. It’s a process, and one that we are kind of in the middle of.

I also have to adjust to my kids growing up, which might be the biggest challenge of all. I’ve honestly enjoyed having all three of them in one room, learning to share, learning to work together and coexist. Forts have been built, stories have been read, siblings have collaborated to stack stools on top of chairs, on top of peanut butter jars (true story!) to reach contraband play-dough from the top shelf of the closet. What I will really miss is creeping into their room at night to watch them sleep, just like any self-respecting stalker mom does. I’m going to miss it all.

We will continue to trade spaces as our family grows in size and grows in personalities. I’d better stop dragging my heels and start moving furniture.

Over the years, I’ve come to grips with the fact that I’m not very good with houseplants. Possessing a degree in agriculture, it’s likely not best to broadcast that around, but the facts don’t lie. I’ve tried and have many empty pots to show for it tucked away in my storeroom. I’ve had little luck with African violets, I’ve killed many a generously donated Ficus seedling, and was tough on a peace lily to the point that it eventually rested in its own peace. I did have a little English ivy I named Thomas during college that did stay alive for four years…only to perish during my move to our ranch. I really do have much better luck growing things in the great outdoors in flowerbeds and pots, so I don’t entirely have a black thumb. But at this time of year, when the temperatures drop and the snow flies, I have but two green plants thriving in my house. My favourite is my Christmas cactus.

Not just an ordinary Christmas cactus, this particular one is a legend. It started out as a slip from the Kohlman Family Christmas Cactus, and I carefully rooted it in water before planting it in a pot. The mother plant is more than 70 years old, and originally belonged to my great grandmother Kohlman. When she passed away sometime in the 1940’s, it somehow made its way under the supervision of her daughter-in-law, my Grandma Kohlman. A busy farm wife with fifteen kids, no electricity or running water, I can’t imagine my Grandma put caring for this potted plant straight to the top of her priority list. Still, she made sure the plant was prominently placed on an oak table in the family’s small living room out of the draft. Once, when the oil burner went out overnight in winter time, it came very close to freezing. Surviving this brush with frost, the cactus also managed to withstand dozens of active kids who were cooped up during winter blizzards or summer storms. It likely missed out on the odd watering and I doubt it was overly fertilized. But the plant not only survived, it thrived. It bloomed without fail each November in the month leading up to Christmas, and sometimes, if the conditions were right, it would even bloom at Easter. My grandma took it with her when she moved into town almost thirty years later, again placing it in a bright spot in her living room picture window. It flourished there too.

While my specimen looks healthy, it rarely blooms. It actually has two blossoms on it as we speak and this is only the second time in eleven years that it has done so, making it a relatively noteworthy occasion in my life. I’ve researched strategies to achieve blooms. I’ve read that you can water the plant less frequently to induce blossoms, or move it around to different areas of your home at certain times of year or even lower the thermostat. One “how to” guide mentioned putting it in a closet for a specific period of time each day which seemed to me to be a lot of work, so I never explored this tactic. The only thing I really do is water it when I think of it, and make sure it has a healthy coating of house dust.

Many of my cousins and aunts and uncles have their own plant from the Kohlman Family Christmas Cactus. It’s a small, low maintenance yet beautiful living piece of heritage that we can share. To be perfectly honest caring for the plant is a bit of an afterthought to me, but I’m grateful that it wasn’t to my Grandma Kohlman. Thanks to her, I can enjoy these two rare blossoms (a month later than normal) and reflect on our unique family legacy.

My German- speaking grandmother had a saying that loosely translates to “it won’t sew on its own.” What she meant was, you can have all the tools to do a job, but at the end of the day, unless you are motivated to do the work, it won’t complete itself. I am a bit of a procrastinator in certain situations, including actual sewing, so this saying applies to many aspects of my life.

Growing up, my mom always seemed to be sewing something. Naturally, as a kid, I started dabbling in stitchery myself. I appreciated a craft that yielded instant gratification. After just an hour of sewing, I had something to show for it! I would sew little dolls and then sew little dresses for said dolls. I participated in sewing in 4-H and liked sewing in Home Ec class in high school. I even moved my clunker of a sewing machine up to university, where somehow I didn’t have time to spend writing my thesis, yet I had time to sew a lovely set of custom-made blinds for my apartment. Priorities, I guess. In my twenties, I continued to crank out a few sewing projects, usually some Christmas potholders (on Christmas Eve) or a denim baby blanket (the night before we were visiting the new parents), proving that sewing was the ultimate craft for procrastinators.

After getting married, I learned that my husband had his own set of sewing skills. Apparently a pillow he sewed back in high school (which he still has, by the way) garnered him a 99%, making him a self-appointed stitch master who thought he was well positioned to critique my needlework. I made a couple of nice shades for our house and a seat cushion (with the ties sewed on the wrong side) that he bravely appraised, giving my work a “mark” in the low 60’s. I may have flung the seat cushion at his head but it didn’t quite make the impact I was hoping it would.

Still, I kept sewing, with mending being my preferred task. Mending was just the right blend of nerdy yet frugal stitching that really appealed to me. Given that my husband’s pants were already infused with diesel and splashed with battery acid, I didn’t think a carefully placed patch would set his style back too much.

Then, just like that, I stopped sewing. My old, well-travelled clunker had died, and I replaced it with an almost-brand-new machine that was incompatible with me. I tried using different needles and bobbins and I adjusted this tension knob and that one and I even translated the Spanish operator’s manual, to no avail. My mending pile grew to be an overwhelming stack. Sewing was no longer fun.

I decided that I needed to inspire myself, and maybe sewing Christmas stockings for our kids would motivate me. Having moved my grumpy sewing machine on, my mom brought me her dependable PFAFF of my childhood, and even supplied me with some Christmas fabric to enable stocking construction. Still nothing. Years literally went by, one Christmas after another, and my sewing drought continued.

All of a sudden, in an unexpected turn of events, the other night I started sewing again. We were heading out the door and I had no clean pants and no time to wash any. A bit stuck, I recalled that I had a perfectly good pair of pants downstairs in my mountain of mending. These pants, which I fashionably bought with patches, needed a tiny patch… on one of the patches. I set my sewing machine up, plugged her in, patched the tear and was out the door in five minutes flat. The next morning, seeing my faithful sewing machine still set up, I started patching pants for my Other Half, who had recently informed me he only had two pairs of pants. How a grown man suddenly has just two pairs of pants left remains a mystery to me, but I digress. He now has many more, thanks to my stich witchery revival.

My sewing machine will never “sew on its own,” but it is seeing more use than it has in a while. Perhaps the trend will continue and those Christmas stockings will finally, after all these years, sew themselves.

We are at that magical time of year when parents everywhere are celebrating the end of the school year and, more importantly, the end of the school lunch regime. It can be hard to come up with nutritious, interesting lunches for kids year round and by the time June arrives, kids and adults alike seem ready to just take a break. I, on the other hand, don’t (at least not yet, anyway) share that sentiment. With two kids in Kindergarten, their every-other-day lunch requirement was a nice pattern, and school lunches were hardly a blip on my radar. Rather, it is my ongoing quest to pack large, cool-on-hot-days, hot-on-cool-days, healthy and inspiring lunches for the field and pasture that cause me a little stress.

We are heading into peak meals-on-wheels season around our ranch and I’ve been packing picnics and field meals a lot over the last two months. I suspect it’s going to get busier before it gets better. I don’t mind packing a lunch most times, but it seems like I’m all tapped out of ideas and we have a long summer of baling and moving cattle still ahead of us. Kebabs and wraps, pitas and sandwiches, meat buns, burgers, hot dogs, taco in a bag, calzones, smokies, subs… you name it, I’ve done it. And I’m already kind of tired of it.

Our kids help a lot out in the field and their gigantic appetites don’t match their seemingly small frames. Apparently they will grow even heartier appetites, according to my sources. They aren’t picky eaters for which I am grateful, and they must be growing because they are ALWAYS hungry. It doesn’t matter how much food I pack with me when we go and check cows or head into the field, the cooler is always empty when we return.

I do enjoy baking and cooking, although you would never know it based on the deficiency of home-baked goods that appear in the cooler. On rainy days or those occasional moments when I’m in the house mid-day, I will try and stock the freezer and fridge with a quadruple batch of banana bread, biscuits, muffins or meat buns. But unless they’re well hidden, my fresh baked supplies dwindle, sometimes before I can even pack the next lunch. And, let’s be honest, baling trumps baking, so I prioritize my time accordingly and our lunches reflect that. At the start of the season, I seem pretty ambitious and creative, and mid-way through, my crew is lucky if there’s a pepperoni stick and a bag of chips to gnaw on.

Fortunately we have a good local bakery and an excellent grocery store right in town. I stock up probably two or three times a week, optimistically buying ingredients to make food, or conversely, buying whatever ready-made food items can jump out of my cart and into my cooler. Sometimes a well-timed parts run to a larger centre will yield subs for everyone or a strategic trip to the local tavern or pizza place for take-out does the trick too, which takes some of the pressure off.

When I first got married, some farmHERs gave me a few tips as to what to expect and near the top was “prepare a meal that can be ready in twenty minutes – or three hours.” Truer words were never said with regards to pasture picnics and field lunches. While I am a bit burned out of lunch prep, no one has starved. Yet. And my consumers rarely, if ever, complain.

I just have to come to terms with the fact that for our family, any time is lunch time. But… if anytime can be lunch time, I guess the same would hold true for five’o’clock, no?

Maybe I’ll get through this field lunch season after all.

Farming and ranching has a reputation as being a “boots on the ground” sort of profession. Of course there is much more to farming than day-to-day chores and it is a lot more complex and technological than what some would believe. There is something special, however, about playing a role in food production where you literally get your hands dirty and have, well, your boots on the ground.

Having your boots on the ground, however, requires a lot of pairs of boots. Literally.

In our family of five, we seem to have no less than four pairs of boots each. Cowboy math will tell you that I have at the very least twenty sets of footwear sitting by the door. There may be work boots, riding boots and possibly town boots (if you’re lucky). Then you have rubber boots and winter boots, and depending on your budget and level of sentimentality, you can break down each category further into a sub-category of old winter/riding/work boots and their newer, not quite broken-in version.

When it comes to our small fry, while they’re feet are indeed smaller, their boot, er, footprint is no less a problem, as there is usually a pair or two that are slightly too big set out waiting beside the pair they are currently outgrowing. Throw in some running shoes, sparkly princess preschooler shoes, and even an errant pair of high heels kicking around from the last fancy function I attended, and the whole shoe situation gets out of control in a hurry.

All of these boots, and then some, occupy space in my porch. My entire porch is a landing zone for veterinary supplies, loads of groceries, items to return, eight pails of potatoes, toques, sunblock, mitts, bug repellant, work gloves, water bottles, 457 cowboys hats, and an underused vacuum. The space also doubles as my laundry room which just adds to the mix with hampers of dirty and clean clothes, laundry soap and mending.  But the boots….they are the crux of the matter.

It turns out, I’m not alone. I made a call for help to my farming peers the other day, asking for their tried and true boot storage solutions. Some gals institute a one-pair-of-shoes-by-the-door policy, others defer to a gigantic bucket or tub that everything gets thrown into. Various shelving units were suggested to me from porches across rural North America, ranging in size and style from Swedish-designed furniture warehouses to homemade rustic planks to Pinterest-worthy beautiful baskets. But everyone agreed, the struggle is real. And the struggle shall continue as long as there are feet that need to be outfitted with boots. It’s a good problem to have, really.

I could take all the footwear in my porch and their corresponding values and trade them in for one very pretty pair of Laboutins or Jimmy Choo heels. Sure, these haute couture shoes would be absolutely frivolous and highly impractical for my lifestyle, but I guarantee they would not take up more than 144 square inches of precious real estate in my porch. Plus, they would be pretty. But my kids and husband would be barefoot, and I’d probably lose a toe out in the barnyard, so we all know that isn’t going to happen.

At this time of year, on the cusp of late fall and early winter, all I can do is survey my porch and know that this is as good as it’s going to get for a real long time. I haven’t even brought up the topic of coveralls and their good, better and best versions (x 5) that I will soon have in heaps in my porch. I just have to put my best boot forward.

This fall marks ten years since my Other Half and I moved a house onto our humble homestead. We had decided to reclaim a previously abandoned yard, mostly to make use of the large beautiful hip-roof barn that was located there. While the yard had a great barn, it didn’t have much else, so we had to figure out what exactly we were going to live in. After looking for a while, we came across a nice little house and we arbitrarily chose a spot to… plunk it. So began our adventure as home owners. Sometimes it feels as though we’ve been here for 100 years, other days it seems as though we just arrived. Either way, our homestead has been (and will continue to be) a real work in progress.

In 2004 the internet was in its young adulthood, and it was before the days of Facebook. That didn’t stop my from subjecting close friends and family to a little email update on our house renovating adventures, which I had forgotten about until a friend recently unearthed a copy of it. Somehow, in the midst of fourth year finals, wedding plans and job hunting, I still had time to pound out a rather wordy and melodramatic message titled “The Top 10 Reasons to Move a House into the Middle of a Pasture.”

It’s been interesting to compare my earlier observations with where we’re at today. Not all of my “top 10” are still relevant, so I’ve picked out a few of my favorite ones to share.

2004: You get to develop the useful skill of filling holes in walls.

2014: Still true. I’m actually not terrible at spackling, and through a lifetime of experience, my Other Half is also pretty good at filling gaping holes in drywall. And, given the fact that there are now three preschoolers integrated into our home, and said preschoolers will someday grow into rambunctious teenagers, I really should just buy some stocks in a drywall mud company right now and be done with it.

2004: You get to check your cows without leaving your kitchen window, sometimes they even rub on your house!

2014: fortunately we have a slightly more defined and refined buffer between our livestock and our house. Sometimes. When we first moved here, we had no fence restricting cattle from accessing our house. And sure, sometimes I’d come home from work and Brownie would have tipped over the BBQ (perhaps in protest?) or wrecked the front step or Tina would have rubbed another piece of X90 siding off the house, but Rome wasn’t built in a day. When we did get the much coveted four-wire fence constructed, we curved it around the front of the house so we can still check cows from the kitchen window. Just the way we like it.

2004: You find a place where you’re always welcome, “where everybody knows your name and they’re always glad you came…” that’s right, the Home Depot.

2014: I don’t darken the doors of big box home improvement stores if I can help it. They don’t know my name, they don’t care what project I’m working on, and the money I spend does nothing to help my local or regional economy. Local stores have competitive prices, unparalleled service and thankfully only give me 10 choices, instead of 4976. Ain’t nobody got time to look at that many samples.

There are still many more points to go, but I’ll have to save those comparisons for another column, perhaps later this fall. Right now, I’d better try and salvage my walls from the bumps and scrapes of life.

I appreciate everyday modern household conveniences. Things like running water and electricity, and the magic that ensues when they are combined in the form of a washing machine make my life a whole lot simpler. I am happier still that I live on a farmyard with enough water to do the numerous loads of daily wash that come my way. Any time I feel overwhelmed with laundry, I just compare myself to my foremothers who would have loaded up their children (and the dirty laundry they produced) and head down to the creek to beat the stains out on the rocks. Fast forward a few decades and the familiar routine of throwing in dirty items, adding soap, and pressing a couple knobs and buttons doesn’t seem so bad.

When it comes to drying the laundry, however, I’m a little bit Old School. I have a minor obsession with my clothesline. Shortly after moving into our humble home, engineering the perfect clothesline was pretty high on my to-do list. Literally. My husband insisted that any clothesline we installed needed to be high enough to ride a horse freely underneath. Now I’m not certain what past experience or insight he had as to why this was necessary, but it seemed like a critical step to realizing my goal, so I went along with it. We sourced an extra-long piece of metal pipe that we pushed into the ground for one end of the line, and attached the other end directly to the back of the house. Voila! I have a clothesline that the very tallest rider riding the very tallest horse could ride under with much room to spare.

Of course, every clothesline needs a little routine maintenance now and then, which requires some willing bodies who aren’t scared of heights. And a tractor. With a front-end loader. We’ve enlisted help from in-laws, outlaws, neighbours, cowboys and even random passersby, all to keep my beloved clothesline functioning.

There are some definite benefits to hauling alternating loads of wet and dry laundry in and out of one’s house. Nothing beats the fragrance of line-dried laundry or crawling into a bed made up with sheets that smell like the great outdoors. Also, the last time I checked, Saskatchewan is moderately breezy on any given day. This wind is not only plentiful but it’s free and just waiting to suck the moisture out of my clothes. Clotheslines are a great way to pinch pennies, while being quintessentially eco-friendly. Our pioneer ancestors were trendy and didn’t even realize it.

The downside of using a clothesline is that it can be slightly time consuming and, unlike a dryer, you can only leave the dry clothes where they are for so long. Left too long on the line, your clothes might become a popular gathering point for a flock of birds. Left even longer, your dry clothes might get a second rinse from an afternoon storm, require a second washing after getting blown off the line, or get tangled up, requiring your handy front-end loader. The clothes aren’t always soft, especially after those hot, still days, when you can stand your stiff clothing up in the corner after it baked on the line. Also, leaving both your children and your laundry unsupervised for even the briefest period of time may result in chaos. Small, innovative children may retrieve their favourite (damp) clothes, and I once walked in on a discussion that suggested using the clothesline as a zip-line.

So it’s not perfect.

But hanging laundry on the line is still one of the most peaceful things I do in a day. In this busy, crazy, technology-ridden world that we live in, sometimes it’s comforting knowing that I’m doing chores the same way that our mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers did. Hopefully they caught a few peaceful moments when they hung the laundry out to dry too.

The kitchen is the command center of our home, much like in many farm or ranch houses and probably most houses in general. It is the site where everyday activities take place that hold this business and household together. Bill-paying, laundry-folding, reading, budgeting, drinking (usually preceded by a grueling budgeting session) and writing out ear tags are just some of the activities that go on in our kitchen. From time to time, you might even see me cooking and serving food here. And around our place, home improvements are pretty low on the priority list.

When I was in a good mood, I would suggest our original 1961 kitchen was endearing in its functionality and cupboard space, not to mention its décor. The countertop laminate was held on with thumb tacks in several spots. I had removed the backsplash in some areas where I thought I would investigate and improve the wall beneath. Upon revealing some unpleasant things, it seemed best to abandon that project and pretend as though it was perfectly fine, despite the minor wreck I left behind. The lazy Susan, which lived up to its slack name, fell down every once in a while, regularly needing a lift. And the faux bronze plastic medallion drawer pulls were well aged. Enough said.

Since 2010, I’ve sort of been planning to get new cabinets. Leafing through glossy brochures, I determined I wanted something that was clean, white, classic and…. economical. It’s a kitchen after all, not a barn or a stock trailer. I visualized cabinets that stretched all the way to the ceiling, instead of the ones I had, which stopped short and concealed a dusty space full of unidentifiable ‘treasures.’ I pictured level countertops that were free of crevices holding bits of food from meals long gone. This imaginary kitchen even featured one of those newfangled automatic dish-washing machines, as well as a pantry that was located on the same floor as the kitchen.

It finally happened. A bit of unscheduled destruction, coupled with a major cabinet sale and a need for windows all but forced me into sort-of-planned-but-not-really-expecting-it-to-actually-happen kitchen renovations. It was tough to tell who was more surprised, me or the hardware store kitchen designer, when I rolled in and placed a deposit on my cabinets. According to the manufacturer’s booklet, they promised to “craft dream kitchens that fit every lifestyle,” even mine.

I didn’t want to think about how many cow-calf pairs I could have purchased for the price of this little project.

At the height of the renovation disorder, I was perking coffee on the bathroom counter, roasting beef in the living room, and using more paper plates than my tree-hugging heart appreciated. Strangely enough, I often found myself wishing my slow cooker could somehow cook faster. Fortunately, we didn’t starve, and the occasional neighbor, friend or feed sales rep that popped in and experienced the chaos first hand were understanding and very gracious.

The process, still ongoing, has been messy, and definitely gotten a little western at times. There was a fair bit of yelling on my part (mostly directed at my offspring), and a modest amount of nagging, but that is already a regular fixture in our everyday lives so it didn’t throw us off balance too much.

If all goes well, when my new and improved kitchen is completed I’ll have a lovely, functional space that, as promised, is tailor-made for my lifestyle. I just haven’t figured out what that is yet.