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Fall Garden and Home Outdoor Decor

October 15, 2017 By Laura 2 Comments

Fall is here, and while nature readies itself to bless us with the year’s annual grand finale display of beauty in New England, our gardens had found it time to wither and fade, with an early prep for a long winter rest. Especially since we opted to not plant anything new for a fall harvest this first season in our new garden area.  We still have lots of carrots in the ground, and we’re still picking peppers of all kinds. But everything else was pretty much done. So with a good wait in front of us before a pure blanket of white snow covers all that is post-life and ugly, we wanted to keep the beauty going a little longer, with some festive Fall garden and home outdoor decor.  We thought you might enjoy seeing the photos of our efforts.

We worked with an abundance of the typical Fall elements: Glorious mums in a variety of shades, pumpkins of various kinds, straw bales, cornstalks, and gourds. But we also planted our first big arrangement in a huge whiskey barrel, and we’re excited to show you that!


We had started getting everything ready to go, but then Storm Jose’ was heading our way. So we put many plants out behind our house in a more sheltered area to wait. Besides, we were also still having some days that felt a whole lot like summer. The heat is no good for many of these cool-loving plants, so keeping them in the shade until things cooled down a bit, was the right thing to do, also. (Even though I was so excited to get working on making everything FALL TIME, like the calendar said!)
The days came where I couldn’t wait any longer.  So we got to work over a weekend, and banged it all out. 
Then we smiled.
–


Here’s an overvew of the fenced garden. We’ll give you a closer look around in a minute. But let’s talk about the fresh layer of straw over all of the beds first. We use it all gardening season long around the plants in the beds as a mulch, to protect the soil from the sun. It does a great job of keeping the beds moist, and not drying out to a dush in the heat. It’s important to be sure you are using straw in gardening though, as opposed to hay, because hay has seeds, and unless you are going for wheat fields, you really don’t want all these seeds falling on your garden soil.

The straw is not only a beautiful golden color for a Fall look, but throughout the bitter winter here in New England it helps protect any perrenial plants buried in the garden beds, holding in some heat from the earth. Come spring thaw, what is broken down can just be turned into the soil with other more enriching  compost.

Ok, less talk, more photos, now.


Our garden-entry gates.
Come on in.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: FALL Home Decor, Gardening, Home Decor, Home Page, Seasonal Home decor, The Homestead Tagged With: corn-stalks, fall-decor, fall-festive-gardens, fall-gardens, hay-bales, mums, outdoor-fall-decor, pumpkins

Meet Our Hedgehog, Paprika!

August 11, 2017 By Laura Leave a Comment

Have you ever met our hedgehog, Paprika? If not, we thought we’d introduce you to her, today. If you have, you might want to see how much she’s grown! 
You’ll just want to let all of the photos load, so you can see if she does indeed have some serious cute-factor, or if it’s just us.
So give it a moment.
We think you’re going to love her.

P is for Paprika, of course.
And here she is . . . .
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Home Page, Life In General, Our Hedgehog, The Big Picture Tagged With: exotic-pets, hedgehog, hedgehogs, nocturnal-animals, nocturnal-pets, pets, unique-pets

Meet Our 5 Sweet New Baby Chicks, Quick!

June 2, 2017 By Laura Leave a Comment

 We announced awhile back that we decided to add to our chicken flock, but there was a little wait.
Well, our day-old sweet new baby chicks just arrived! 
There are few things sweeter than opening a box of brand new baby chicks! If you opened the box with us via video on our Facebook Page,  (<– watch here), you know just what we mean!  We’ve been so excited to get them, and we’re loving having them here.
Most of them still have their little egg-tooth too, and well, we’re all smitten with every one of them, already.

So today we are going to just briefly share with you their photos, names, breeds, and egg colors! 
And also, what they will look like, for the most part, when they are all-grown-up!

 

A Word on Naming Them

You may know that for our first-chicks-ever (one-day-old chicks we received just like this, in 2014), the name-theme we were running with was towns we had personal ties to. When we allowed those chickens to have offspring with our rooster the following spring, we went with names of personally-relevant streets in those towns. (From the coinciding towns, of course.)

This time, with this order of sweet chicks, we have no consistent theme for names!  So, don’t expect that. We’ve got a couple of spices, a couple of shrub/trees, and one more street!  We roll unpredictably like that.

And God-willing there will be NO boys/roosters! We did order to have them vent-sexed, to be sure (ha haha!) we get females again. But ummm, well, last time (our first order), there were 2 out of 8 mis-sexed chicks.  (We kept 1, even though we never intended to have a rooster. We did love our time with Weymouth.) And then when their offspring were born, 5 hatched, and 3 were boys/roosters!  We kid you freakin’-not. So, we’ve had our share of finding homes for roosters. 
We are counting on having ALL GIRLS with these chicks! Please, Lord.

. . . . . .

Alright, are you ready to meet the new chicks, one by one?

 


“Juniper”
Juniper is a Blue Easter Egger. Isn’t she just a doll?! She is expected to lay blue or green eggs. We can’t wait to see her eggs!  Because whatever color the first egg is, is what that Easter Egger will always lay. I’m sure we’ll show the first egg on our Facebook Page and or our InstaGram. So yeah, follow us theres. (Typo on purpose.)
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Home Page, Our Chickens, The Homestead Tagged With: chicken-breeds, chickens, chicks, ordering-day-old-chicks

Details About the New House of Joyful Noise Rooster

March 19, 2017 By Laura 2 Comments

Just a quick post today, to share with you all a few details about the new House of Joyful Noise rooster, since we mentioned we would tell you a little more about it in this come-back post.

When I got to thinking about freshening up our blog and giving it a bit of a new look, for some reason the idea of incorporating a rooster with a fancy tail, popped into my head. And once it did, I couldn’t let it go! We love roosters, and their big fancy tails anyway, and it felt like it fit well, because they are certainly farm-ish enough. We do keep chickens, and have certainly dealt with our share of roosters. We had a big and beautiful rooster with a fancy tail for awhile, until he died unexpectedly. We miss him on the one hand, and he took real good care of his hen girls.  But on the other hand, he was getting [Read more…]

Filed Under: Crafts & Creations, Faith, Faith/ Catholic, Home Page, Life In General, The Big Picture Tagged With: Cursillo, Karla-Dornacher, rooster-art, rooster-paintings

Our Open Farmhouse Kitchen Shelving | Before and After | Home Project

February 25, 2017 By Laura 3 Comments

The slow transformation of our kitchen continues, and this is another one we are so happy with how it turned out. What a great big difference it has made, getting rid of our cabinets, and building custom open farmhouse kitchen shelving!

A Bit of the Back Story

In this project, we were actually undoing a change we made many years ago.
One of the many reasons we bought this house in the first place, was because it had a lot of floor cabinets in the kitchen, and none on the walls! I really didn’t want a kitchen that felt closed in by a lot of cabinets mounted on the walls, that I would have a hard time reaching anyway.  However, it wasn’t long before we realized, the floor cabinets alone just didn’t provide enough storage for everything. 

And so Michael bought basic ready-made cabinets at Home Depot, installed it on our one empty wall, and then added oak trim and handles to match the rest of the floor cabinetry . . . .

I really grew to hate it.

It’s been there for at least 20 years. As much as I grew to despise the look of it, it was necessary for storage, as far as I could figure, for far too long. The floor cabinets stored plates and bowls, glasses, pots and pans, and storage containers.  And the drawers stored what drawers do, of course: utensils, herbs and spices, a junk drawer, etc. So the cabinet on the wall stored cereal boxes, crackers, rice, and that kind of thing.

I began to dream about open cabinets, with dishes and all in there. And I had come up with a good plan of how to rearrange everything in the kitchen that still needed to be stored. (Just put all that was up in the wall cabinet – cereals, crackers, etc. – down in the floor cabinets, when all of the dishes, bowls, etc. came out.)
But I wasn’t sure open cabinets was what I really wanted. Then I started thinking about open shelves. But as much as I thought about it, I couldn’t see in my head exactly what it would look like, that would look right in our kitchen. Until I did.  However, explaining it to Michael was not painting a good picture for him. I was being clear enough in my description, but he just didn’t think it was going to look good.  As I gave him the details, he kept questioning me, like….“Really?”. 

It was unusual. Because you see, with any big or small home projects we have ever done, we have always planned the whole thing together. We most always have the same vision, the same expectations, and the same excitement. But this time….Michael didn’t see it, what he was expecting was not good, and he definitely was not excited. 
This time, I had to ask him to just trust me, and build it like I’m saying.

And he did.

plain white kitchen cabinets Good-bye, boring ordinary cabinets . . . .
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.

.

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[Read more…]

Filed Under: Home Decor, Home Improvement, Home Page, Home Projects, Organization, The Homestead Tagged With: custom-fit-shelving, farmhouse-kitchens, farmhouse-style, kitchen-organization, open-farmhouse-kitchen-shelves, open-farmhouse-kitchen-shelving, open-shelving-ideas, shelves, shelving

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