Day 350

Warm, Warm, YAY!

While we were outside I pulled out a few of the pieces of the porch to take a couple of pictures of them. These are pieces of the back porch, but we are guessing that our front porch matched the style of the back porch.


The old porch railing.

The heat has also made the bees active. Hmm, not my favorite part of the warmth. I guess I need to get that bee guy called again so he can come and get them out of the walls of the house.

Day 342-348

It is getting to feel a lot like spring. :)

Jonathan has been doing a lot of research on how he wants to set up the intercom system and the home automation system. He is going back and forth on what he wants to do. So mostly it is up in the air as of yet. When he gets a bit more of it worked out I will write about it.

I have been moving some boxes around and going through some more stuff. I am getting really tired of having so much of our stuff in boxes and unusable. This weekend I worked on going through all of the kitchen boxes. I got most of it sorted out. We we don't have up in the 2nd floor kitchen ready to use, I am sorting and putting in the cupboards in the 1st floor kitchen so that I will be able to find it if and when I need it.


We also spent some time today looking at the garage. Now if you haven't had a good look at the garage, the biggest problem is that the roof is falling down. We are not ready to redo the whole garage and make it the way we want to. But we are thinking that we are going to have to do something about it. If we fix the roof, it would be a usable space.

While we were outside we picked up a bit of trash around the garage and cut down a couple of trees. There are trees all over that need to be removed as they are growing to close to the house and garage. I have also been noticing the last couple of days that we have flowers poking out of the ground. I might have to think about moving them. Only I don't know where I should be putting them yet.

Day 341

We got a load of wood this afternoon. It should get us by and still have some left over for next fall. It seems a little more wet than it should be. But hopefully we won't have to use much. And by fall it should be just right.

Jonathan is doing research on what he needs to get our intercom system working. Hopefully we will be able to purchase what he needs to get started on that.

We are also waiting for the foundation guy. He was supposed to come and look at things last week. But we didn't hear from him.

Day 340

Saturday:

They were right about the snow and the cold. :( We are also just about out of wood. We were hoping to get by with what we had but it doesn't look like we can.

Today was a great day! We had Deseray, Jeremy and Axel over. We all had a lot of fun. :D

Next up is calling about some more wood and trying to finish up the landing room.

Day 338

We have not yet let Zeb sleep in his semi-finished room yet. It is still a bit on the cold side out there. We need to seal up some of these cold spots and finish insulating the ceiling. Today was very warm (almost 70 degrees), but tomorrow and Saturday they are telling us it is going to snow and be in the 20-30's. First day of Spring on Saturday with the possible 5 inches of snow. :( Not looking forward to that.

Day 334

The weather has been warm lately. So we have decided that it might be time to see about Zeb having his own room. So far all three kids have been sharing a bedroom. It has been not to bad, they have all been getting along pretty good. We thought that we would also like to move the dining area out into the landing room. This would make it right next to the kitchen. That would be nice. It would also give us a little more room in the 'living' room.

So today we moved most of the bookshelves into the landing room. And then Jonathan made frames to make a wall the rest of the way to the ceiling above the bookshelves. We are planning on making a temporary wall. That way we can use the landing room as a dining room and a bedroom for Zeb. He is very excited.

Day 332

Today the kids and I went over to the court house to pay property taxes on our house. Not that exciting except that I wanted to go down and check the records to see if we could come up with a name of the people that owned our house first. We went down to the record room and someone showed me how to use the book and I went back page by page writing down the names of the people who had owned our property. Back in the 1880's the property on the block was divided a little differently. But we did find some very interesting information. On August 5, 1886 Jefferson Weston sold most of the property (and likely the house) to James Kidston. One small portion of the property was sold on July 23, 1886 to Daniel Cook. After finding these names we started to research these people. It seems that Jefferson Weston and Daniel Cook were to rather important people in Beatrice history. Jefferson Weston was one of the very first people here. He and some others decided where the town of Beatrice should be. To read about Jefferson Weston go here. http://www.usgennet.org/usa/ne/county/gage/books/whoswho/

Or check out this book:
http://books.google.com/books?id=9noUAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=History+of+Gage+county+NE&source=bl&ots=NEfteY5KCM&sig=EYToiJ34mgqw687NvzzScJY3afo&hl=en&ei=IiyiS_m0PILgNfK45OII&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=12&ved=0CDwQ6AEwCw#v=onepage&q=History%20of%20Gage%20county%20NE&f=false

with a search of Jefferson Weston, Silas Wheeler, and Daniel Cook. These are some of the people that have owned/lived in our house. We are going to be doing some more detailed research over the next few weeks and will hopefully find out some more information and hopefully some old pictures of the house.

Day 328 - 330

We have been coloring like crazy. The kids have been exciting about coloring our house and trying to pick out the colors. Here are some of the things we have come up with.

There is also a pile of drawings that have been partially finished only to find that we really didn't think those colors were turning out right at all.

We do actually like several of these, but are still looking to see if there is something we like better. We are not sure how we are going to tell which one we will go with.

Day 327

Today Jonathan made a coloring page drawing of our house. We are getting to the point that we might need to know what color we are going to have things. We are having a hard time trying to figure out just want we might want our house to look like. So we printed off lots of blank coloring sheets and all of us started coloring our house. We have quite a few different ideas, with more to come. I will get them all scanned in and added here to see if anyone has any ideas of how our house would look the best.

Day 326

Well, we have really been enjoying the warm temperatures. But we know that winter is coming again. ;) It is funny to think about that as it hasn't even gotten to the first day of Spring. All I can say is we were cold this winter and we are going to do anything we can to be warmer next winter.

So today we went to on architectural salvage shop in search of radiators for our house. As I said our main goal this Spring and Summer is making sure we are warmer. So first on that list is finding radiators and getting the boiler system in and working. We have been looking at 'new' radiators and our not very excited about them. They are plan and ugly. There are several companies that produce the nicer decorative ones, but all of these seem to be in England. As we need around twenty, there is no way we could pay for shipping. We have also been looking on ebay and craigslist. But we want to get going. We need at least 6 and up to 10 by winter. So off to one of two shops in Lincoln (the other isn't open on the weekend). And guess what, they had 3 radiators. We quickly bought them. The owner took our name and number but said that they don't often get those in. So now we need to get to work on these radiators. We need to sandblast them and repaint them before bringing them in and running the plumbing to them. This of course is bringing in question color... We are thinking of matching them to the rooms. But as of right now we have no idea what the rooms are going to look like. So time to put our thinking hats on while we work on these radiators and search for some more. :)

Day 322 - 325

Not much work on the house. But just really enjoying the sunshine and the warmth. I am even happy to see all of the mud as all of the snow melts. :)

Day 314 - Day 321

Crazy week... we started out at the hospital with Melinda's appendix being removed. Then a week or rest and cuddling. Read the full story on Lisa's Place. She is feeling much better now.