No.855: Last Week at the Farmhouse // Diligent Work at Home

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Our home looks like a construction site right now.  As time allows, we’ve been working as a family to remove the wall texture in the living room and it’s been quite the project!  Furniture has been crammed into the middle of the room, lamps and artwork are hanging out in other spaces and watch your step!  Step stools and trash bags and putty knives of all sizes are everywhere.  We’ve done this kind of slow and steady work with the farm and even though we’re living in organized chaos, it is so fun and satisfying to have the same experience inside.

Doing the renovation ourselves brings me back to 2008ish and that period of the Great Recession.  I was a newly married, young mother of very young children.  As a family just starting out on one income, we didn’t have much money and I was so inspired by the surge of DIY projects and money-saving ideas on the internet.  Sadly, as the economy recovered, a rise in fast consumerism occurred and those do-it-yourself tutorials seemed to fade out of popularity.  And what a shame!  There’s something about doing diligent work yourself, learning new skills and trying new things, that just can’t be compared!  And that feeling of pride in a job well done?  Priceless.

Hoping to document the abundance around me all year long!

Around here, abundance looks like…

+ continuing on with the Weather the Storm Challenge.  (As a reminder, the goals of this challenge are to reduce debt, add to our food storage and save money.)  The biggest change I’m seeing may not be the vast amounts of money I’m saving (I wish!) but the confidence it is creating.  I’m constantly thinking of new things to try, new ways to stretch what we have.  It’s intoxicating and exciting!  Anyway, this week, I:

• used the weekly grocery store ad to buy grapes, tuna, and panko on sale
• used a coupon to try a new tikka masala sauce kit for free! (I saved $5.50)
• purchased five canned goods to put back for winter (mixed vegetables for chicken pot pies)
• sold eggs and chicken to friends
• made beef bone broth for the first time
• froze that broth into Souper Cubes (to stockpile for beef stew and french onion soup)
• found a sweatshirt for my son in the hand-me-down bins
• used up a free laundry detergent sample
• made english muffin bread
• learned from my son how to cut up a whole chicken into parts (he works at a farm and is a pro)
• made chicken broth from those carcasses (I’m on a roll!)
• listed a few items on ebay/Poshmark/Pango

+ selling eleven unneeded items for the Car Loan Payoff Plan: seven books, one textbook and three pieces of clothing.  After shipping and fees, I made $91.35!

Reading //

• How Many People do we Need in Our Lives? from Edwin Leap at Life and Limb // “We all need connection. We need our own clans. Our own groups. Our own churches or synagogues, mosques or temples. We need deep relationship. These things can go a long way towards helping and comforting the lonely. They can make hard times better, hopelessness hopeful. They can protect against danger, hunger, disease and abuse by simply showing up and standing by those who are frail and powerless.”
• No, you cannot have it all from Jim Dalrymple at Nuclear Meltdown // “…you can’t have it both ways. You can’t be a self-centered individualist right up until the moment you need people. By that time the trade-off is made, the deal is done.”
• The Mother’s Gauntlet from Lane Scott at The American Mind // “One might object to the idea that homemaking requires an almost superhuman amount of self-governance. After all, isn’t it mostly about keeping the kids alive, fed, and your home kind of running on a basic level? That can’t be that hard. Yet it is precisely because the standards imposed externally are so low that the job can be so unsatisfying. The stay-at-home mom unconsciously applies her own standard, above and outside of the rest of society. Despite any protestations to the contrary, she knows her job demands more than subsistence. Her household has set aside the life of an entire adult, and all the income and aspirations she could have chased, so that she can raise the children. That sacrifice demands a thriving family, not a family that simply survives. The stakes are unbelievably high.”  Interesting thoughts here.
• Forming Human Persons in a Digital Age from Shannon Donald at Nota Bene // “I sometimes wish I could roll back the clock and do things differently. I like to think I would have kept digital technology out of my children’s lives for much longer, and that I would have endeavored sooner to break free from my own digital chains. But we can only ever learn and move forward, striving to become a little more human every day.”
• ‘Art Will Touch Lives’: An Aging Farmer Adds a New Dimension to his Ministry from Max Heine at Front Porch Republic // What a fascinating person.
• the comments under Grandma Donna’s The Bumpy Budget post // I sometimes feel like I have more in common with older retirees than I do my own generation.  They tend to avoid debt and are more content to live within their means without all of the unnecessary luxuries.  To read about their struggles in this economy both buoys me (we’re not alone!) and leaves me so, so sad.  God help us all.

New Additions to The List // 

• Coming Up for Air by George Orwell
• Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves
• None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell

Watching/Listening //

• Millennial Stone Cleaner // I’ve been enjoying this Youtube channel.  This is the first video in a series where he restores and conserves an abandoned cemetery in Des Moines.

Loving //

• You Can Draw in 30 Days // My daughter is going through this book in school and really likes it.
• these “Save By Numbers” savings challenges // I just printed out the Donut Sloth.  If I can complete it, I’ll have saved $2,778!