OK, We Won't Be in For X-Mas

Well, it was a valiant effort but as it began to quickly eat up any available funds, we quickly realized that a X-mas in the stone house with actual gifts would be better than a X-mas at Fox Hollow with nothing.  Somehow, the gift of simply being at our Fox Hollow Home wouldn't cut it with the kiddies.  Having accepted that fate, I've begun focusing on bringing some warm winter holiday cheer to our stone cold home.  Today, the mad crafting and decorating and maybe even cookie baking begins!  Here's a few photos from some of our past stone home Christmases...is that a word?



Cleaning, Part ___? of Infinity of Course

So its been a month and we've been cleaning, dirtying and cleaning again....  It almost looks exactly the same but there are some significant accomplishments that are worth pointing out:

OK, so maybe it doesn't look cleaner, but all of the funky vinyl and 1x1 ceramic bathroom tile (?) fireplace hearth have been scraped off and since vacuumed.

But here's the big deal...a front door!  Why such a big deal? Because while we were patiently waiting to close on this property, someone took it upon themselves to forcibly and violently remove the existing door (and part of the wall, too) with a sawzall.... presumably to steal the piano from inside along with all of the house's plumbing.  Yeah, it really sucked.  It's been a gaping reminder of being violated by somebody that probably lives in our very same hollow.  But, now there's a door -- and of course a lock.

This is the blue bedroom -- the one that had the trailer-trash glue-down el cheapo blue carpet tiles.  They came up pretty easily, but left behind a black foamy stuck down mess.  We rented a big old floor sander polisher thing that Zenka wrastled with and ta-da...sanded plywood never looked so lovely!  I will post updated photos of the remarkable progress.  We will be moving in before X-mas.  We will. We will. We will.  When there's a will, there's a way!

Cleaning, Part 1 of Infinity

This is Zenona pitching in last week at the first of many, many days of cleaning and de-funking.  What are the mystery orbs in this photo??  Hopefully just dust...

Makin' the Big Move - But First We Need Water

This mess of tools, pipes, dirt and rocks is actually the spring source that supplies our house's water supply. While most modern homes in the Catskills have drilled wells, some reaching depths of 300+ feet, a spring-fed water supply was pretty much the norm back in the day. In order to make our big move to the Fox Hollow House, we have to have water. And water that doesn't run out and doesn't freeze either. Zenka has been working to bring the old water supply system back to life and, hopefully with some improvements.

The first task was to reconstruct a cement holding box around the spring source to capture and corral the water into the piping system that leads to the actual cistern. A cistern is a big holding tank, in our case an underground square concrete block thing that I was standing on when taking this photo. After the concrete was poured we had to muck out the cistern that had been drained earlier. There was buckets and buckets of muddy silty stinky slop...too gross to stop and take a photo.

The water from the newly-poured spring box will fill up the now mud-free cistern, which has a pipe leading to house's system and an overflow pipe that feeds our garden's water system (a whole different topic of needed water supply improvements we will get to before the growing season....). Our spring water has got to be some of the most pure and best-tasting water EVER! It comes from deep in the mountainside and behind our land is thousands of acres of NYS wilderness. We literally could bottle the stuff!