Here are the way-before photos. I want you to know that that brown carpet had mouse chew-holes in it. The original wooden window was rotten. The spackled ceiling was an especially bad idea in an attic bedroom, because you’d bust your knuckles on it every time you got undressed for bed.

Mouse-eaten carpet. Peeling ceiling. Pinkish-brown painted walls. Uselessly tiny closet.

Cruddy discount lighting.

The first thing we did was replace the carpet with an inexpensive, inoffensive, cheap off-white low pile. Hardwood would have been nice, but the floors were sagging around the center beams and the job would have been prohibitively expensive and involved. Next we replaced the window with a nice new energy efficient one that Obama gave us a tax break on.

The remodeling seed was planted when I saw a photo in a magazine of an attic bedroom completely covered in beadboard. The lightness and uniformity improved the look and feel of the tiny space. Plus the time had come to tackle the storage problem. That tiny closet wouldn’t hold all our clothes, so half of them were always stashed around in vintage suitcases or in plastic bags under the bed. The Old Man had the bright idea to wall off the window side of the room, creating his-and-hers closets and a window seat. Track lighting was also The Old Man’s idea.

Ah, sweet closet space. The one on the left is mine, all mine!!!

Track lighting on each angle wall.

Look at those awesome doors. My bedroom looks like a barn now.

I wish I could find a photo of the shiny, black, midcentury modern dressers with metal pulls that we were using before the remodel. Because now those completely-different-looking dressers inhabit the space in the wall where the tiny closet used to be — also The Old Man’s idea. I painted them Cake Batter white to match the rest of the room and ordered the coca-cola bottle colored depression-glass knobs from eBay.

The dresser tucked neatly into the wall.

The room was smaller now, so I commissioned these tiny bedside tables from Andrew’s Reclaimed on Etsy. Andrew makes his furniture out of recycled wood and hardware, and he added ultra-cool insulator knobs that I was unable to zoom in on. I painted the tables Cake Batter white, using only one coat to retain a rustic look.

A perfect nightstand.

The bed with the nightstands.

Of course the window seat was an odd size, so once again Etsy came to the rescue. Busy Bee worker made me a gorgeous window seat cushion in this lovely Waverly fabric.

A lovely window seat.

Ice Bat looks right at home.

The bedroom is all white with touches of orange and turquoise.

The room got dirty from all the painting and sawing.

What fairy princess bed?

Vintage pillowcases.

Just another view of my awesome new bedroom.

Molly's sheepskin rug on the ottoman. Yes, that's right, I bought my cat a sheepskin rug.

The whole room.

This year I made a concerted effort to change that. First I dug up the perennials, raised the bed, and edged it with a rustic but luxurious three layers of bricks. Then I put them back, supplementing the display with plenty of blossoming flowers from Lowes wherever I saw a gap.

So far, so good. Everything’s in bloom!

A winding flower garden.

The path is under construction. I get my bricks for free from neighbors and Craigslist, but there’s still a lot of labor and some expense in the form of sand and landscaping fabric. Right now, half the path is in the ground and the other half’s lying on top, waiting for me to get a weekend free.

A walking path.

Margo, the owner of our local antique store, found this little goat, stuck it in the store window without a price tag, then went out of town for a few days. She left friends to mind the shop, and I pestered those ladies every day to get me a price and hold that goat for me. By the time I paid my $17 and carried the little guy away, they all thought I was nuts.

I get their goat.

I love the way the creeping Jenny and the three kinds of coreopsis look with the angie blue anagallis.

Yellows and blues.

Look how happy this sedum is!

Don't look at the weeds though.

In another spot in the yard, this waxy sedum-like plant is growing like mad. I don’t remember planting it — I think it’s a weed! It looks good, though, so I might transplant it as a foliage backdrop for some flowers. I don’t turn up my nose at weeds if they look good — last year a wild petunia had its way with my front yard!

An attractive weed.

The fairy roses are getting bushy and looking good and healthy.

Fairy roses from Mom.

These blackeyed susans with the dark centers have been one of my favorite flowers since my Grandma used to plant them in her yard. I found out a bit late that they’re annuals, though. We’ll see if they reseed.

Yarrow and rudbeckia.

A batch of angel hair drying out on our desk.

My father-in-law refused to eat pasta in restaurants — “I won’t pay $10 for a plate of noodles,” he once famously said.

I disagree: pasta is one of my favorite foods. Whether it’s Italian, Japanese, or simply some macaroni – I never met a noodle I didn’t like.

Lately I’ve been making my own – if you have a pasta machine it’s easy. If you don’t, you can make plenty of simple pastas (like linguine) with a rolling pin and a knife.

The trick is to use  semolina flour (sometimes called durum, although durum is actually the type of wheat grain used to grind semolina). You can often find it in groceries, or try your local bulk food place. We’re lucky enough to have a place nearby that was willing to stock it for me. Make sure that your semolina is actually made from durum wheat.

Many pasta recipes on the web will tell you to use eggs, but with semolina you don’t need them. Store-bought pasta doesn’t contain eggs. The advantage of this is that you can then dry your pasta out and store it at room temperatures without worrying about food-borne illness.

I added my basic dough recipe to Foodista, my go-to website for recipes.

Rolling Out the Pasta: If you are lucky enough to have a pasta roller like our Atlas, you can use it to roll out sheets of dough. If you are working by yourself, try running very small amounts of dough through at a time, it’s easier to work with shorter sheets if you don’t have a helper to hold onto the long sheets of pasta as they come out of the roller.

1. Start on the widest setting (1 on my machine) and run your doughball through.
2. Repeat over and over, decreasing the size setting on each turn. Don’t skip any!
3. I usually stop at about 6 or 7 on my machine, which yields a pretty thin dough.
4. If you get holes, try doubling the sheet over again and running it through one more time on the same setting.
5. Let your sheets dry about 15 minutes or so.
6. If you are making angel hair or linguine, run the sheets of pasta through the cutting attachment.

Pro Tip: Dust your pasta sheets with semolina flour every few turns and you’ll find that it goes through the machine much more smoothly. Also dust the sheets a bit before running them through the cutter, and you’ll find that the pasta cuts more cleanly and doesn’t stick to itself nearly as badly.

Using a Rolling Pin: You don’t need a fancy machine to make good pasta, if you have a rolling pin and a little elbow grease. Take a little dough and roll it out on a floured surface with a rolling pin. Get it as thin as you possibly can without tearing, and use a knife to cut it into shapes.

Drying the Pasta: You can lay your pasta out on wax paper to dry overnight. Once its hard and brittle, package it up into containers. It should store for quite some time.

Making Ravioli: I don’t have a ravioli attachment for my machine. Instead, I use a small mini-muffin pan to form my ravioli shapes. Here’s the trick:

1. Lay a sheet of pasta over the muffin pan. Press the dough slightly into the pan, but not all the way. You should get some circular indentations, but you aren’t trying to form the pasta to the inside of the muffin cups. You’re just making some room for the filling.
2. Spoon your filling into the indentations.
3. Brush the exposed parts of the pasta sheet with water to help the ravioli glue itself together.
4. Lay a second sheet over the top of everything, and use your fingers to press it down firmly.
5. With a quick movement, flip the pan over onto a dry, floured surface.
6. Use a knife to cut out your individual ravioli.

Most ravioli fillings can’t be dried, but they’ll freeze really well.

Finished linguine that has been dried and packed for storage.

Restarted the cooked herbs yesterday and added some rosemary and sage that I’d been meaning to throw into the mix.

Since my old grow-light setup heated things up too much, I’ve replaced them with a pair of 3 foot strip lights from Lowes. They were inexpensive – like $12 each. They needed a standard outlet cord added to them, since they are mostly meant to be wired as permanent fixtures, but that was easy. I hacked up a couple old extension cords to them.

They fit perfectly on the left side of my potting stand, and are hung on a chain so they can be lowered and raised when I begin moving starts under them.

All in all – it looks like a mad scientists lab down there now!

I repurposed an old trough from the barn to make this stand. The reflective material is metallic insulation that I had around from an old project.

Detail of the hanging strip light arrangement. These were cheap, bright, and fit perfectly into my stand.

Keeping temps right under those grow lights was just too touchy. Things cooked when they were on, and got too cold whenever they were off.

Built myself a light box – a wooden box with a lightbulb in it that heats the starts from the bottom when you set them on top of it. Had enough scrap wood and an old porcelain light receptacle to tack it together in just a few minutes.

Now our starts have a two stage process: 1. Start on warm light box. 2. Transfer starts to under lights after sprouts show.

Still monitoring temps overnight. Will pot a new set of starts if they remain stable.

Build from scraps and a leftover porcelain receptacle. The bulb provides heat from beneath the starts. I prop a piece of scrap over the front to trap in more heat.

Leaving as-is and taking some temp readings. When we pulled off plastic, pots were visibly steamy in our cold (mid 50s) basement.

Lights were approx. 1 foot from pots – temps got above 90! Will try to adjust temps down over the evening into the 70s by repositioning lights, and maybe replacing one or two with a standard CFL instead of those hot grow lamps. Will also start a timer (try to setup a dark cycle that stays above 55).

Testing a new watering method – using 1 quart jars filled with water and strips of cotton to “wick” water into pots. Works well, but maybe too well. One or two pots are swimming. Waiting to see if they dry out under lights when I remove the saran wrap from the pots.

Basil has already sprouted!

This is mostly an experiment for this new watering method. If it works, we’ll pot the herbs. If not – oh well it’s still early.

Might play with tweaking the size/material of wick to decrease the amount of water delivered. Testing with parachute cord on one.

Mugsy, however, came limping right up when I called him. He was extremely hungry and was more than happy to devour a plate full of Purina Cat Chow. He was also willing to be petted, right off the bat. You might even say he was needy. Desparate.

We fed Mugsy and gave him a week or so to return home, if he had one. He didn’t seem to have one though. He had earmites and worms and a number of wounds from fighting, and he hadn’t been neutered. We surrounded an old doghouse with hay bales and he agreed to sleep there.

It should be noted that before Mugsy had a name, we called him “Cat Cat”. He has one of those nicks in his ear that fighting tomcats often have. Here’s a blurry photo of it, because Mugsy doesn’t sit still and prefers head-butting to being photographed.

Mugsy's Ear

When we met him, Mugsy also had a puncture wound near his ear and these two scrapes on his back legs upon which there was no fur:

Scrapes and Scratches

These looked way worse a few weeks ago and were part of the impetous of getting him to the vet. When we got there, though, the vet said these scratches weren’t so bad. It was the hidden bite on his front leg, the one that was making him limp, that was abscessed and nasty.

So the vet gave him another bald spot:

A Bald Leg.

Since Mugsy was already going under anesthetic so the vet could drain his abscess, it was good time to get him neutered as well.

Fourth bald spot acquired.

The Bald Backside.

Sorry.

Mugsy also got antibiotics, Mita-Clear, de-wormer, and all his vaccines.

He looks like hell, though, for a cat so well taken care of. A photo of all his scrapes and scratches in one frame is in order, but he won’t sit still for it.

Whether he comes inside or remains an outdoor cat remains to be seen. We have a number of things to consider: the fact that he wants in, the fact that our other cat Does Not want him in, the Country Mouse’s allergy to him, the need for booster shots, the possibility that he still marks his territory, and the fact that someday we’ll want outdoor cats to chase away barn mice. He’s so comfortable at our home and wants in so badly that we theorize that he actually lived in our house long ago, before it sat abandoned for a couple of years and we came along and bought it last Spring.

We still call him Cat Cat sometimes out of habit. He’s super sweet and gracefully endures the application of ear mite medicine and other indignities. He likes to follow us around the yard and he loves to be held and carried. One day I went out and got into my car, and he followed me and jumped in before I could shut the door. We love him.

Our wagon (technically a “garden cart“) is hardly the red wagon I had as a kid. We bought it to help clear the Huge Pile of Trash from the old barn, and it has already been a big help cleaning up the fallen limbs from around the yard. And although three acres isn’t massive for a homestead, one gets tired of carrying piles of stuff back and forth. This wagon makes that easy, and even kind of fun. I know people (even some neighbors) who use fancy ATVs with cargo beds for lugging almost anything around their yard, but that seems like overkill for our little homestead.

The sides of the wagon can be lowered for handling large or unwieldy loads.

Our wagon is large – large enough that a couple of adults could sit cross-legged inside it. It has heavy duty, inflatable tires, and sits high enough to handle most reasonable terrain. The draw bar can be be attached to our tractor hitch. The bed is made of heavy-gauge aluminum mesh, and the sides are hinged so that they can be lowered (for carrying larger items. One of these days I’m going to rig up an adjustible wooden brace so that the sides will lay flat to make one very large bed.

But every time there was a strong wind, which was about twice a day, our little canvas camping chairs blew right off the deck and beyond into the tall, tangled grass (the Country Mouse does his best to keep up with mowing the three acres). Sitting on our porch and staring at the cows had to be preceded by a trek around the lawn, looking for the chairs.

So I started scouring the junk shops, and I found this nifty set of wrought-iron chairs for $25. They were begging for a little TLC and they promised to stay put.

The chairs, before

I knew right away that I wanted to paint them red, but wasn’t sure what to do with the seats. Then we stopped by a fabric outlet store on our way home from Myrtle Beach, where I found this lovely retro strawberry vinyl and enough foam to freshen them up.

Strawberry fields

My front porch is like an ice cream parlor now. Pardon me while I go and make a caramel sundae.

The chairs, all finished!