packing

Clean up: old kitchen – clearing the stove

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Yesterday, while working on packing stuff in the old kitchen, my focus was on clearing the wood cook stove.  It was completely hidden away by stuff we put there, just to get them out of the way until we could get them to the storage shed or, for our own stuff, create a space for it.

The old kitchen is an add on to the original log house.  I had thought my dad had added it on after buying the farm from a relative, but I’m told the original builders had built it.  Another log building that we used as a chicken coop was the “summer kitchen.”  That’s where a stove was set up and the cooking and canning would happen, to keep the house from getting too hot.  As I understand it, this stove is from the summer kitchen.  Which means this stove hasn’t moved in about 3 generations.  Maybe four.

Until the new part of the house was built in the early 70’s, and we got running water and an electric stove, this was our kitchen.  Even after the new one was built, when the power went out, we would go back to using the old kitchen for cooking and some of the heating (the wood burning furnace needed electricity to operate the fans the blew hot air).

It’s a good thing we have no plans to use the stove.

I’m just going to post a couple of pictures for now; I found a lot of weird stuff on, in and around it!  Here is how things looked after I moved away that big stuff we had leaned in front of it.

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The chair, we’d put in to make room in the dining room, since we didn’t need the 8 or so that were there.  The vehicle bike rack is ours.  We kept it, even after selling off our bikes before a move, because we’d intended to get bikes again.

There’s a vacuum cleaner you can see on the left, with its head in the centre bottom of the photo.  That used to be ours!  And before that, it belonged to my in-laws.  They gave it to us during one of our moves back to the province, and when we left it again, it ended up on the farm.

The fire extinguisher box on top of the warming shelves turns out to have a fire extinguisher in it!  We’ll have to take it out and check its condition.  If it’s good, we’ll just need to recharge it and we’ll have an extra. :-)  We already have another modern one in our kitchen, though I suppose it’s due to be recharged, too.

You can also see just a bit of an umbrella sticking out.  That’s ours, too!  My husband bought it for the girls the second time we moved back to the West coast.  It’s painted silk with scenes of Winnie the Pooh (book style, not Disney style) on it.  There was a second, smaller one, too.  The girls were 3 and 6 at the time.  They are now 22 and 25.  So excited to find that!  I hope we find the second one somewhere, too.

I’ll post pictures of some of the other stuff I found later.  For now, this is what it looked like when I stopped for the day.

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Yeah, I found another vacuum cleaner. :-D

The tin on top of the warming shelves was one of the things I found IN the warming shelves.

It’s full of nails.

The oven door is broken.  I found a piece of hinge on top of the stove, and I think the second hinge is broken inside the oven door frame itself.

I wonder why one corner  of the stove top is leaning down like that?

Amazingly, there are still ashes in the fire and ash boxes.

Eventually, I plan to give it a good cleaning, polish it up and find some way to put the oven door back, though I doubt it can be repaired.  If there is a baking rack for the oven, I haven’t seen it – though I might not even recognize it for what it is, if I did.  I remember my mother baking, but have no memory of a rack in the oven.  The only memory I have of looking inside the oven was when my mom was canning and had jars in a water bath, the container of which pretty much filled the entire oven.

For now, I am done with the oven area.  I will next focus on emptying the shelves in the west side of the room and made some decisions about which, if any, I will keep.  I think I might keep one, just because it’s been handy to stand on to reach the breaker panel.

I am NOT looking forward to working in that nook beside the oven.  It’s going to be a tight fit to get into and move around in there, and it’s quite the disaster. :-(

The Re-Farmer

Sun Room Clean Up – East side

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Today, while the girls finished raking up behind the other house and adding to the flower garden, I finally got started on the sun room.

This addition to the house was the brainchild of my late brother, to create a space that my parents could sit and enjoy “outside” without being exposed to the elements.  My late father used to love sitting there.  It was also easier for him to get outside with his walker, as there are no steps to clamber up and down, like at the main door.

We’ve been using the room to store bags of feed for the outside cats, deer and birds, and now we’re using it to store the yard work tools we’ve been using.  However, we’ve basically only been able to use one side of the room.

Here are a couple of before pictures.

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My dad’s walker is still there, and still used by my mother, so she doesn’t have to struggle with bringing her own walker over here.

Behind it is what appears to be an antique prayer kneeler.

I’m keeping that, and hope to be able to refinish/preserve it.

That plastic church on the shelf across the window is something I thought was one of those Christmas village things.  It wasn’t until I started packing it that I realized it’s a hanging bird feeder!

It is now hanging off the stand in front of the living room window, waiting to have some bird seed added to it.

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We’ve been using my dad’s old seat to hold the feed bags (just cat food, right now).  It’s one of those glider rocker type seats.

The crutches in the background, leaning against the shelf on the right?  Those were there so long, the padding of the handle leading on the shelf was actually stuck to the wood!

Of course, cleaning this all up was… interesting.

I started at the window, taking things outside and getting it cleared enough that I could move the seat outside.

When I moved the green garbage can, I figured I’d better check to make sure there wasn’t any actual garbage in it.

I found a plant pot.

Full of gloves.

Then I spotted a… wire whisk?

Ugh.

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I don’t want to know what’s on that.

It got thrown out.

Yes, I was wearing gloves for all this!

When I finally could move the seat, I found this, under it.

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The cat poop, I was expecting.  During the winter, we sometimes found one of the outside cats had snuck into the sun room while we were putting food out, and at least twice, we discovered a cat in the room the next morning.  There is no way a cat could be in there that long, without making a mess.  Unfortunately, we had no way to even look for it, never mind clean it up, until now.

I also found the world’s cheapest, dullest knife.

Once I could access the shelves, I finally could start packing up the books, magazines and old Polish newspapers, as well as the various odds and sots around.

Speaking of odds and sots…

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There were tucked away behind the kneeler.  Mouse and rat traps.

Very gross traps.

The got garbaged.

The scrap carpet got added to the haul-away pile, outside the yard.

Here are the after pictures.

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The far wall is one of the log walls of the original part of the house.  Behind the bookshelf that was there, I found a pile of dead Asian Lady Beetles, that had made themselves some sort of a nest to hibernate in, partly under the paneling.

I really hope I swept them all out, but probably not.  We’d have to remove the paneling.

I’ve left the shelf across the window to finish clearing later.

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What a huge difference!

Once this side was clear, I had the space to start moving things around to work on the other side.

Which will be in my next post. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Okay… this is the worst find yet

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I thought, after the horror tunnel, desiccated mouse carcasses, and other strange things we’ve found while packing up and cleaning away 4 decades of my parents’ stuff in our new home, I would have been beyond getting surprised by things we find.

I was wrong.

I must admit, it’s not so much the contents, but the circumstances of it.

Though we really don’t have the room for it in the growing pile in the dining room intended for the shed, I am just really not happy with having the litter box in the dining room, even if it is in an out of the way corner.  Having cleared everything else away, I decided to move the dresser and the stuff on the wall out of the little nook they’re in, so the litter box can be moved away from where we eat.

After removing the drawers, the first thing I discovered was a scale under the dresser.

Why is there a scale under the dresser?  It’s not like it was accidentally pushed under it.  It was way in the back corner.

Okay.  Fine.

I start moving the now drawerless dresser.

*clatterclatter*

A broken broom handle, with masking tape on the broken end, falls to the floor.

It had been between the dresser and the bit of wall on the bathroom side.  I had noticed that something was there, but forgot about it before moving the dresser.

Okay.  Fine.

I carefully pull the dresser out, hearing all sorts of crunching, grinding noises from the floor.  Oh, dear.  I called for a daughter to help carry it, since it sounded like pulling it along the floor would cause damage.  However, as I maneuvered it out a bit more so a daughter could grab it from the other end, I found it was really, really light, and not making the noise anymore.  So I just moved it myself, down the hall, up the two stairs to the new part of the house, and into the space I’d prepared for it in the dining room.  Then I put the drawers back and went to continue cleaning.

This is what I found.

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What on earth?

This is a flash picture; there is no light in this corner, so I really couldn’t see very well, but that plastic container on the floor?  My first guess was that the dregs on the bottom was mouse poison.  And what was all that on the floor?

I moved the scale and that plaque beside it to the pile of stuff for storage.  The plaque?

It was a prayer.

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Okay.  Fine.  I can see something like that falling between the dresser and the wall and being forgotten about.  That black piece of plastic?  Probably put there to get it out of the way and forgotten about as well.

I very carefully moved the mirror next.  It was just leaning on the wall, on top of that piece of wood.  The far side of it is a broken edge.

Then I come back to clean up the rest.

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That plastic bowl?  Is a glass bowl.  The crud on the floor is ancient cat litter, complete with several desiccated turds.

And a piece of bread.

So, it looks like this area was used for both a cat litter box, and for… cat food? before.  I threw the bowl out, but I’m guessing it’s the remains of some sort of cat food on the bottom.

All of this means that someone took out the litter box, but left the mess behind.  Left the bowl and the bread and added a bathroom scale.

Then put the dresser on top of it all.

Then used the dresser to store extra towels on the bottom drawers.  Above the cat poop and drying food.

Oh, and as I was going back and forth to move things, I found a pile of something that had fallen out from under the dresser as I’d moved it up the two steps.  As I swept it up, I took a closer look.

I’m pretty sure it was a very old mouse nest.

Once clear, I mopped the area with disinfectant cleaner, including the walls, then used a scrub brush in the area (including on the other side, where I got the girls to take the stuff leaning there upstairs), then mopped it again.  The only thing in that corner that still needs to be moved is one last large mirror, which will require a screwdriver to remove.

I don’t have the energy for that anymore.

I also found a shoe tray that I scrubbed; it will go under our litter box when it gets moved.  For now, the entire area is being left to dry.  We will move our litter box in tomorrow.

This just blows me away.  It’s one thing to be in the practice of keeping things that might be useful, and just shoving them somewhere for storage, as is likely the case for most of the things we’ve found.  It’s quite another to deliberately put a dresser on top of cat litter, cat turds and cat food.

And a scale.

I just don’t understand.  Who did this?  I don’t know how long that dresser has been there, but I don’t think either of my parents were strong enough to move it.  Well; maybe my mother, depending no how long ago it was done, but she usually got other people to do that sort of manual labour for her.   So I have no idea.  And why?  Why was it done like this?  I can’t imagine any of my siblings doing this.

I’m at a complete loss.

I think I’m going to take a shower now.

The Re-Farmer

More Packing Up

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After much procrastination, I finally started working on a corner at the end of the hall, between the bathroom and old kitchen doors.

There is a dresser in a little nook there, surrounded by a couple of big mirrors, and with some sort of little memorial shrine or something on top.  It ended up being a catchall place for things, both our own and stuff from when we were cleaning the bathroom out.

I finally started to pack it up.

After finding places for our own stuff, I started boxing what was on top of the dresser, then moved out the mirror that was sitting on top of the dresser, leaning against the wall.

That’s when I noticed this.

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Has that gap always been there?  I have no memory of it, but as a child, it’s not something I would have noticed.

This area is where the add on that the old kitchen is part of is attached to the log portion of the house.  So the wall on the left with the opening is log – which is why it’s as wide as it is – while the rest is more modern materials.  You can see more of the log portion of the opening in the mirror, up to the wall the stairs are against.

After moving the mirror that is in the photo, I finished packing up the contents of the dresser.  It turned out to be an odd mix of things.  The top drawer had all kinds of gloves – painters gloves, I think – paint brushes, stir sticks, a couple of wooden crosses that looked like they used to be mounted on the top of something, a Canadian flag, an envelope of flower seeds, a couple of children’s sweaters… ???

The other drawers seemed to be used to store old towels and fabric pieces.  The towels in the bottom drawer where hiding a whole bunch of mouse poop.

Which actually reminded me of when this dresser was my own.

When I was a kid, what is now my office was my bedroom.  My bed was in the corner my desk is now in, and the dresser was against the bit of wall between the door and the closet.  The closet itself had no door back then.  I don’t think it even had a curtain, yet.

Above the side of my bed was an outlet, where I had a nightlight with its own switch.  I also had vanity with a mirror – which I now have in the master bedroom – against another wall.

One night, I was awakened by the sound of something falling off my vanity.  Turning on my nightlight, I looked around, but never did find out what got knocked over.

Going back to bed and turning out the light, I lay awake for a while.

That’s when I started to hear the noises.

By the vanity.  The dresser.  The closet.

Rustling.  Scritching.

I turned on my nightlight.

The noises stopped.

I turned it off and waited.

The noises started.

It was mostly around the dresser.  In the dresser.

This time, when I turned the light on, I pulled one of the dresser drawers out a couple of inches.

Then I got back in bed, leaving the night light on, and waited.

After a few minutes, the noises started again.  Then I began to see them.

Mice.

They had been climbing somewhere up the back of the dresser, and with the drawer open, I would see a head pop up and look around every now and then.  I heard them scurrying between the dresser and the closet, and then I saw a mouse start to climb up my clothes!

I think I saw about 6 mice different mice that night.

The next day, I found one of the friendlier barn cats and brought it into the house for the night.

The cat was okay with it, for the most part.

Then, during the night, I rolled over and my head landed on something soft and furry.  The cat had curled up on the pillow beside me.  I don’t know which of us was more startled; me, or the cat!  I felt so bad for spooking it.

I don’t know how successful the cat was in hunting, but I didn’t see mice in my room again after that.  Perhaps the cat caught them, or the cat’s presence scared them away.

Either way, they were gone.

Over the years, that dresser was used by my grandmother when she moved in with my parents – my room became hers – before passing away, and then by my father, as he started using my old bedroom because it was so much warmer (and closer to the bathroom. :-D ).  I don’t know when or why it was moved out to where it is now, replaced by a different dresser.  Maybe my dad was starting to have troubles opening and closing the drawers.

Once we get the dresser out of that corner, along with the other large mirror, which is just leaning between the wall and the dresser on top of a piece of wood, and the framed copy of the Mona Lisa, that corner will be the permanent spot for the cat litter box.

I was really hoping to have had that done by now, but the dresser is too big to add to the rest of the items stacked in the dining room, waiting to go into the shed for storage.

I’m not looking forward to dealing with the cobwebs. :-D

The Re-Farmer

Why?

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I finally got around to taking one of the many random mirrors down. This one was in the kitchen, partially covered with a wall hanging.  It was adhered to the wall in spots, so I ran a butter knife under it and managed to pry it off with only minimal damage to the wall (as if that matters, given the condition the paneling already is in).

On the back, I found this.

The ones in the corners make sense, but what’s with the ones scattered all around the middle?

How does this even happen???

The Re-farmer

Some progress

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Today was another day to work on packing the kitchen.  Including a whole bunch of canisters on the counter, most empty, but some with food in them.  I don’t know how many years they were in there, but in one of them, the canister was starting to rust into the sugar. 😝

Tomorrow, we will have another load for the shed, then the cupboards can be cleaned.  Then we can unpack our own kitchen stuff.

Hopefully, we will finally find my giant stock pot.  That thing is big enough to brine a whole turkey, with room to spare.  You’d think something that big would be easy to find!

We did end up keeping quite a bit of plates and bowls, since we had to get rid of almost all of ours.  With the cramped layout of the kitchen, those will go into shelves outside the kitchen.  The plan is for the kitchen to only have pantry items, food and cooking tools, so much as possible.  With the counters as empty as possible.  Soon, I might even have room to use a slow cooker!

It’s amazing how the most mundane things become exciting when you realize just how much you use them, and suddenly you can’t.

Speaking of which…

With the hot water totally gone again (we have theories as to what happened, but no way to know for sure), we went over our budget and crunched some numbers.  With Christmas, my husband will actually get a disability payment early, so if we can swing it, we might be able to get a new tank installed before Christmas, instead of in January.  It will depend on whether the guy I called can fit us in.

Some bills will have to wait, but the amount of time and energy going towards heating water every day has got to stop.  Our electric bill is going to be insane.

But, if we are careful, we will be okay.  Not having rent to pay makes a difference.

We still need to consider all those little fees that need to be dealt with, like transferring our drivers licenses and vehicle registration and insurance. Thankfully, those all seem to be cheaper in this province. Still, it’s never the big things that kill a budget.  It’s the little things that sneak up on you, chipping away, a few dollars here, a few dollars there.

Still, we have got by on much less, in the past.  Plus, growing up here, I learned very early, how to make a little go a long way.

That has come in handy, many times, over the years.

That initial rough patch is sure painful, though! 😂

The Re-farmer

New Habits

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As chaotic as things are, we’re settling into a bit of a routine.  Mornings, the heating of water for washing begins.  My past habit of staying up to the wee hours and getting up at around 10am has changed to going to bed before midnight *gasp* and getting up earlier.  It takes most of the morning to heat enough water to wash up not only ourselves, but any dishes and stuff that needs doing.  No point in heating all that water again in the evening, just to do dishes.

In the morning, someone goes to feed the outside cats and get them some warm water.  A warm water refill gets done again, later in the day, when what we gave them earlier is frozen.

Packing my parents’ stuff, cleaning shelves, unpacking our own stuff, then finding somewhere to put it, happens when we can.  I have been getting a fair bit of it done while heating water and stuff.  Usually it starts with, “I should make breakfast, but I could really use… ” and then I end up going through several boxes to find an item, get distracted and do something else, get distracted and finish another thing… then, eventually, I remember to go back and actually make breakfast.

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Green tea with chamomile, in my footed cup, all freshly unpacked!

We’re tea drinkers in general, but since the move, tea is ever-present.  Even when I was just coming out to stay a short while (usually for something funeral related), and I stayed at the farm, the kettle seemed to always be on.  We’re drinking more tea now than we did even just before the move, when the water at the co-op started tasting worse and worse.  We have since found and unpacked our tea supplies – we have a LOT of tea and tea supplies! – so the variety is being enjoyed often.

Loading packed boxes into the van and taking them to the shed has had a bit of a stall.  The van is currently full of stuff for the land fill.

Now there’s a new habit we’re going to have to get into.  Regular trips to the dump. Continue reading →

Progress

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Working more on the master bedroom, emptying the shelf that used to be part of a store.  It was jammed full, but I am close to getting it done.

Three of these are books and magazines. Does not count the one box of books that will not go into storage. I expect to pack at least two, maybe three, more boxes of books.

All but one of these boxes is from that shelf.  This is on top of the 5 or so big bags of linens, etc. I packed from this room.

Why is this here?


I also found mirror 56, tucked into a box of utility hooks.
The Re-farmer 

Things We Find – part 7

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Another item I remember from my childhood.

I had to stop and re-read it.

The girls found this one upstairs. I have no memory of it.

The star nosed mole with laser eyes are not something I remember from the Bible… Lol  I’ll just guess that it’s a different Samson.

Update: I just finished reading it. It’s set in a post nuclear dystopian future. The copyright is 1966. It’s older than I am!

The Re-farmer 

Slaying the paper monster

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I like to think we made good progress today. The office is basically done; what’s left is stuff that needs to go elsewhere, not sorted or packed.

Then my daughter and I tackled a stack of boxes in the second floor hallway.  These had been stored in the laundry room until the hot water tank died, flooding the floor enough to damage a couple of them before I caught it and hit the shut off valve.  After cleaning up the mess and getting the tank replaced, they just never made it back into the laundry room.

I have discovered something about myself today.

Apparently, I never throw out bills.

Or notices.

Or bank statements.

Or receipts and newsletters and classroom materials or forms…

These boxes were still unpacked from our last move, when we went from a 3 bedroom townhouse to the 5 bedroom townhouse we are in now.  There was 6 of us at the time. Of all my moves, this one was the worst. We all got sick with colds and what should have taken a leisurely few days became a week that ended with us just throwing things into boxes and bins and dragging them over the half block to our new home.

We had a very large desk back then, and it would not fit with the new layout, so we passed it on.  The contents got thrown into boxes, but we never had a place to unpack them. So in the laundry room they sat, virtually untouched.

Until today.

As my daughter and I went through them, almost everything went into bins or bags for garbage, recycling, Goodwill or ReUse Centre. Oh, and the Eco-station. We seemed to collect old power and USB cables and cords.  Almost nothing was kept.

By far, the largest portion had to be shredded. I found old utility bills from before we moved into the Co-op. There were credit card statements for cards we haven’t had for years. Some of the utility bills were the first to encourage people Go! Online! to pay their bills.

I was even finding hand written prescriptions from 2003-2004, when we lived in another province.

And tax stuff that should have been shredded years ago.

The tax stuff made sense, but why did I keep all those classroom materials from when I taught crochet? I haven’t taught formal classes in over 5 years!  Class outlines. Sign up sheets. Pattern notes. Evaluation forms.

So. Much. Paper.

Some of it made sense to keep for a few years, and since they were in the boxes, there they stayed. But much of it, I don’t know why I kept them.  Shredding from just these 4 boxes filled about 5 garbage bags!  And there was still the stuff that went into recycling. Plus, this is after many, many more bags of shredded paper from the office and even some ground floor stuff.

As stressful as this move is becoming, finally slaying the paper monster is turning out to be a huge benefit.

The Re-farmer