The Mo House is now our Dorm House

We have decided to stay put at this house for educational reasons. While searching out things on the net to brush up on math I came across Khan Academy. It is wonderful and recently won the Google 10 mil to 5 award. I love this website. Each lesson is ten minutes, so it's not too much to take in.
Sal Khan is the teacher and I think he was a fund manager before starting this free service to the world. If you would like to learn about the current economic situation and how we arrived here, I think his presentations are awesome. Look under the Finance section. A person can see why buying a 40 acre farm in Prairie Farm Wisconsin in 1995 for $38k and then using a home equity loan in 2005, ten years later for $225k might have been a bad idea. You can also learn how to do the math on that type of appreciation if you didn't know. I learned how a home goes from $38k to $225K in ten years and why we might not see that home return to $225k anytime soon, if ever again. The biggest point I took away from this presentation was, the vast amount of wealth that was spent on consumption rather than investments; factories being built, research & development, and job creation. We traded all that for granite counter tops, remodeled bathrooms, room additions, Hummers and nice vacations.

Back to Normal

We are back on line for everyone to see the blog again. We had the house for sale and we didn't want prosective buyers to see all the details. We have decided to stay put for a while and last night took the property off the market.

The House is still for sale

So today it has been one month since we have listed the house and not a single person has even looked at it. I don't know what to think about that. I asked the realtor about it and he said it takes 8.2 months to sell in todays market. I told him that is too bad because you only have a 6 month contract. Anyhow for the few people who are wondering how the process is going, it's a lot slower than what I would have thought.

For Sale so you can't see

The other day as soon as the sign went into the yard I closed the blog to just anyone who wanted to view it. Some people may see it as a benefit to see the before house pictures but I really do not want a prospective buyer having that choice. Would you buy a car that was totaled and then repaired? So that is why you couldn't see the blog and had to be an invited reader.

Back Bedroom

This past weekend we thought we might need to make the back bedroom look like a bedroom. So we went mattress shopping. We found a good one but a bed frame that was nice was another story. So I built one the following day. Anyways here is the finished back bedroom.

For Sale

The House is done and last night we listed it with a realtor. It was a long Summer Vacation of 25 months. We have learned that we are not house flippers. We learned that we do make things unique and spend too much money fixing things up. I think we may get everything out of the house that we put into it but we did the work for free. I am fine with that as in the end I just want to be done and move on to our next project.

Studio

Dining Room

The Master Bedroom

Above the bed we strung up a wire to show our notes, cards and drawing to each other.

Living Room

Our Living room. We didn't really splurge on furniture down here. Just a few things to get by on our Summer Vacation. The good furniture will come in the future. We are just happy that we are able to say the house is done.

Kitchen

So here is what we came up with for a kitchen.

Final Photos

One project we needed to do was make a return air for the living room. It was just a hole in the floor , so I built a box with drywall and below is the finished results.

The other thing I was looking for was photographs of finished rooms, outside shots and such. I saw that I had never photographed anything nice, just in bad shape and in the process of getting repaired. So over the next few days we will show the final photo's of the rooms

Here is the house today. The numbers were just put on today and I still need to place one board under those two windows up top.

Finishing Touches

Everywhere I look in the house we have counters full of food from the garden. We need a bigger kitchen.
There was this concrete door sill that was between the backroom and kitchen. We kept a rug over it all this time and yesterday we finally did something about it. We used floor paint and painted wood grain into the wet base paint.
The space in between the door way isn't even that bad now.
The floor to the bathroom needed the divider too, so we purchased a $5.00 metal piece for that.

I have about 15 more things to do and I think we can say we are finished with the Mo House. They are are little things like above that we have just been living with..

Today in the Garden

We have about 14 watermelons still growing on the vine and we have been enjoying eating them as well. I think we will save the seeds from this years crop too. They grow well and produce finished fruit in 85-95 days.
We have a variety of peppers we are harvesting daily.

The one cucumber plant is still producing cukes. We just planted six new plants as seeds.

Now that we have trimmed back the foliage we are seeing the tomatoes turning color.

The summer strawberries are coming in. We do not get as many as the spring produces but it's a nice treat to have them in July.

The Three buddies growing in stockings. (That just sounds weird) It's actually two now as I cut one off this morning. I didn't let it grow to 18lbs like the first one. It still came in at 12lbs. I was thinking how many pies will all these Tennessee Sweet Potatoes make and how many pies can I eat a day?

A shot of the garden looking over the fence to the east.

Boo Boo vs the Onions

So we spent some time in the garden today and pulled out some onions that were ready. Boo Boo was very interested in them and just jumped up on the little table to get a better look.
Remember the Tennessee Sweet Potato we harvested last week? Well here is just a small part of it turned into muffins and a pie. The pie tasted just like a sweet potato pie but only lighter. Very rich and creamy.
Here are a couple of Tennessee Sweet Potatoes that are now growing since we cut the monster one. There are a number of them now. One vine in this plant is well over 30 feet long.

Another thing we spent time doing today was trimming the tomatoes. I believe by trimming the lower leaves off, the plant will put it's energy into the fruit on the vine as well as producing more , while allowing sunlight to ripen the tomatoes faster. I do not know if I am right or not but we took a chance.

Melon Petit Gris de Rennes

This morning I went to the garden and saw a melon that had turned colors. I brought my bride out to show her and now we had a problem. We didn't know when you pick the melon. So we looked it up and found out when you see the stem cracking around the base and you move it a little, the melon should just fall off. Well you know we did just that and the melon did just that.
We left it in the house an hour or so. It smelled so wonderful. It weighed two & half pounds. We sliced it open and ate it all in one sitting. We found out a couple of things today about the
" Melon Petit Gris de Rennes."
First of all, I read that if a person can grow this melon they are a Master Gardener. I know that isn't true because we grew this one and four more are on the vine. Second of all, the grocery store melons have a green line in between the skin and edible part of the fruit. Ours doesn't because we do not have to pick it early for market. We get to pick and eat at just the right time. Last, I spotted this melon when it was little bigger than a golf ball on June 26th, so I think it takes about 29 - 34 days after the flower fruits for this kind of melon to mature.
Here is a pumpkin pie. Well maybe not yet but that's where this pumpkin we harvested is off to.
Boo Boo admiring the table flowers this morning. He likes watermelon and Petit Gris de Rennes as well.

Lunch Today

What we had today for lunch and this mornings harvest from the garden. We have had about 20 cucumbers this year from the one ten cent seed pack. The fact that we were able to nurse a cucumber plant along and not have the cuke beetles beat us is amazing to me. The store here charges 1.29 for each organic cucumber and the same with the green peppers. We have had three watermelons from the garden now. The little Serrano peppers are coming in now too! What I am really looking forward to is more sweet corn. I have always bought it from the road side or grocery store. When it is picked a few minutes before boiling however it is like candy as the starches haven't had time to develop. I think I will never again buy sweet corn that wasn't picked within a few minutes of boiling. We did purchase sweet corn at the farmers market a few weeks ago. It was picked the night before we got it. I think the corn was good but I bet it was awesome the night before.

What came from the garden today.

The other day we cut that monster Tennessee Sweet Potato. I was wondering why we were not getting any female flower and only male flowers on this plant. We also were only getting one giant fruit. So we cut the monster and now I am glad to say we have at least 8 fruits growing on the 30 plus foot vine, plus female and male flowers. Who knew that a single female could keep all those male flowers to herself? Well we cleared her dance card didn't we.
Part of today's haul from the garden.
The French Melons are starting to scab over. We are so close to completion.

Three Tennessee Sweet Potatoes growing on this 3' run.

I was squishing cucumber beetles, grass hoppers and Japanese beetles between my fingers about an hour ago and I saw one corn cob ready to eat. We started the water boiling and dropped it in for seven minutes. My bride put a little butter on it and we sat saying mmmmm mmmm good. Boo Boo heard us and wanted what we had so bad. Since it was our first cob I was cheap and gave him only one kernel.

Boo Boo vs Watermelon

This evening we harvested the first watermelon of the season. It is only 5lbs. We have it in the fridge so it is going to be dessert tonight. I was hoping for the melon to get 10-15lbs but my bride found one split open from the rain we had. So now I will have to go through the patch and harvest all the ones with the yellow bottoms before they crack open too.

Boo Boo vs Tennessee Sweet Potato

Today we harvested the first of our Tennessee Sweet Potatoes. It was 18.25lbs, which weighed in more than Boo Boo. He thinks all melons, pumpkins and the like are new toys for him to play with so we let him be in the picture of our first fruit from the vine.