Two Whole Years!

My goodness! I can't believe it's been two years since we descended on this little town.  We moved to Geraldine the night before Halloween exactly two years ago.  My rugrats were so little then....

 

 

My big boy was in Kindergarten.  He's the handsome one in the yellow shirt.  This was his first school concert, just a few days after we moved here.

 

 

Tonight we made the rounds trick-or-treating through Geraldine.  Just like we have for two previous Halloweens.  (You can recap a little about our first Halloween in Geraldine by going here.) This is not one of those places that frowns on trick-or-treaters! No way!  Folks here love to see the kiddos all dressed up and running amok all over town.  Hired Man Jim was over at the V.F.W. hall serving hot cocoa and handing out treats like they have done for more years than he could remember for certain.  We stopped in to Rusty's Bar and Café to chat with our friends and show off our costumes, then we hit the streets.

 

 

 We were lucky this year, it wasn't snowing!  Around here we choose our costumes by making sure we are able to fit winter coats, and snow boots under them.  I spent quite a few Halloween nights trudging through snow when I was growing up over on the other side of the mountains....

 

There was a little magic in the air tonight.  The good Lord gave us an amazing sunset.  The sky looked as though it were on fire with it's gold, orange and purple lighting up the sky.  Then a flock of eight whooping cranes swooped over head in formation.  I had never seen more than one or two of the cranes in one place before!  It was a very special sight.  Someone shoulda told them they were going the wrong way though!  They were on a path toward the northwest....

 

The boys had the time of there lives and momma enjoyed it too.  Then we came home to our warm house, had a treat or two and then got them tucked into their beds.  Now I'm off to bed as well.... tomorrow is another day in paradise,

 

Bye for now,

B

 

 

Hunter's Hideout Update

Remember the little project Prairie Granny, Hired Man Jim and I have been working on?  We have been turning the old grain crib into a cozy bunkhouse for visitors, guests or hunters to have a place to stay.  Geraldine is so limited in places for anyone from out of town to stay and I have always enjoyed having guests.  I think it is a very fun addition to the farm.... Remember what we started with?



The living area before.

The "bedroom" before.

 Now it is furnished with comfy, cozy refurbished, repurposed and hand made items.  I want it to feel like a cabin in the woods.....even though we're on the prairie.

I hung the curtains on a tree branch.  I might need to find one that is a little more straight though....

 Hired Man Jim and Prairie Granny custom built the bunk beds so they are "adult sized".

 

Staying in the bunkhouse is meant to feel like "Glamping" more than staying at a motel....

 

 

 

The only things in this room I had to buy were the really cute antler lamp, the burlap coffee sack and the duck on the shelf.  Special thanks to Prairie Momma Trish for donating the awesome couch! It is perfect! Now I think I need to have my girls all out here for a slumber party....

Bye for now,
B

Autumn in Geraldine

 

I love, love, love this time of year! I always feel that I have the most energy in the fall.  Many of us are inspired by the dawn of Spring.  It encourages us to throw open our windows and get into freshening everything up.  For me that feeling always hits in the fall.  I get the itch to cook yummy things, spruce up tired rooms in my home and decorate with the beautiful things the good Lord gives us at harvest time.

 

The slant of light is always different in the fall.  Sunlight seems richer and the shadows are deeper....

 

 

 

A few leftovers are allowed to stay in the garden beds.  Just because they are too beautiful to toss to the piggies....

 

The dirt roads are perfect now for meditative walks....

 

 

Geraldine is brimming with apples in October.  It seems almost every yard has a tree and the streets are littered with them.  Hired man Jim gathers them for my piggies and for my table.

 

 

The boys adore being able to romp outside without being subdued by the heat of summer. Their momma does too....

 

 

 

Thanks for visiting  my little piece of heaven....

 

 

 

Bye for now,

B

This Is Not An Interior Design Blog, But Here's My Living Room

I never really thought I'd blog about my house.  Not in the "house tour" kind of way.  So I didn't prepare for it with lots of before pictures.  So this is pretty much the only one I have of the entry/ living area before.... You can see "The Tenant" was in his place above the stairwell and that the entry wall was olive green.  The main living room wall was also that color and had a mountain man wall paper border. I'm sorry I didn't get a photo of that.....

 

I had the walls painted Behr Wheat Bread.  I wanted light, but not white.  The old barn door behind the stairwell was found down by the corrals.  Once again I dragged in an old piece of history and gave it a scrubbing.  As far as farmhouses go, this is a pretty new one.  It was built in the early 1990's.  So I feel that giving the old pieces a purpose also gives my home a sense of longevity.  This farm has been here a long, long time even if the house didn't show it. 

Here's a chuckle for ya.  I'm raising Holstein calves that will someday be grass fed beef for my family and maybe yours too.  I have been pampering them along since I brought all ten of them home as teeny babies.  Prairie Momma Trish (from the Cowgirls post) has helped me with them quite a bit and knows them well.  When Trish stopped over the other day, she looked down at my brand new cow hide rug and exclaimed, "Oh no!! What happened?!"  I explained I had just purchased the rug at Sam's Club and everyone was fine.... but we sure laughed about that.

The front entry makes me smile now.  Some Behr Hawaiian Cinder is in the wall and I love the little bench.  The perfect place to yank your boots off after doing chores.

 
My world is one with rugrats, toys everywhere and sippy cups on the floor.... so I just left those where they lay.  Some reality never hurts.  This isn't an interior design blog ya know.  It's a "life on the prairie blog".

The look I was going for in here was western, but not so western that it looked like a rodeo was happening in my living room.  I love cozy, I love rustic and I love simple.  So this is what I ended up with. There's another post about my decorating style if you go here.

I had fun putting this autumn tray together.  The pine cones, pumpkin and butternut squash are from my yard.  The other things are from the grocery store.  Cheap and easy, gotta love it....

Thanks for checking out my living room! It really has been fun to write these posts and hear what ya'll think of my farmhouse.

Bye for now,
B

Dining Room Exposed

 It's been really fun for me to go back and look at the way my house has changed over the past six months.  I have had a request or two in the past to show more of what my home is like and I like how this little tour had come about.  So today I'll show you a dining room before and after....

 

This room had a dark, rust color on the walls prior to this photo being taken.  The "befores" were almost forgotten!  But you can see the not so lovely light fixture that came down about five minutes after I took the photo.  The barn wood wainscoting was done by the previous owners and it's gorgeous.  But the rust paint color seemed make it blend into the walls.  The color I chose to use in the dining room and kitchen is Behr White Truffle.  I usually don't gravitate towards white.  Like ever.  But this color has a touch of  "greige" and makes the wainscoting and knotted pine ceiling pop.

 

The only things in this room I had to purchase were the light fixture and the Farming Traditions artwork.  I saved money on the fixture by buying one from the "commercial lighting" section at Home Depot.  It saved me about a hundred dollars!  The color and style worked great too! The table was handed down to me by my step-mom.  Her Dad made it by hand for her in 1975 and she gave it to me 12 years ago. One of the chairs came with the table and the Windsor was a Christmas gift from my mom.  A can a black spray paint made them "match".

The little, antique wooden high chair was a gift from one of my mom's "Ya-Ya sisters".  Her husband had refurbished it and it is the perfect thing for the corner of the room.  The art on the wall is a Paul Cameron Smith print my mom gave me the Christmas of 1998.  It's hung in every home I've had since then....

 

 

 

These old sheep shears were laying in the dirt down by the barn.  I loved them and immediately gave them a scrub and a place in the wall.  The stamp says "Burgon and Ball" and "made in England".  I don't know how old they are, but I'm thinking they're pretty dang old and that works for me!

 

I really love the vaulted, pine ceiling in here.  The dining room really had a lot going for it and it was really fun to add my touches to it.

  Hope you are enjoying the tour of my little farmhouse....  We're headed out to start the day.

 

Bye for now,

B

All The Dirt

You guys seem to like the silly little post I did on fixing up my bedroom.  So just for fun, I thought I'd show you some of the other things I've done to the farmhouse since buying it in April of this year.  None of it needed any major overhauls or anything, but I've had a lot of fun adding my style to the place.

 Confession: I hate to do laundry!  Always have, always will.  I'm pretty domestic, I think.  But the tediousness of all that folding and matching and remembering to switch the wet things to the dryer ahead of the mildew setting in.... Oiy! Thank God Prairie Granny seems to be quite fond of that chore and helps me stay on top of it. She's like my laundry fairy! 

One thing I had to do was fix up the laundry room.  As you enter my front door, the laundry room and all it's mess is directly to your right.  It's also a walk through to my bedroom and bathroom. A very visible, high traffic spot. And it needed HELP!

 

 

I know some people really love wall paper borders.  I am not one of those people.  I put one up once in my oldest son's nursery and I did like it then.  But that was almost 8 years ago....

 

I also didn't want to keep the wire rack shelves. Maybe in a laundry that isn't right next to the front door it would be ok.  Like in a basement laundry.  But they felt too utilitarian for me....

 

So now....

 

 

 

This is the view you can see from the entry area.... 



You know how I'm a little obsessed with old things?  One of my very best friends gave me this old cabinet the other day.  (You know who you are and I love you to pieces. Even when you don't give me things!)  It was forgotten in a storage trailer for like a million years, covered in nasty, greasy dirt an filled with wasp nests.... but I LOVED it!  Some wasp spray and a good scrubbing and now it's the perfect cupboard to hold all the laundry soap and stuff!

 

 

The sign above the cupboard was a gift from a dear friend from the church used to attend before I moved to Geraldine. I sure miss her and the sign makes me smile. The piggy bank is the one Prairie Granny actually made for me when I was a baby.  Now it's the perfect place for all those coins we pull out of jeans before throwing them into the washer.

 

 

 

Another friend made this awesome coat rack out of barn wood and antique, wooden thread spools.  It's the perfect place to hang this old time scale that I still use to estimate the weight of alpaca fleece before I send it out for milling....

 

I didn't realize until I wrote this post that my laundry room is so filled with love!  But three of my friends and my mom all helped add to the character of my laundry room.  No wonder I actually love my laundry room now!

 

Bye for now,

B

 

Rainy Day Projects

Ok, so let me start by saying I am not an interior designer. Like, at all.  Not a title I'll ever claim.  But I do like my home and my farm to be a reflection of me and the life we lead.  I like things to be beautiful.  At least to whatever level I can pull off.  (Don't peek into the downstairs family room right now! Two, two year old tornados just hit it.) I don't like to spend a lot of money on many things and try to be as frugal as possible in my pursuit of a pleasant home. 

Today was a very cold, wet, soggy day in Geraldine.  Autumn has definitely set in.  So other than feeding and watering all the critters and making sure everyone looked happy, we've hung out inside.  That gave me some time to do a couple of fun things.  First, hired man Jim and I took down a chandelier from the other house and moved it over here.  The other house is now opening as an assisted living home so the lighting needed to be updated to suit senior living better. 

My room at the farm has been bugging me.... It felt too big and empty. Nice, but kind of lacking character.  I was even tempted to move into one of the smaller bedrooms downstairs that are cozier.  But that would be kinda crazy.... So I decided to quit whining and fix up my room!

I found this photo of what the room looked like when I bought the house....

This is how I had my room for a while.  Nice enough, but I decided the zebra rug was a bit crazy.  It's now in my closet and is very happy there.  It's also nice on my bare tootsies in the mornings.

 

 

 

I had taken some pretty cool photos of old barns, old branding irons, (probably my favorite photo ever) and one of my saddle.  I've had them printed and framed for a while but never got around to hanging them.... until today!



 

 

Now they make that huge empty wall look a whole lot cozier!  The room also desperately needed a better light fixture. I absolutely hate those standard fixtures that the home builders put in! They should be against the law in my opinion! Just kidding.... we already have way too many laws.

 

 

 



So the chandelier now hangs in the center of my bedroom and looks fabulous!

 

The last piece I need to scrounge for is the right dust ruffle for the bed.  Home is always a work in progress if ya ask me.  Some of my favorite things in here are the Boston Terrier pillow from Pottery Barn and the antique phone. You know me and old things, I can't get enough.

 

So now you know what this farmgirl does for entertainment on rainy days.... I'd rather putter around and figure out how to spruce something up than sit in front of the TV all day.  And of course rainy days are good for blogging too! 

 

Bye for now,

B

 



Homecoming!

As I have said before, kids are very important in this town.  Folks here know that they truly are the future.  Everything possible is done to support our kids and the school here.  Sports are also hugely important to the kids and the town.  Many of the kids know that sports are one of the best chances they have for a college scholarship and pursue it from grade school on.  So I'm sure you can imagine, Homecoming is a BIG day for the town of Geraldine. Yesterday was that day!

Everyone comes to town for the parade.

 

No Montana parade is complete without kids, horses and tractors....

The homecoming queens must've been cold!  It was only about 40 degrees yesterday morning....

Gotta love the Duck Dynasty float!

After the parade it was time for FOOTBALL!  The make up of the football team is interesting.  We didn't have quite enough kids to form a football team.  But neither did the neighboring town of Highwood.  So they worked together to form a co-op team called the "Rivals", because the two schools used to be rivals.  They now take turns hosting the games and practice at both schools. But that way they are able to have a complete, six man football team.

There aren't any official cheerleaders, but these girls did a pretty darn good job!

The boys won their homecoming game against the Box Elder Bears.  Forgive me that I don't know the exact score. I'm NOT a football expert whatsoever and I'll do better next time! But it was a good game and a very good day....

 

 

Bye for now,

B