Summer kitchen

We’ve been keeping busy around here. There is still quite a few things to plant in the garden, but there’s still plenty of time. We’ve set out tomatoes, sweet peppers, sweet potatoes, and broccoli plants and planted some peanuts, squash, cucumbers, and beans. That’s not counting the potatoes, peas, onions, and salad greens we planted earlier. We’ll be planting more squash, summer and winter varieties, more beans, okra, corn, etc. as we’re able. It rained today, so we’ll have to wait for the garden to dry out a bit. I also planted nearly half an acre of corn last evening. Today’s rain should help it germinate quickly.

I have a friend who is coming over here to work on house-building-related things with me a couple of days a week now. That helps to keep me on task so that we can get things done. There are so many different projects to do that it can be difficult to focus specifically on just one. Some things get put off when something else demands attention. With Jon coming over to work, I’m forced to focus my energy and efforts on some specific projects that need completed.

This week we worked on the summer kitchen. We’ve been using the wood cook stove on the porch quite regularly since I set it up a few weeks ago. Our plans were to enclose the porch, making it into a summer kitchen.

We built walls (only needed on two sides) on Monday. On Wednesday, we put on siding, screened window openings, put trim around the window openings on the outside, and reglazed some windows. I have seven windows that a friend gave me two or three years ago that have been stored in the barn that we’re using for the summer kitchen. We hung one window – the others will be installed in the coming week.

With the walls and screen, a lot of bugs will not have easy access. That’s a good thing. I have to do something about the leaks in the roof. The roof has leaked since I put it on when I built the porch a few years ago. I’m pretty sure that most of the leaks originate in the junction between the porch roof and the house roof. The shallow pitch of the roof also has an effect. I’ll attempt to rectify the leak situation soon. With the rain today, we didn’t have rain blow in the windows, just leaks from the roof in a few places, especially when the rain was pouring down hard.

We acquired the sink and cabinet from a friend who removed it from someone else’s house. It’s a single sink with double drain boards and a white metal cabinet. I haven’t hooked up water to it yet, but I’m going to. We’ll run the drain outside and use the water for irrigating Anne’s flower garden.

You can see my clothes hanging up to dry in the last photo. I got soaked doing chores this morning. I had to chase the neighbor’s cows (10 Holsteins and a calf) off of our property (I hope he fixes that fence sometime) while it was pouring down rain. Then, I set up some more paddocks for our cows since I was already wet.

We’re already pleased with our summer kitchen. It’s going to work out quite nice.

The kitchen floor: gettin’ rid of ugly

When we bought our farm, the only “livable” space was an old mobile home. It’s UL listed according to the 1972 standards. It was dirty, dark, and smelled of mothballs when we first saw it. It has evidence of roof leaks and leaks around windows. It’s an old mobile home.

We’ve done things to make it more livable over time. We removed the brown shag carpet from the living room. And, the original green carpet that was under that. Then, we patched places where the floor was rotted out near the walls and put down laminate flooring. That made the living room much better.

The next room we tackled was a bedroom. It had the original green carpet. In the corner of the room, the carpet was about the only thing keeping things from falling through to the nether regions under the house. We removed the old, nasty, dirty, disgusting (add your own adjectives here) green carpet, patched holes and rotted places in the subfloor, and then put down laminate. We also added some big windows to the room.

Later, we installed laminate in the hallway and remodeled the bathroom, creating a small half bath off of the bedroom. These too received new flooring.

The one room that still had the original flooring was the kitchen. It needed replaced, but I was reluctant to do so because it meant moving everything out, including the heavy wood cookstove. The old linoleum was a “lovely” gold and green color with a fascinating pattern designed to excite the senses and provide cover for dirt hiding thereon. It was also rapidly deteriorating as pieces of it were wearing off.


The thing that motivated me to replace the floor was a leak under the kitchen sink. One of the housings on our reverse osmosis water filter developed a crack. Before we noticed it, much water had leaked and had saturated the subfloor under the sink. It should be noted that the subfloor in this lovely manufactured house is nothing more than particle board, a material that dissolves into nothingness when it becomes wet.

Rather than have the horror of someday soon watching someone washing dishes disappear through the floor along with the sink, I decided to fix the problem. While I was at it, it seemed appropriate to replace the ugly linoleum with something better – laminate in an oak pattern.

My dad helped me complete the job. It took us two days and involved taking everything out of the kitchen and then tearing out the gold & green linoleum. Once it was removed, we cut out the bad sections of the floor and replaced them with something solid (new boards). Once the floor was repaired, we laid the laminate flooring. What an improvement!