If you have been following the blog or my Facebook page, then you know that we have been working on various home remodeling projects here - including (but certainly not limited to) - replacing our white wall-to-wall carpet throughout the downstairs with porcelain wood-look plank tile.  

Downstairs includes our master bedroom. And once we had pulled up the old carpet, it was completely necessary to take the opportunity to repaint as well. The original walls were a mossy green - which I updated to a more muted bronze months ago.

We started laying our tile in the bedroom at the beginning of July. I will be honest: I thought we would have been done with the entire project by now. But we had a bit of a setback in having purchased and used the wrong mortar for the job when starting out - resulting in having to take up and reset a lot of previously laid tile. And there is also the problem which will never go away: my choice of tile.

Porcelain wood-look plank tile (6" x 24"):  A few things you should know (that we did not know when we decided to use it.)  First, porcelain is very hard and difficult to cut - a decent quality tile saw is absolutely imperative if you want to finish tiling with porcelain within a generation.  Also - as we learned the very hard and tearful way following our wrong-mortar fiasco - the 24" sides mean that plank-style tile is always considered a large format tile - no matter how narrow the planks may be (purchase the appropriate mortar).  Everything else is concerning the relative dimensions of the tiles.  And I do mean relative.  The tiles are not the same thickness.  They are not the same overall size.  They are not perfectly square - some curve significantly.  They are not a consistent thickness throughout the tile.  Many have a substantial bow to them and will not set flat on the floor (something you have to make up for with some creative mortar beds).  All of this means that it is impossible to get a perfectly consistent grout line or a perfectly straight line on long runs of tile.  The stuff is great if you start out with the idea in your head that you want a rather random and rustic look.  (Fortunately, that's exactly what I wanted.)  If not, you will surely lose your mind.

We have officially finished the bedroom - which looks fantastic.  No regrets!  Even though it took at least six weeks longer than we had anticipated.  We now have somewhere comfortable to sleep so that we can rest up and conquer the rest of the downstairs floors.

We have begun laying out the tile for the remaining hallway and into the foyer.  I am a little anxious about the incredibly long runs that have to happen from the front door to the back of the living room and we are hoping that enough planned randomness will compensate for less than perpendicular lines... Besides dark (black!) grout covers a multitude of sins.

Now I have to stop talking about it and get to work - I hear Dave mixing a bucket of mortar as I type.  

As I sit here at the laptop this afternoon, there are far too many tabs open in my browser at the moment.  Email, Facebook, this blog, articles to read, t-shirt designs, photo albums, homeschool planners... It's all over the place.  I have just as many lists of things to do and paperwork to go through and books to read scattered on the table next to the laptop.

It does not seem possible that we will ever complete the various tasks before us... There is not enough time.  There is not enough energy.  There is not enough determination or concentration or motivation.  Impossible.  Yeah. I'm a little overwhelmed today.

When things get overwhelming, I have to step back and look at what we HAVE accomplished rather than melting down over what still lies ahead.  For my sanity.

So what have we done this year so far?  Here's a list of major accomplishments for 2019 in no particular order. 

We started out 2019 with new doors as the priority.  At the time, we thought this would be an easy and quick thing to check off the larger to-do list.  We were very wrong.  It took months to get the proper doors ordered... and that was after having to choose different doors more than once... and then even longer to get them installed.  The end result is well worth it and we have finally all adapted to not having to put hang the door handle back on the door after having opened it.  Bonus - our house is much more energy efficient without the daylight-leaking gaps around the doors. Imagine that.  Also, this was the first big step toward making the place really feel like ours for the first time in five years.

Emily's gosling production this year turned out to be much better than we had anticipated.  For a while there we were knee-deep in adorable goslings.  Although I do not have the exact number before me at the moment, I know that we sold over 30 of the little fluffballs before we finally decided to keep those we had left for our own flock.  We currently have 28 geese and ganders of varying ages running free around the place and wreaking havoc.  Never a dull moment.

Then you obviously have never followed us when we are working on one of our projects before.  Just so you know what to expect from now on, I shall provide a sort of flowchart of steps that we go through whenever we are working on anything.

We have laid tile before so we were pretty confident going into this last weekend.  We were both slow to realize that something was wrong, however.  I guess both of us were thinking that it had been a while and we were rusty at the mechanics of mortar and tile.  I admit that I complained a lot more than Dave.  Mostly I wanted to know why the pre-mixed mortar we were using had the consistency of hot toothpaste.  I was not polite about it at all.  It was sticky, messy, and impossible to spread with the  trowel.  It was on my shoes and in my hair...  It made me cranky. But we used it anyway.  A whole bucket of it... and then a little more.

I haven't had a moment to breathe, let alone blog, for the last couple of weeks.  Still, the thought of empty blog space sitting out here on the internet haunts me and I feel compelled to sit and write something just to make the tiny bell inside my mind stop ringing for a while.

This is our fifth year here at LeChat Noir Farm in Salina, but we have never gotten around to most of the home improvement projects that were needed when we first moved in.  We focused our energy on building a barn (and an apartment for our older boys) when we first arrived.  Then we turned our attention to fences and shelters - as we were starting out with exactly zero and though we wanted to free-range the animals .. our neighbors probably would not have appreciated that much free-ranging going on.  

Just as we reached the point of having enough in order to fix things that needed to be fixed in our own living space, Dave was laid off from his job in Tulsa.  He moved away for work temporarily while looking for a new job close to home.  Temporarily turned out to be two years.  Which, I suppose in the grand scheme of things, is actually temporary - but hardly feels so to a mere mortal such as myself.  Needless to say, everything was put on hold for those two years while the kids and I worked to just maintain the place mostly on our own.  Improvement ​ was out of the question.