I am taking on yet another household project here at the old farm. I have straightened and cleaned the sun room. I laid out a rug that John's mom gave us over six months ago. It has cat hair on it and will have to be repeatedly vaccuumed before it can really be used. I am not sure how to go about cleaning it other than vacuuming it because it is some kind of fancy thing, although it couldn't be that fancy after all, she did hand it down. It is a lovely blue and it covers most of the room which is good insulation as the only thing separating the ground from the room is some boards and a pitiful amount of carpet with no pad or foundation or anything other than cold air that you can feel through the pitiful carpet. So the rug will put another layer between us and the outside world. I am not sure what all will go out there other than my books for now. I would like for it to be a nice sitting room, but as of yet it has no power and no heat. So that will make the project long.

I am also working on the opposite side of the house on the cabinets. They were built in the fifties. If I could describe the color it would be nicotine yellow. Bleh. I have been given some good suggestions on what to do with them. I am going to paint some boards first to see what I like best before just painting and having to redo my work. I am looking at an olive green with a glaze. I am looking at a "mountain air" blue. I am looking at a high white gloss with a hydrangea blue glaze. I don't know what I like best yet. I still have to clean and scratch/sand them. The sanding is to give the new paint something to stick to and to eliminate residue the cleaning did not get up. You'd think you could just sand them, but ah, not the case according to experts. I call them experts because they have done this for a living.

Hopefully once the cabinets are done I can move onto the walls. That is a much more in-depth project than I am willing to do while I am in school. Maybe that will be a good spring break project. The kids at school are already talking about trips to Destin, going home to work for a week or going skiing in whereever. Must be nice to have money to travel. I will just stay home and keep working on me. That way I can get to a place where I can travel too one day.

Turns out that you don't have to give something up for Lent. Sometimes you can just give something for Lent (thank you Sherry for the clarification). So this Lent season I am not giving up anything, I am going to give myself a home. I have been working slowly but surely on it for a while. The back room is now officially a clean, well organized closet. The kitchen is a place where we can move and eat and live. It is cleaned and organized. It is more oriented for just me and John and if we like a set of guests. John redid the bathroom. It is so much nicer than when I first moved in. It has matching fixtures, a stainglass window and has been repainted. He also added a pretty medicine cabinet mirror instead of the old, rusted mirror where the frame of it was screwed into the wall. I will be glad when we have the sunroom at our disposal too. Then we will have three rooms available to us instead of two, a closet and a bathroom. The mudroom is the last option I have to adjust. It will take several men to fix. We have a six foot freezer in there with NOTHING IN IT. It is just plugged in, sucking up electricity. I would like to ditch it and put in an antique bakers table that we have. I would not bake with it, but I would store laundry stuff in it and it would give me a place to fold clothes. It would free up some space to put in a pretty antique bench so as to sit and take your muddy shoes off too. It is also one of those rooms that is like our computer room when I was growing up. It has a purpose for the use of a computer, but if you are ever looking to just stick something somewhere, it is a great room for that too. I would rather the mudroom live up to its name. Ahh....life at the farm.

This I give to myself: building a home I can call ours instead of his. More than anything, building a home instead of just some place to lay down. I guess if I am going to be here, in this shack in the valley of the mountains, in the middle of the pasture, I should make it a place that would be honoring and cherishing of not just myself but a place for God.

Who would ever know that in the game of MASH, I would end up with the greatest man ever, four cars, a motorcycle, a shack, potential children later on, and a job as a student? Ah, such is life.