Four Part Harmony

Well, it’s been a busy couple of weeks at the homestead. It continues to be busy, and as always, updating the blog tends to fall down the priority list pretty quickly if I let it. Here’s a few photos while I’ve got a minute.

We had Mary and Don (Grandma and Grandpa Newman) in town this past week. It was a very nice visit as always, and I think Anna is already missing having them here. This picture was taken last Saturday, at a tulip festival down south of Woodburn. The weather was really nice Saturday, and Don and I had essentially had to kick them out of the house (more on that later). Luckily, Nicki knew of this festival going on. It sounded like a lot of fun.

Here’s a really cute picture of Anna and Kadin at the Farmer’s Market prior to heading out to the tulip festival.

Here’s the reason that Don and I weren’t at the tulip festival or the farmer’s market. 24 new windows to replace our old crumbly wooden ones. It’s a long story how we got to the point of ordering 24 new windows, and if you stop by and care to hear it, I’ll tell it to you some time. Mostly it was due to the fact that we need to get our house painted, and the time, effort, and cost that was going to need to be put into repairing, scraping, and repainting the old ones seemed better spent on new windows that would provide us some energy efficiency as an added bonus.

Don got completely roped into this project (this always seems to happen when family comes to visit). Here he is on Friday, our first day of installing the windows. We got five in total on Friday, with our friend and friendly neighborhood window salesman Jason helping out and showing us how it’s done.

Saturday we worked in the main room, while Nicki, Mary, and Anna were out at the tulip festival. We had gotten the hang of getting them in pretty quickly, and at least half of the work was in keeping things clean inside and out. It took us all day Saturday, but we managed to finish the rest of the downstairs windows on Saturday.

Here’s me on Sunday. We managed to do all the upstairs windows on Sunday, 11 in total. We had the technique pretty much down at this point, and were only slowed down by the individual peculiarities of each window and situation. I was starting to feel pretty sore in my shoulders and my hands were pretty beat up by the end of the weekend..which I blame on the fact that I turned 31 on Friday (ok, not really…age is a state of mind after all).

We managed to get all the windows in, and now just have to finish up some trim work and some sill work outside. It was a massive undertaking, much moreso than I envisioned, but we are really excited to have them in. Nicki compared it to when she gets a new pair of glasses and realizes how clearly she can suddenly see. Also, they are nice and airtight (the old ones were not), and they slide up and down quite nicely.

Here’s a few more photos taken during the nice weekend weather.

A nice group photo of the chickens. It’s been a good year for dandelions this year in Portland.

Anna riding her “bike” in the backyard.

Anna driving a big old John Deere tractor at the tulip festival. Too funny.

We’re headed the beach this weekend for our annual spring getaway. See you all in a week or so!