Encouraging Hearts & Home 11.22.18

Posted on November 22, 2018 by Jennifer

Welcome to Encouraging Hearts & Home!

The Encouraging Hearts & Home Bloggers

Join your Encouraging Hearts & Home Co-Hosts each week for encouragement and support for your heart & your home. We hope to provide a space that builds each other up and lends a helping hand along the way. With all the negativity in the world, let’s shine a positive light!

***Each week, our co-hosts will each choose 10 of our favorite links, along with the most clicked link, and pin them to our Encouraging Hearts & Home Pinterest board.

The most clicked post from last week’s Blog Hop was:

Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Brownies from A Nest In The Rocks

Screenshot 2018-11-21 at 7.54.20 AM

How to Link Up

  • Use the form below to share your posts this week, and maybe you’ll discover some new ideas from all the fabulous links!
  • Please share only your family friendly posts with us!
  • Please only link up images that you have the rights to use.
  • By linking up, you agree that if your blog post is selected to be featured on any of our hosts’ blogs, we can use an image from your post with a link back to your post.

Other nice things you can do

  • Follow and/or subscribe to your host’s blog.
  • Visit a few other bloggers and show them your support. We all love getting comments, and who knows what inspiration you may find? Be sure to share the love–that’s what a blog hop is all about!
  • If you are interested in co-hosting, contact Anne at anne@mylearningtable.com

Continue reading →

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The Tale of an Energy Audit

Posted on November 21, 2018 by Jennifer

Our electric coop does an awesome thing, for $100 you can have an energy audit done on your home to see where you can make improvements in energy usage. Earlier in the fall, we decided we should complete an audit. We knew that our home had very little insulation and that there were lots of places we could improve but we wanted to know where to spend our money first. You know, where could we get the most bang for our buck.

img_5810 Continue reading →

Posted in Building project, In The Kitchen, Our Farm | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Say Goodbye to the Kitchen Hydrant

Posted on November 19, 2018 by Jennifer

Our home was originally built as a barn, and then transformed into a hunting lodge. While we love our farm and home (for the most part anyway. lol), there were some things that we didn’t love so much. Like the hydrant in the kitchen. Yep there was a hydrant in the kitchen. Oh and some other, well, oddball things like when we moved in the kitchen sink was actually in a small room off the kitchen. That small room was also home to a toilet. You know so if you had to go while washing supper dishes just turn around and sit right down. While the hunting lodge had plenty of bedrooms, it lacked closets. (See why I needed an armoire?) There also was very little (and I mean VERY LITTLE) insulation in our home. The first winter, I thought we might go broke paying the electricity bill for running the baseboard heaters in the bedrooms.

So we have continually worked to make our home, well, our home. The toilet was taken out of the small room, which will eventually be my walk in pantry. The kitchen sink was transitioned out into the kitchen in a very temporary set up. (I built a frame with 2″x4″ lumber and put a countertop on it with a sink in it over the drain in the middle of the kitchen. The water lines were taken out of the little room along the ceiling and then dropped down to the sink. It wasn’t fancy but it’s been serving it’s purpose until we could go deeper on remodeling the kitchen.

One thing that had to go was that hydrant! But we knew that it would be quite an undertaking to take that thing out. After all, hydrants are typically buried 3′-4′ deep. Well November 2018 marked the last days of that hydrant in the kitchen.

img_6634 Continue reading →

Posted in Building project, In The Kitchen | 2 Comments

Encouraging Hearts & Home 11.15.18

Posted on November 15, 2018 by Jennifer

Welcome to Encouraging Hearts & Home!

The Encouraging Hearts & Home Bloggers

Join your Encouraging Hearts & Home Co-Hosts each week for encouragement and support for your heart & your home. We hope to provide a space that builds each other up and lends a helping hand along the way. With all the negativity in the world, let’s shine a positive light!

***Each week, our co-hosts will each choose 10 of our favorite links, along with the most clicked link, and pin them to our Encouraging Hearts & Home Pinterest board.

The most clicked post from last week’s Blog Hop was:

Screenshot 2018-11-14 at 12.20.33 PM

How to Link Up

  • Use the form below to share your posts this week, and maybe you’ll discover some new ideas from all the fabulous links!
  • Please share only your family friendly posts with us!
  • Please only link up images that you have the rights to use.
  • By linking up, you agree that if your blog post is selected to be featured on any of our hosts’ blogs, we can use an image from your post with a link back to your post.

Other nice things you can do

  • Follow and/or subscribe to your host’s blog.
  • Visit a few other bloggers and show them your support. We all love getting comments, and who knows what inspiration you may find? Be sure to share the love–that’s what a blog hop is all about!
  • If you are interested in co-hosting, contact Anne at anne@mylearningtable.com

Continue reading →

Posted in Encouraging Hearts & Homes | Tagged | Leave a comment

Repurposing an Entertainment Center into an Armoire

Posted on November 13, 2018 by Jennifer

One of the dilemmas that comes with living in a home that was originally designed as a barn and then later as a hunters’ lodge, is that there aren’t any closets. No not one. I could only take that for so long before I had to get more creative.

I think this entertainment center is the only new piece of furniture that we have ever purchased. When we had been married a few years, we combined all our Christmas and birthday money to get it. We stopped using it as an entertainment center a few years ago, but obviously hadn’t gotten rid of it. So I decided to turn it into a armoire.
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The first thing that I needed to do was replace the back. The original back was just basically a thick cardboard type stuff. I replaced it with Lauan plywood. Then I painted the entire piece with gray milk paint.

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I purchased a metal rod and rod hangers from our local hardware store. You can’t really see the bar in the picture below but it’s there.

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I wanted it to look rustic and have part of the dark show through the milk paint. Overall, I like the way it turned out. I guess I failed to take a picture when it was finished and the hardware was put back on the doors but it’s full now so I won’t be getting a finished pic. 😉

I hope this inspires you to be able to repurpose something you have around your home into something more useful.

Blessings,

Jennifer

Posted in Building project, Repurposing | Tagged , | Leave a comment