Good Advice

My great friend, Rebecca, gives really good advice. Having recently done a big remodel on a 70s house bought from a member of the older generation, she had loads of good advice. But this tidbit is the most profound of all.

Remember that this is not your dream house.

She is so wise. This week, I had to give up on my dream of radiant floor heating throughout the house. *sigh*. I know some of you are saying, well, duh! But, I just really thought it could happen with us replacing the flooring anyway… but we finally got some real numbers and those, combined with the extra stuff we were thinking about (moving the basement arrangement, raising the door frames, re-ducting the A/C…), it just wasn’t feasible.

I’m pretty comfortable with it now. I’m no longer worried our renovations might price us out of our market. Plus, I’m comfortable with the skill level of all the DIY projects remaining. But, one day…

As a compromise, I will be getting radiant heat in the bathrooms (with those electrical pads that don’t raise the floor and look super easy to install!).

We’re almost done with the planning stages and might start on some demo upstairs soon… !!!

In the meantime, we’ve been renovating the greenhouse. We’re cleaning it out and preparing it to hold the potted plants for the winter. Rob also is figuring out how he wants to do the aquaponics (we plan to have a fish tank! – fresh fish, anyone?)

As part of that process, yesterday we did one of the more disgusting things either of us has ever done. In an effort to rid ourselves of the gross, yet effective composters – the maggots – we took on a daunting task.

We separated the worms from the maggots. Hands covered in muck, Rob imagined that this was one of those gross medieval era jobs – picking worms from the muck. It really wasn’t that bad until we got down to the details. Worried (and rightly so) that baby maggots would be impossible to separate without washing the worms, we each took a handful of worms and slowly and methodically rinsed them, picking out the clean worms and placing them in their new home.

It took about two hours.

Later that night, when I closed my eyes, the picture etched into my eyelids was that of a writhing ball of earthworms wriggling in my hand. I guess the experience was a little traumatizing…

You should be glad we didn’t take pictures.

But here’s one of our first ideas to separate the worms:

We thought if we put a handful of worms in water, they would swim to the top and we could easily transfer them cleanly.

They did not.

But hopefully now we’ll have a much more pleasant compost bin!