The destruction of the kitchen

Now that the garage is done, the next step is the kitchen. First, a little background. When we bought this house, it was site unseen (well, at least the inside). We bought it in a foreclosure auction on the county courthouse steps nearly 6 years ago. It was two months after the sale when we were actually able to look in the house itself. Keep in mind I was also pregnant and hormonal at the time. Well, I took a look at the kitchen and about burst into tears. It was UGLY!! Still is ugly. Paneling everywhere, ugly yellow and brown countertops and floors. I'm sure back in the 60's and 70's it was state of the art. But I wanted to stay in my almost new doublewide trailer with the nice white and cheerful kitchen (and walkin closets, and huge master bath with a shower and seperate garden tub).

So, that brings us to where we are now: finally starting to remodel this house a little. We have had a bit of controversy about it. First we were going to gut the whole kitchen and start over. But new cabinets cost money, even the cheap ones. We were also going to have a contractor do it (different guy than the one that did our new doors on the garage), but after waiting a year on him, we have decided to just tackle the job ourself. We ruled out cabinets. We can strip and restain and update the hardware ourself on these. But the paneling and soffit's gotta go. We ordered new countertops at Lowe's last week. Unfortunatly, they won't be in for 8 weeks. And the floor guy comes out tomorrow to measure the floor for new linolium.

First to come down was the soffit in the kitchen

when the original owners put it up there, it was not meant to come down.

And just as I suspected, after tearing that down meant I would also be painting the ceiling. But it sure did open the place up.

North wall, Before

and after

then came the snack bar. You can see in previous photos that it wasn't the same height as the rest of the counters. Jeff is in the process of building a cabinet to go here (there wasn't one before).

Stay tuned, there will be more coming soon!

Remodeling the Garage

I haven't posted in a while because we have been BUSY! Besides the girls being on 2 different basketball teams (both requiring practices and games) and them cheering (and me coaching them), and me getting the flu and laryngitis. But we have also been remodeling.

The garage was too small for any of our pickups. And when I found a rattlesnake in the garage last summer, we decided it was time to finally enclose the garage. We had a local contractor put the doors in, and we decided to do the rest ourselves. Which was an adventure. Neither of us have really done anything like this.

Of course, Jeff got to buy new tools for the job. A miter saw and a wet saw to cut tiles with. A guy always needs an excuse for more toys, right?

Before. Check out the holes in the wall on the right. The previous owner somehow managed to fit a car in here, but wrecked out the walls with her car door.

Back corner, before.

Jeff had to do some mudding work to the textured walls. For some odd reason, the previous owners had textured the walls AFTER installing the garage door. So he did some patching up.

Painting the ceiling

Drew had to help put the beadboard up. We decided that bead board would be the best way to cover up those holes from the car door. And we really liked the look of beadboard from my mom's breakfast room in her house.

Chance had to get in on the act and help a bit, too.

Putting down the tile floor. This was our first adventure into tiling. Jeff did most of the floor.

But I had to help a little bit because Jeff was so sore from doing 2/3 of it.

Then I got to do the grout.

Floor after all the grout in. The next part was harder than the actual grouting, scrubbing the excess grout off the floor. By the time I got done late Friday night, I was give out.

And here it is all done! Jeff got the baseboards down and we gave the floor one last mop.

Getting moved in. Jeff's music corner. He has a desk on the other side of this corner.

My desk.

We put the love seat out here, too.

We are very happy with the results, and now that we have done this ourselves, we are ready to tackle the next job: THE KITCHEN!!!! Stay tuned...

Branding Cattle

The one drawback about closing down the old site was that all the old content (7 or 8 years of accumulated stuff) went away with it. So periodically, I'm going to put a post up that was actually a page from the other site. Just a bit of info about us (our work, projects, vacations, kids, whatever I feel like subjecting you to). There should be a record of it in the sidebar somewhere (look under vacation, or farm, or something like that. Sorta like a table of contents).

Today, we are branding cattle (well, no. Not TODAY. That's just what I'm going to show you today).

This here is what we heat the branding irons in. It's connected to a propane bottle (not in the picture). Branding is an important part of ranching. It identifies your cattle from someone else's, for one. Say a fence is down (or some idiot guy doesn't fix his fences and his cows are ALWAYS getting out and breaking into OUR pastures and mingling with OUR cows). You gotta have someway to tell them apart. You also must have cows branded in order to sell them, at least in New Mexico you do. You also can't sell cows that have a fresh brand. They must be 2-3 weeks old or so (the scab from the brand will have peeled off). This also deters rustlers from stealing cattle. Because they don't want to have to feed them and house them for 3 weeks waiting for that brand to peel off.

There are a couple of different ways to brand cattle. There is the old fashioned way (which is more work, but I think more fun). Everyone gets up at 4am. And when I say everyone, I mean your neighbors, uncles, cousins and other folks get up at 4am, saddle and load their horses in trailers, then drive them out to your place. By 5am they arrive with the horses, go way out into the pastures, find all the cattle, and herd them up to a big pen or two (usually they try to seperate the calves from the mamas). Then a one or two guys will remain on their horses and ROPE a calf, drag it away from the other cows. A couple of strong cowboys will then catch the roped calf, throw him to the ground, and the calf is swarmed by a bunch of people, each with a different job. One is castrating, one branding, one dehorning, one vaccinating, one ear tagging (varies from ranch to ranch). The next week we go help the neighbor out with his cattle. But anymore, everyone around here does it another way.

This is a branding chute. And we don't even use the horses anymore. Our cows are "trained" so that when they hear the feed truck, the come a'runnin'!! Gotta be the feed truck. You can go out there in a regular pickup and they won't even look at you. But the FEED truck (in our case, a 1986 F-250), they KNOW that sound!! We can also use a 4-wheeler to find any that wandered off (but that doesn't happen with our cows. They want that FEED!).

We also have a pretty big setup of pens by the house. A few big ones, some smaller ones, gates, chutes, runs. We can put them all in one big pen, then seperate them out (calves from mamas). All the calves are then in one pen with a narrow run that they line up single file.

Here is Jeff's dad, Don. That stick in his hand is a cattle prod. It gives the cows a little shock to get them moving thru the run and into the chute. Sometimes they get a little stubborn (think they know what's coming?)

Here is a good view of the chute. As soon as the cows head gets thru a hole in the front, we trap him/her in there and squeeze the chute shut. The cow can't go forward or backward, or lie down or anything. You can fit a pretty good sized cow in this chute. For really small calves, we have a smaller chute. It's down a different run. On this day, we didn't have any small ones.

The bars will fold down two at a time for easy access to whatever part of the body you apply your brand to. Brands are registered with the state, so you have to do it the same each time.

There is also a part near the bottom that folds down for easy access to a bull calf's "manly" areas. Because he won't be a bull no more. Nope, time for him to become a steer. We used to just use a pocket knife and cut them off. Some people save them (the testicles), take them home and fry 'em up. AKA Rocky Mountain Oysters. And to tell you the truth, I think they are pretty tasty. But, the Essary family doesn't do that. Now we use a bander. There are different kinds of banders. Some are nothing more than a small, really thick rubber band that's put around the base of them. We have a SmartBander, which is a little different than that. It's not supposed to be as traumatic on the calf and something to do with hormones. In a week or two, they just fall off.

And while the calf is in the chute, we can do other things, like dehorn, vaccinate, ear tag, put some wormer on them. We do not use horomones, though.

Oh, great. I'm caught. Hey, wait a sec! What are you doing with that hot thing!!??

OUCH!!!!

Actually, it only hurts for a second (well, I'm assuming. They don't seem to be bothered by it once you done. Having never been branded myself, I guess I really can't speak for them). This is our brand.

Then they are all turned back out to their mamas, and it's like nothing ever happend. We have such a small operation (50 head), we can easily do all our calves in a day with just two people. But sometimes it's fun to invite some friends over anyway to help. Drink some beer, tell some dirty jokes, do a little work. And be rest assured that the wife has some big meal cooked up at the house. Like a big BBQ briscut, some mashed taters or tater salad, buns, broccoli casserole, and homemade ice cream to go with some peach cobbler. Except that this wife likes to be down where the action is and doesn't quite go that far. But Jeff's mother does! The past few years with little kids underfoot I've been at the house more, but soon, they will be old enough to be down there and not be in the way.

Here's some pictures of our cows I took the other day while we were driving around the ranch.

Ha! I'm a horse. You aren't going to get near ME with those hot things!!! (actually, many ranches do brand their horses. We just choose not to)