Guuuuuys. Holy shit, what a week. There wasn’t a spare minute in the last few days to let you know what’s been going on around here other than some brief social media updates, and that’s because Sarah (you know, my DIY internet bestie– and occasional nemesis–from The Ugly Duckling House) came to stay at the farm for a few days and force me to finish a goddamn project already help me tile my upstairs tub surround.
WHAT.
I know, you thought I forgot about that bathroom… and you’re right. I did. And I intended to keep on forgetting about it until it got reallyeffingcold here again and I wanted to take a bath for the first time in four years, and then maybe I would have started tiling again. But Sarah got here Tuesday night and as I was giving her the grand tour of the house she stopped in the upstairs bathroom and was like, “OH HELL NO, we are finishing this shit before I leave.”
And I was like… can I take a nap first?
It’s been a really long and emotionally draining month, what with the film crew here (and putting on a big dinner for family and friends), and then trying pull together financing for making a big land purchase (before losing it at auction), on top of all the other required life activities like doing my job well, and making sure the animals are fed.
Oh, and I got this crazy idea that before Sarah showed up I should try to make the guest room in my house look a little less… well. A little less like this…
Nothing says “WELCOME TO THE FARM YOU’RE ABOUT TO GET AXE MURDERED” like a guest room straight outta the Bates Motel.
So, before Sarah got here, I painted, and bought some things (like this quilt and this bed) and…
Okay, it’s better. But this room still looks a little ridiculous because 1.) The bed ended up being A LOT lower to the ground than I anticipated, and 2.) I couldn’t find any appropriately-sized side tables. Plus the room needs curtains and some shit on the walls (not actual shit… yeah, I’m looking at you, chickens) and I need to do something with this mess…
BUT the nice thing about having another DIYer who lives in a perpetually under-construction house come and visit you is that they totally get it. DIYers have a no-judgement code about this stuff, and if Sarah had any issue about living in the middle of my mess for a few days, she sure didn’t show it.
We spent a lot of time talking about life and houses and dudes and power tools and how crazy-awesome it is that we live at a time where we just sort of toss these really honest and authentic stories about our lives and the work we do out into the world (via internet), and such amazing friendships and inspiration (and the occasional kick-in-the-pants to get things done) comes from it.
Sarah also taught me about a new app called Periscope that allows you to livestream whateverthehell you’re doing AND allows other people to ask questions and participate real-time. I’m highly skeptical every time bloggers jump on some new social-media platform (sometimes it feels like a mad-rush to be a part of “the next big thing” just to get more readers, regardless of whether or not it’s actually a good storytelling medium.) But, first of all, I already know and like Sarah (she’s younger and more hip than I am) so I trust her judgement on this stuff, plus give me a few beers and a video camera and ALL BETS ARE OFF, amirite?
(I’m the one on the left that looks like an effing goofball… Sarah is the one who looks fairly sane.)
So with Periscope you can view a livestream (and comment while it’s happening) OR it’s available to watch for 24 hours after it goes live… and after that all of the hilarity disappears into the ether, uh, apparently. I’m pretty sure our funniest livestream was Wednesday night, but that video has already disappeared… however if you want to see our tired faces you can check out last nights completely exhausted and somewhat incoherent discussion on Sarah’s feed until about 1AM Saturday by downloading the Periscope app and looking up @uglyducklingdiy.
I’m not sure if this is a thing I want to do regularly (or if anyone will think it’s actually interesting) but it got me thinking… specifically about the Ask An Expert chat I did about home improvement over on Lifehacker a while back and how hard it is to describe things real-time without being able to physically show pictures or draw things out. SO. I have an idea.
I always have an idea…
This Saturday (9/5) I’m going to do a Beer & Building Hour under my current Periscope handle (@kitliz). If you have any burning building questions, leave them in the comments and I’ll be sure to answer them OR join the Periscope chat tomorrow (which I think will be around 4:30 EST, but with all the things that go on around the farm and/or the amount of beer I hope to consume tomorrow, who the hell knows?) I’ll post to facebook, twitter, and insta before I go live…
We’ll see if this is any fun… if so, I’ll make it a weekly thing.
In the meantime, I’m so glad to have had the opportunity to spend quality time with Sarah and couldn’t be more thankful for the work she did on the spare bath…
Because it’s a far cry from what it looked like a year ago…
Ugh. I just gagged.
I’ll definitely have more updates soon, but this weekend I’m going to take a little time for rest and recovery and laying around in my hammock, because it has been one hell of a month…
And then I’m going to finish what Sarah started on that damn bathroom. I swear.
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