October 2020 – Our Fall Photo Gallery

October 2020 – This time of the year in Minnesota can either be Heaven on earth or a great big ball of suck. (Usually it takes turns being both which is exactly what it did this year.) We’ve had snow storms throughout October some years and have also seen highs in the 80s other years. This year it was cool but a pretty much lovely month minus the snow storm we got hit by at the end of it! We had many of those perfect, shiny, fall days where the sunshine feels like liquid silver and the shadows are long and dark and the trees get to take their time turning in for the winter… And then a foot of snow landed on us… I have some catching up to do as I didn’t recap on all of the projects we completed throughout September in my last post.

When I said that our back entryway just kept growing into a bigger and bigger monster I had NO IDEA it was going to KEEP GROWING! (I’ve mentioned it several times on my to-do lists…)

First I was gonna turn it into a day bed/reading nook and replace the door with a far better insulated steel door (and new doggie door) and then I realized it was all wasted space and Lodi totally deserved a space of his own… Oh and then it seemed so weird to even HAVE an exterior door in Lodi’s space and it made WAY more sense to move the doggie door into my Workshop because it is really the one room of the house that can be cold all winter long… AND that would provide a great buffer to helping keep the rest of the house warm…

and THEN my brain just kept working on the situation because I seriously can’t help it…

It would have been fine to have just a doggie door in the wall in my workshop but THEN I realized I didn’t want to lose the exterior door on this side of the house and WOW it would be SO COOL to have an exterior door in my workshop!

I just keep making our lives more difficult…

…but it made SO MUCH sense.

We’ve hauled countless pieces of furniture and lumber and tools etc through the finished house to the workshop. An exterior door there would be IDEAL. It even FEELS like its meant to be because we’ll be putting the door where an old exterior entrance used to be – the concrete steps are still there so we wouldn’t even have to build those!

Unfortunately this means we’ll be tearing up the BRAND NEW siding we put up last fall… hacking through six inches of spray form AND I’ll have to move an outlet that’s in my workshop.

BUT ITS THE RIGHT COURSE OF ACTION DAMNIT!

October 2020 – I have great ideas but they can be totally exhausting…

So, officially: We’ve replaced the window with a new exterior door in the workshop (with a new doggie door in it) and we’ve removed the old door from Lodi’s space and replaced it with the window from the workshop. Blog posts will be coming out about all of it I promise!

Here’s a sneak peek of the destroyed workshop and new door along with the whole fall photo gallery!

It felt like no matter what I did this summer I just never got anywhere and everything took so much longer than normal…

I know, I need to be easier on us.

This is not a normal year for anyone and, quite frankly, with my mom getting sick I had a hell of a time getting motivated for things that just felt trivial in comparison… which was basically everything.

2020 felt like I was carrying an extra 100 pounds on my back.

By the end of September though we did finally get the main living space in the basement done – a project we’ve been working on for over 7 MONTHS.

Getting Lodi’s furniture out of the garage was an absolute must before winter so we could park our cars in it and that couldn’t happen until we got that basement living space completed.

(I am aware we could have just hauled his furniture down there WITHOUT completing the basement. But if we had done that we would have then had to haul it all back out again to finish the basement. SO, lets be honest here, we may have never finished the basement then…)

Between Lodi’s furniture and my own the basement is on its way to becoming a great theater/bar/exercise space! It’ll also be great for guests and it gave us some much needed long term storage as well.

(Seriously stoked to show you how its coming together. Here’s a sneak peek!)

October 2020: I was so excited to get the garage back that I danced in it!

We cleaned out the entire garage and gave it some serious organization. We hauled several furniture pieces and other big things to the dump and Lodi went through his stuff and took the opportunity to do some purging as well.

We also burned a huge pile of crap too because I am a wood hoarder and really need to break myself of that habit…

(The garage will totally be getting an updates post all about it before the end of this year!)

It was amazing.

The garage has been one big note of unorganized anxiety for me but this October 2020 it finally became my ZEN place again! Between an empty garage and a finished living space in the basement we increased our living “area” by over 1,200 square feet!

We hauled the privacy fence panels out of the way and over to where we will be putting them up next year. Yep, we failed at getting the expanded dog kennel up – there were other things that were just more important – I’m not even mad about it.

I am a summer child but every single autumn there is relief in making it to fall. My world gets smaller – somehow it just feels like there is less to worry about.

All summer long I’m working at all that must be done before winter.

The pellet stove is clean and running and a lovely comfort. 120 bags of pellets are stored and waiting. The deck and yard furniture are safely tucked away as are the hummingbird feeders.

The yard’s been mowed for the last time and the vegetable and flower gardens are tucked in until spring.

We have a barn full of winter hay stored for the horses, the tank heater is plugged in so their water doesn’t freeze, we moved the hose to the hanging spool in the garage for the winter and the bird bath/critter watering hole has been replaced with a heated dish so we can still give them fresh water all winter long.

With the basement complete and the garage cleaned out, we have plenty of room to park both vehicles. And our back entryway won’t be wasting so much heat ever again.

We finished what we needed to get done before winter.

October 2020 We made it.