Now, where was I?

We still had our house in town for sale, and were living in the RV in the front yard at the ranch. We decided to take the rebuilding in stages.

The first stage was to tear it up. It took a whole year, while we were waiting for our house in town to sell, to demolish the old and start rebuilding the new.

It was sort of satisfying, but really sad too - we knew that the first owners of this house had built it them selves, evenings and weekends, and here we were, tearing it down. But it had to be done. The walls were infested with termites and twice, someone fell through holes in the floor.

Happy New Year Y'all!

Ok, so its been a wild and wonderful holiday season - We've been traveling and wassailing and eating and eating and I've gained a few of those old pounds back from the year of the "diet". They'll come off again in January. We still have a few Christmasses to go yet, so the stockings are still hung by the chimney with care, and the lights are still up on the front of the house, and the trees are still sparkly with ornaments and red glass balls and there are even still a few leftovers we haven't managed to polish off. I've been busy making tiles and sending them all over the world. I'm firing my last kiln load of the year today and will shut down the studio for two weeks. Etsy has been slowing down a lot with the merrymaking and it is a good time for us to go on holiday.

I'll be back in the swing of things soon, and will continue with posting our journey at the Shady B. Larry is working on the shower now and is making a lot of progress. I ordered the glass mosaic tile so I could get started on my part next week. I'm planning on finishing the tile for the kitchen while I am off too.
So stay tuned. There is SO much more to come.

And have a safe and Happy New Year - 2009 promises great and wonderful things - a year of PROSPERITY for all! Love and kisses, Rachel

check out my new shop!

Say it with a SMILE and a handmade TILE
www.tilesmile.artfire.com

The house in town

We had a great little house in town. One of those dreamy little houses in a dreamy little neighborhood. We thought it would sell the first week. It took a year to sell it! Here are a few pictures of our first home together.

RV life

Meanwhile we put an RV in the front yard and left our house in town all fixed up, ready to sell.

It took a year.

We lived in this RV for 18 months. Winters were very cold and summers were very hot. The front yard was our living room. We had a LOT of company! We cooked on the grill alot, even pancakes, and a picnic table served as our dining room. It was perfect. But I was ready to live in a house again. Six gallons of hot water just isn't enough. I guess I'm spoiled.

Demolition

Demolition begins.

This is very satisfying. However, it DID go on for quite a long time.

While we were waiting to sell our house in town so we'd have the cash to get started, we tore this old place up. Threw it away a dumpster load at a time. For two years, we filled our dumpster with this old house. We burned what we could, but there was a lot of stuff that we couldn't burn. The first thing to go was the old roof off the studio. I had to have a place to work so I could close the studio in town, so we began with the worst of the worst and completely rebuilt it. More on that later. First, the demo pictures.

a treasure lost and found

Oh, today is SUCH a great day.
Wonderful weather, cool and crisp this morning, the sun is shining.
And I found a treasure.

While cleaning out the garage, unpacking boxes that have been stored away for the past four years as we've worked on this old place, I found a box of my cookbooks. Amongst them, was a hand typed book, about 40 pages or so, compiled by my late Aunt Margy, of all her favorite recipes.

There are some great recipes in there, ones that I plan to use for sure - and she wrote funny little notes along with them about the people she got them from and how she might have changed them up a bit. But one of them is a recipe that I thought for sure lost and gone forever.

Pickled beets. The recipe was given to her by Aunt Eva, my pawpaw's sister, who is delightful and living still at 90 something in a wonderful old folks home in Denison Texas. When we visit her she asks the same questions over and over again, and tells the same stories too - about things that happened to her when she was a girl. She has the same sparkle in her eye that my pawpaw had in his. I kinda hope that I have it too.

Anyway, I'm sure it has to be the very same beet recipe that my meemaw used to make the most mouth watering sugar beets in the world. I've not had them since she died - I had one old jar of them that I kept in the frig and put canned beets in the juice for about a year after she died, until it just wasn't the same anymore.

Meemaw said that beets made your cheeks rosy, and I believe her.