My horrible, no good, very bad days
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If you were to simply look at the Life on Misty Acres Facebook page, Twitter account, or Instagram account, it might be easy to assume that real life on a homestead is always wonderful and fulfilling. I will say, that for the most part, living on Misty Acres is dream fulfilling; and I don’t regret our move out here at all. When things go wrong on a homestead; they can go really wrong, really fast.
I think that so many times with social media and the internet it is really easy to only show what is good in our lives and omit everything imperfect, messy, and hard. I often look at a social media page and find myself quickly thinking “Wow their life looks really great!” or “How is their house so clean all the time?” Then I remind myself it is natural to want to only talk about the good, the fun, and the exciting. It’s easy to always show the bright side of life and sweep the dark side under the rug. Well, that’s just not how life works, for anyone; and that is especially true here on Misty Acres. In the spirit of trying to be real and transparent about life on Misty Acres, I thought I would share some of the dark side stories that we have had to deal with in the last week.
If you follow us on Instagram or Facebook you would know that we have removed the carpet that was in our dining room (yes there was white carpet in our dining room). The project had its own complications; when we pulled the carpet, what we thought we would find was a hundred year old hardwood floor. We did find a hardwood floor, but we also found places where original walls used to be with no hardwood flooring in those areas. We ended up pulling up about half of the floor as carefully as possible and reinstalling it. It turned out well; but it was a much bigger job than we expected and took a lot longer as well. If you have ever remodeled a home that you live in, you know how disruptive that can be. Furniture in the wrong place, tools all over, and dust everywhere; remodeling can be tough. We couldn’t wait to finish our floor and put our home back together; especially as we were about to leave for five days, and had someone else living in our home while we were gone. We were definitely feeling the project pressure!
On Friday I called Lindsay on my lunch. She was telling me that there was some water in the basement and how she thought it was coming from the basement refrigerator. I told her not to worry about it and I would figure it out when I got home. She told me later that it was a quite a bit of water and she wasn’t sure where it was coming from and that maybe it was coming from outside since we had about three days of rain. When I got done with work that day I had a text message from Lindsay saying she thought we needed a sump pump and sent me a few pictures of all of the water. Not a big deal pumps fail all the time, so I bought a new pump and a rubber coupler before I went home. I got home and there was quite a lot of water filling up the basement. I had to hook the new pump up to a pool hose and run it out the basement door just to drain the water low enough in the basin to remove the old pump. I had to keep a utility pump running while I installed the new pump because after three days of rain the basin was filling so fast that I couldn’t work without the water rising above where I was working. I got the new pump installed after spraying myself in the face with our untreated rusty water twice with the full force of a 3/4 horsepower pump. Needless to say we had a huge, wet, rusty mess to clean up.
I worked the next day until 7pm, but I got to work on the floor for a few hours and it was the start of my vacation. Things were looking good.
Sunday morning was cold, rainy, and dreary a perfect day to stay inside and work on the floor. We had just gotten out of bed and my son was knocking on our bedroom door telling us a man was at our house. I came downstairs to find a distant neighbor on the deck telling my kids directions. I went outside to find out one of the horses we board for an Amish family had gotten out, and was about a mile away. Lindsay, my oldest son, and I grabbed a lead rope, a bucket of grains, and a lariat (lasso) and jumped in the truck to find a horse. We drove around in the area where the neighbor had found him. The horse was an unbroken second year colt we call Stallion (the Amish don’t name their horses until they train them). I was not sure how we were going to get him home but luckily he seemed a little lost and scared so he was happy to see us and followed me home with the bucket of grains without an issue. By the time we got him back into the pasture the rain had become snow, we would have to mend the fences tomorrow. We had missed church by that time so I decided to get to work on the floor. I was making good progress sanding and at about 8 pm Lindsay stopped me and told me someone was at the door and they had almost hit a horse. We threw on our boots and coats and ran outside. Stallion and a draft horse,who we call Drafty (a very clever name), had gotten out and were running at a canter down the road. Keep in mind, it was pitch black outside by then and the horses are black running down the center of a fairly busy county road. I corralled the remaining horses and Lindsay went after the two runaways. Lindsay was able to get the runaways to turn themselves around and run the opposite direction and miraculously turn down the driveway. We put them in a coral. After the scare of almost getting a horse killed we came to the conclusion the fences couldn’t wait until tomorrow. We put the kids to bed and mended fences until about 2am. We will get our floors done tomorrow we told ourselves.
Monday we slept in and I headed down to the the barn to do chores at about 10am. When I walked into the barn I was greeted by the sounds of Niagara falls. One of the cows stepped on a hose sometime in the night and snapped off the pipe the hose was connected to. the water was flooding the barn. I shut the water off, not a big deal, at least the animal stalls were dry, but another big mess to clean up. I took care of the animals; repairing the line could wait, I needed to finish the floor. We got the floor stained, and got the first coat of poly on at about midnight.
On Tuesday we had our coffee and went to work on finish sanding and applying our second coat of poly. If all went right we could get our furniture all put back that night before we left the next morning! Lindsay was finishing the last section with the final coat and I was picking up tools and materials and I heard what sounded like a fan motor. I followed the sound to the mudroom and it seemed to be coming from the crawlspace under the mudroom. I went down to the crawlspace to find that our main water line had burst and the crawlspace had about 8 inches of water at the bottom. I went and shut off the breaker for the pump. I didn’t have the heart to tell Lindsay what I found, until after the floor was finished and she had a minute to admire the job.
I fixed the water line under the house and then the water line in the barn. I tend to always buy extra parts I might need in the future to keep on hand, and this week it paid off. I was very fortunate to have all the parts I needed, so I did not need to run to town (which is about 50 minutes away round trip). We got our furniture all back in place and put our house mostly in order before leaving (there was quite a bit of dust on everything from all the sanding). We left almost on time on Wednesday and had a very nice vacation with family.
So when you look at our social media, read our stories, or look at our pictures if you find yourself starting to think we have it all together and our lives are perfect, just think about this story. It was wet, messy, dusty, tiring, and out of our control. To reference a favorite childhood story I might say it was a bunch of Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Days.
“All’s well that ends well.” at least that’s what I have been told. I think having the understanding that we live in an imperfect world where things WILL go wrong is key to keeping a positive outlook on situations that are out of our control. When we know to expect things to fail or break at the worst times, we are never as shocked or surprised when they do.
Daniel
