Tung-oiled pine flooring update. It's been a year since my last post in this thread, and a year and a half from the floor install, so I thought I would post an update. Some backstory: These pine wide-boards were sawn at a local mill, kiln dried and I think indoors for abt a year before we got it. The boards sat in our house for 6 months before actual install. During that time, I sanded each board and applied and buffed in 4 coats of Hope's Pure Tung Oil. They were installed on our second floor, all bedrooms. Once installed, I buffed in one more coat of tung oil. Today. I am very pleased with how the tung-oil is protecting the floor, and how the floor is holding up. Not seeing much gap between boards, and any accidental spills are not leaving any stains, but I do get to them fairly fast. For clean up, we vacuum and when needed, use damp rag and elbow grease for any scuffs, or marks (dog paws), etc. I occasionally buff out scratches with tung oil (we have a dog and 11yo boy). Since the floor has gone thru one dry winter, this summer I plan buff in another coat of tung oil for more durability. Because it is pine, we do not allow shoe traffic on the second floor or food, but that rule was same when the flooring was carpeted. I love this floor! The patina is becoming quite lovely, it has been really easy to keep. I expect the floor to age gracefully and develop more character as the years go on. I do not regret going the all-natural route with using only the tung oil.

I used a couple of small 99cent bottles of Michael's craft paint in bronze & copper, and applied them with a small sea sponge to a 1950's mirror that I bought for $35 at an estate sale a couple of years ago. For a while I tried to use the mirror with it's gilded looking finish, but it was just too kitschy. I had no rhyme or reason. I am not crafty. But GeorgiaGal had turned me on to how easy it can be to use cheap craft paint to turn a Miss into a Hit. (I may have also used part of a bottle of Sophisticated Finishes Blonde Bronze from Home Depot on this mirror/don't remember....The SF is more money, maybe about $8 a bottle.) Here is my mirror on my sage walls now. I don't have a Before pic. Red

Of course you can build your garden beds wherever it suits you and there's nothing wrong with building below-ground hugelkultur beds that have hardware cloth-lined beds above them. That is exactly what I want to do with our back garden because of its sandy soil/vole population, but it is more on my "one of these days" list and not on my list to do this year due to the massive amount of work involved, and the fact that we still haven't even got all the beds in our front garden built yet. We started out with a handful of raised beds in the front garden 1999, and we have added about one per year or sometimes every other year since then. Since the front garden is a large garden, I feel like we'll never really finish building all the raised beds that it needs, much less then turn around and do the same thing to the back garden. Unfortunately, our best bed-building time is in winter and we are volunteer firefighters and winter fire season is our busiest fire season, so it seems like every single time we have a plan to build a new raised bed in the front garden, we end up spending that weekend fighting fires instead. So, the back garden limps along with no raised beds, plenty of voles and lots of suspense about how many plants the voles will eat and when they'll start. To be fair to the voles, they often don't bother the back garden plants until it gets hot and dry in summer, so I can make the best use of the back garden by planting cool-season crops and my early corn back there. Then, at least, we get something before the voles begin devouring everything. And, some years they don't bother the plants at all, but you cannot count on that. If you can dig deeply enough in your clay to build hugelkultur beds below the surface, then it is not nearly as compacted and dense as our clay was when we started. That's a good thing. You couldn't penetrate our clay 2", not even with a strong, heavy-duty rear-tine tiller, a mattock, or a pickax. Now, after all these years of amending it is pretty easy to dig down about 15-18" in that garden, which is a huge improvement but it has taken a long time to get to that point, and at the southernmost end of the garden, you can only dig down about a foot, but that was the last area to get amended and the last (so far) to get raised beds built above amended clay. Be sure the garden has a nearby water source to make irrigation, when necessary, easy to acomplish. And, of course, you're going to continue to have those moles, voles, gophers or any combination thereof tunneling through the good soil. So, if the good soil is intended to be a lawn, you still have to fight the little beasts or your lawn will be torn up and unsightly. On the other hand, all you have to do is visit farm land or ranch land torn up by feral hogs one time, and you'll be shocked, horrified and then very happy to go back to your place where your problem is only moles, voles, gophers and, if you're in some parts of NE OK, ground hogs.

Thank you Sheisback! I didn't even realize I could do that. Yeah, I hear you on the chandelier, unfortunately, it is a compromise with my husband. I have to give him something so I can get my candlestick looking sconces which mattered more to me. At least the chandeliers would look better with our stuff than his favorite chandelier. Below is a picture of the items we will have in the living room so far. We are still working on decorating. I guess my description probably wasn't very good. It's more of a hodge podge. We decided a while ago that we wanted it to be a little bit Scottish and a little bit nature and still incorporate my english longbow, my equestrian gear and my husband's fishing poles. Most of my furniture is Queen Anne style. I hope that helps.