You have to start somewhere.....

• Veering from homeschooling for a bit....here is a huge step toward the "real" house! Yes, when you buy two, not one, rusty, stained clawfoot tubs, you have to be fairly serious about building a home to put them in. I guess when it's done, I'll have to change the title of this blog since we won't be living in a barn anymore. Seriously, though, we see the housebuilding and homeschooling as all part of our attitude of using our own hands to make and do and seeing past doubts and obstacles to work as a family toward a goal. From this point on, there will be posts from time to time about our progress. Just so y'all know, this isn't a mansion we're building, but a home with room for us and those we love to come visit. A home that everyone can have a part in creating. A building project that allows my husband and I to put together ideas we've found over the years that fit our family and our desire to use natural materials and be more responsible in our energy consumption. (For our friends reading this, we're a little more "out there" than you'd let yourselves suspect, huh?) I truly believe that each step of the way in both endeavors, homeschooling and home construction, God has guided and blessed us in so many daily ways. Not that I think our house construction is a big priority to Him, but I believe He works through all sorts of times and phases in our lives to help us grow and know His care.
  
• land at just the right time and in just the right place with just the right kind of trees.....as my husband has said, our house is already here waiting to be cut and put together! (In case that sounds like we're naive, guess how we got the lumber for the barn we live in?)


• overall unity concerning the plan and building issues--we had figured we'd have to take our respective ideas and somehow an architect would hammer it all out for us, but then we found Jack Sobon's Build a Classic Timbed Framed Home, and it was just what we both wanted.


• safety in the barn's construction


• family and friends who have encouraged and dads who have provided wisdom, experience, and time to help.

There are many more, but they just don't translate well to cyberspace.

Anyhow, back to the tubs..... up there on the right, see the potential under the rust? We got these for next to nothing and hoped our hunches were right. We met a super nice guy here who does sandblasting for a real reasonable rate, and then he surprised us with an offer to paint them as well. Okay, even with that, still less than anything at Lowe's.

Then, we found a set of feet for $24, and guess where they were--on my dad's way to work! My husband had to do some grinding to get them to fit, but they did. He then primed and painted them in chrome, and I just about teared up when I saw them on for the first time.

We couldn't leave them upside down forever, so it was time to tackle the insides. As usual, my husband researched how we should go about this. Armed with a wooden scraper, the garden hose, and an array of products each promising amazing results, we found that what worked best was simply Bar Keeper's Friend and a pumice stone.

That is where my homeschooling application comes in--we are surrounded with products and theories that promise to yield amazing results in our children's education, but we have to be careful. In our zeal to get those tubs as clean and white as possible, we very easily could have damaged the porcelain. In our quest to find feet for them at a good price, we could be tempted to grab one here and one there, assuming they will all work when they're adjusted. Now, realistically, we wouldn't do that, but what about with our kids? Do we ever get so focused on wanting them to really shine that we lose sight of letting them be kids, too? Do we apply harsh words to get the perfect behavior or grades we desire? Do we ever hapharzardly choose curriculum or teaching methods, assuming it will all come together eventually? I like to think we are above these tendencies, but I also know how easy it is to get distracted from the important by the bright and shiny, as well as the convenient, too. Okay, back to the literal, rather than figurative, tubs.

Anyway, so there we were just a'cleanin'! I was able to help till it was time to fix lunch, but my husband was "on a tear", and he worked on them the rest of the day Saturday and was back on the job Monday morning on the second one. And you can see what he had to work with. Anyway, we now have two tubs without a single rust stain--tubs that I look forward to putting in a house someday, a house we'll build together.











Can you imagine doing this to a 100-year-old tub?



The final result. Now they will wrapped for storage until the rest of the house is ready for them. Hooray!!!!!