Is it only me or does January always seems to be one of the busiest month in the year? I don’t know why but for me it seems like it is. This January will be no exception. I have a busy year ahead of me and January will be the »setting the stage« month. With Dad’s passing in December there will be a lot of bureaucracy to deal with. In addition to that one of our tenants is moving out. The apartment will need some major work. A couple of years back there was a snow storm and that caused some water damage in the apartment. While some of it got fixed it was a impossible to do it all when lived in. I need to take down all the wallpaper to see the walls beneath, two rooms need new floors and some of the doors, taps and baseboards need replacing too. And I need to clean the windows of the sunroom, which the tenant never did. Plus there is an electrical problem with the ventilation in the bathroom that needs to be fixed. I cannot do that on my own since I don’t know how. So I need to make an appointment with an electrician.

I also will need an electrician to take down the lights in the wood work shop. The ceiling there is made of mud and is falling apart. It’s no longer safe to work in there and the ceiling is not able to take load. Above the wood work shop is the attic of the main house and well, that portion of the attic actually needs to be able to take load because that is where the main stairs come up. After the lights are down I’ll start taking out the ceiling. I have not done something like that before but how hard can it be? She says and well, let’s hope I don’t run into major problems. I could really use something going just right in this chaotic mess of a legacy my Dad left us children with. The hard part comes when the old ceiling is out. Because I need to put in extra beams to support the new ceiling. Dad has done that for the rest of the attic only the part above the wood work shop is left. I have absolutely no idea how to do that. I’ll have to read up on it. Most likely I won’t be able to do it on my own but well, we will corss that bridge when we come to it, right? I have most of the material and the tools to do it.

Then I need to start taking down some trees and prune the rest. Most of my fruit trees are pretty old and some simply have run their course and have to go. Of course I will be planting new trees. Some new cherries because all three I currently have are either almost dead or hollow. I also want to plant a quince, another mirabelle and maybe some berry bushes. But planting is more a topic in April or May I think. I’ll go more into detail with that in my next blog post »January in the garden«. One of my brothers will help cut down the first cherry tree because it’s huge and I am not that good with the chain saw just yet.

In addition to all of that I still need to get my day to day life done, walk Happy, tend to Mom and Lucy and go to work. I need to clean the stables out, get the manure taken care of. I don’t have a tractor any more so I depend on the friendly neighbourhood farmers to help my out once in a while. Luckily they are happy to help since my Dad was always ready to help them as well and they still feel like they owe him in some way.

So, January already looks like a pretty busy month. I also want to read up on creating a youtube channel for Tales of a life and figure out the editing thing. Plus I still want to write a little bit and maybe start the second draft of one of my original urban fantasy projects.

Oh, I almost forgot, I still have projects inside my apartment left. Like the guest bathroom that needs new everything but here I will start slow and first work on the door, stripping it and repainting it in a darker colour. Somehow Dad thought it was a good idea to put white doors in everywhere. In addition to white ship lap everywhere.

Can we do all of this? Yes we can! Let’s get going!

Love, Mael