Lately in our household...

Looking to the south from the top of our roof on a cloudy day

We are working on the last room in our house - the bedroom. The walls have been painted and now it's time to install the ceiling.

The ceiling is almost done! (Notice the huge citrus tree in the middle of the room, it's a mandarin. My grandparents gave it to us in the fall. It is 30 years old and was grown by them from seed.)

Looking through some old things found in the house. There are a lot of beautifully embroidered traditional Ukrainian towels, table runners and such. They are all thick and sturdy,  made out of  homespun linen and hemp. I'm not sure what to do with them yet, but there were two linen towels/table runners that looked like they would make perfect pillow cases. So I did just that! What do you think?

Last week the weather was very nice  here. We had a few sunny days with temperatures going up to 15 degrees Celcius. I decided to use that opportunity and do something productive outside. I'm a big fan of  having stairs and large rocks in the landscape, so I decided to give it a shot and build a walkway/stairs using concrete urbanite that we have scattered around the property. I used sand to level out the surface and to fill in the cracks between the stones. It is not finished yet, but we are liking the result so far. 

The spring is near!

Stocking up more wood for the early spring and the next winter.

Michael cutting wood from the old/broken/fallen trees we found on and around the property. (And Toma is always nearby.)

Also stocking up on smaller branches and twigs. These are great for starting a fire.

For the past two weeks we've been trimming our trees. We have over 30 apple trees alone. A few of them are very old, most of them are overgrown and  a lot of them have dry or damaged branches.

Some curious fungus growing on the shady side of  our old wooden fence. Can anyone tell us what it is?

It's taken me nearly forever to finish this post! Well...enough time for the first flowers outside to stat blooming, like these yellow crocuses.

Can you spot the tiny snowdrops? They are popping up all over our apple orchard. 

Looks like the spring is almost here...

Til next time,

Yuliya