I really hate

Keith and I bought some furniture to add to the new house, but now all we are doing is fighting with the seller to replace it because it was delivered damaged.

I found this wonderful horse themed furniture with green accents.  Oh boy how can I turn down both green AND horses. LOL. I couldn't, however now all I have is damaged furniture.  They did come in boxes and the boxes appeared undamaged, but as soon as we opened it, we saw this:

The hinges on the door of this cabinet are completely damaged. One hinge is broken in two and the other is ripped out of the wood. but that's not the only damage. the top was almost ripped off and one of the legs is broken.

To get an idea of what it would look like all put together, it should look more like this only with the door in place.

The second cabinet was less damaged. Only a portion of the corner of top was broken.

So it looks a little better and is more easily repaired than the first, but still we received to damaged pieces of furniture and can't get the company to respond to our complaints.

Hopefully the Better Business Bureau will be able to get them to correct the issue and we get a resolution soon.

Painted Ponies

Before the fire, I had several Painted Ponies that were destroyed.  I wanted to purchase back some of the models that I'd lost and I've been given a few for Christmas. My problem now is in the display because they come in "lefties" and "righties". I have all of these Cornices ( I think that's the right word) over the top of all of my windows, and they make a great displace place for my Painted Ponies. But I think I'm going to need to buy several more ponies. I will probably need to put the "lefties" over one window and the "righties" over the other window. 
Right now they are all together:

But as you can see I only have the two that face left and a whole bunch that face right. I've put them like that for now to balance out the numbers, but do you think I can justify buying another 4 "lefties" and move those remaining to "righties" to the other side?

What do you think?  I think I need to get shopping. LOL

Trying to find replacement dishes.

I used to have all Blue Willow dinnerware in the old house, but since I'm forced to start over, I wanted something different. I've been looking for horse related dinnerware for a while.
The problem is that none of it is economical.
I really like this:


But a place setting for 4 people is over $400.00 and as I've been searching, I find that is actually not bad expense wise compared to others. The serving dishes are available separately.

I also found this one:


But it doesn't have any additional place settings available such as platters and serving dishes etc.
We had ordered something similar to this:

and we ordered an 8 place setting with additional serving dishes and canisters and a cookie jar etc. Basically everything we would need. But the company that makes them has become unreliable and the company we purchased them from hasn't been able to provide us with the dishes. So we are still searching. 

I've been looking at these plates:

and these:

and

and these are really my favorite:

As you can see I have expensive tastes in dinnerware. I still haven't decided which one I'll finally go with and for now we have a set of four plain green stoneware plates that Keith's mom brought from a thrift store in Massachusetts.
So if anyone knows of some really cool looking horse related dinnerware available for sale, please let me know.

New House Part 2

Here are some of the other things we've done in the new house. I wanted light in the master bathroom, but didn't want the fully exposed window or curtains. The house came with mini blinds through out the house including the master bath, but I don't like those and will be working on replacing them as we go along.  For the bath though, I thought it would look cool with some stained glass window treatments. So I was shopping at Amazon again and found this. 

I wasn't sure how it would look and I didn't want to buy too much of it so I only go one and it fit one side of the bathroom window quite well. So now I'm off to get a second one for the other side of the window. Then I'll have light an privacy and when I want to look out the window, all I have to do is open it.  This is how the window looks with just the blinds.

Then we put up the stained glass film. I've left the blinds up for now because until we get the second side done, we still need a little privacy. But I think it looks really cool.

We also had an old dresser that came from Keith's family in Massachusetts that was being stored out in the shed because we didn't have room for it in the old house. 

It needed a little restoration work because that top was not the original. It was supposed to have a marble top to it. We took it down to a local woodworker who glued some parts back together and found us a granite top to put on it.

We had planned on using it in the guest bedroom, but once we found the other furniture for the room, it became obvious that the dresser just wouldn't fit in with the other decor.

We also didn't have any type of TV stand or entertainment center so we decided to move the dresser to the living room and re purposed it as the entertainment center. The drawers work very well to hide the DVD's we have been re acquiring, and right now there is also room to store some of the extra pillows and throws that I use to help keep warm.

New House

In less than a year, we have gone from this.

to this:

Well as you can tell we finally have a new house. Here they are moving it on to our foundation.

Then just as soon at they had it all put together and at least water tight, it came a gully washer.

 

We finally got it all ready for living in.

Then we started filling it up with all the new stuff. We knew that we wanted to put in a new wood stove because we always have a power outage during the year and need some type of back up heat. So Keith started building the hearth for the wood stove. He even built a cardboard replica of the size of the wood stove to use as a guide.

Right now we are stuck at partly finished, because we didn't order enough stone. I think the guys at the stone company didn't compute my request right. I told them we were going all the way up the wall, but they only calculated for the lower portion as that is the only amount required for protection. So we had to order another box and we are waiting for it to come in.

While we were waiting on that, I found this wonderful tile on sale at Amazon and just had to buy it.

 So Keith went to work on it and now I have a really awesome backsplash behind my stove. The smaller edge tiles we found at Home Depot. I think they accent the main tiles really well.

Now we are finally in and enjoying our new home. It doesn't feel as strange as it used to and it's way better then living in the camper trailer. I still miss things daily. I go to look for something and then realize, that was the other life in the other house. But it's getting better and I have new stuff now. 
I'm thankful that we've been fortunate enough to get everything taken care of as easily as we had. I can't imagine the horrors of having to go through something like this with out homeowners insurance.  While we were living in the camper trailer provided by my mom, I watched the news several times about others who also lost about as much as we did. We didn't really get much in the way of community support. Not like others. Almost every thing we did was on our own or family support. But we had insurance and that covered most things. 
Things I've learned from this experience:
1. Don't let your homeowners insurance lapse when you pay off your mortgage. We had made the final mortgage payment in March and Keith was waiting for the release of lien documents to take to the insurance. I don't know if was intending to drop the insurance, but since we were still waiting on documents, we were still covered and paid up. The insurance covered the full coverage on the house.
2. Contents- Make sure to update your contents insurance regularly if you pick up anything like family heirloom antiques or extra guns, or if you have a lot of jewelry. We only had a contents insurance for $39,000 but in the end turned over a list that contained nearly $75,000 in items. Many antiques from my dad's side of the family, all of my silver jewelry (I was completely shocked to learn that I had accumulated over $10,000 in jewelry alone) and all of our guns. As we were set up to do mounted shooting competitions, we had accumulated around $27,000 in guns and ammo for competitions. However since we hadn't updated our contents insurance, we are still fighting with the insurance company as they have "depreciated" our items down to only $29,000 and apparently aren't interested in paying out the full value of the contents insurance.
3. Jewelry- If you have any type of plastic container for your Jewelry, Get them out of it NOW! I had a large plastic box that I kept much of my jewelry in because it was easily portable and easy to use for travel.  Well it melts ALL over your jewelry and entraps your items in a horrible blob.  The jewelry that survived the best was in regular jewelry boxes from the fine jewelry stores and in surprisingly also some of my wooden jewelry boxes.  I did go out and purchase a pottery jewelry box after the fire that I'll be keeping some thing in now.
4. If you have guns and ammo, get fire proof safes AND metal ammunition cans. We had one set of plastic ammunition cans that we had gotten at a Friends of the NRA dinner once. The rest of the ammunition was all in US military grade metal cans. None of the ammunition actually survived the fire, but almost all of the ammo in the military cans stayed in the cans. The rounds in the plastic cans when everywhere.  
Well that's about it for this round. See ya later.

Published in nook format

The Horse That Haunts Dreams is now available in nook format for those of you who don't have a kindle.
If you are interested, you can find it here at Barnes and Noble.com.

IN other news, we finally got our new house after the fire. We have replaced most of the furnishings but we haven't replaced the wood stove yet. Hubby is working on the stonework in the corner where the wood stove will go and we are waiting on the certified installer to come install it. 
Otherwise, things are looking up on the house front and I'm back to working on some writing projects also.