When you have a homestead, especially one that's still getting off the ground, there are always a million chores that need to be done. There's far more on the daily to-do list than dishes, laundry, and feeding the animals. Many tasks are projects that take weeks or months to complete. Therefore, when entertaining, it's difficult to know how much needs to be finished before the big event to make the place "presentable." After all, we all want to look like Betty Homemaker once in a while.
We had hosted a few friends and family members here and there long before we were settled, but for our first party, we wanted to be able to show off the progress we had made. We also wanted the evening to be one to remember, because we were celebrating several big events. First and foremost, the festivities were for our wedding reception. It was also our housewarming, and both of our birthday parties - our birthdays are only a few weeks apart. Of course, I wanted everything to be perfect, but our homestead would not magically be further along just because we were having a big day. I had to figure out how much I could handle.
My first step was pretty obvious. I knew I had to mow the lawn, which wasn't as simple as it sounds. Getting a lawnmower in the first place turned out to be a bigger ordeal than we originally thought when buying a house. My husband kept trying to convince me to get a ride-on mower, something I've never used before, and honestly am a little intimidated by. So, we decided to start off with a self-propelled push mower. There were many other projects that kept getting first priority, so two months went by before we got a call from my mother-in-law saying she had one for us. By this point, neighbors were offering to mow our yard for us because it had gotten so long. We went to her house to pick it up. It started up just fine. Then, as Murphy's Law dictates, it stopped working as soon as we got it back home. My husband was so frustrated, he immediately went to the store to buy a brand new one.
Some parts of the lawn had grown as high as my waist, and the mower could not work through that much mulch quickly or easily. I spent eleven hours mowing that day, with a few food and hydration breaks thrown in there. When it was all said and done, the place looked infinitely better. Even the flowers looked prettier without all the weeds in the way.
The next big problem was the poison ivy. There was a lot of it around the edges of the property, and it was encroaching on the yard. There were even a few sprouts around the porch stairs. We called a professional in an attempt to get it removed, but he wouldn't be available until after our event. Unfortunately, the task was too big to accomplish by ourselves in time, so we opted for a compromise. My husband and sister, who don't have the severe reaction to poison ivy that I do, teamed up to clear the sprouts that were coming up in the interior of the yard space. Guests would have to be careful if they ventured too far out, but the area around the festivities would be clear.
I also wanted to get some more weeding done for aesthetic purposes. We have some decorative stone areas around the front porch and one of the trees in our front yard, where grass poking up had started to obscure the rock, and I just wanted to show off a cleaner look. I kept working around the poison ivy until I could get my husband or sister's help with that spot, and then I would go back and finish. It was tedious work, but I got a lot done. I was very happy with the results.
Finally, all that was left was generic cleaning indoors. I cleared out as much clutter as I could, wiped down surfaces, and swept up. We rented tables and chairs for the day, and set up a buffet and stereo outdoors. We had some citronella-filled tiki torches to keep the mosquitoes away, and the carefully selected guests did the rest. Despite all my stress leading up to the event, it turns out that the best parties come from the people in attendance. Everything went off without a hitch.
We did end up with far too much food at the end of the day, and we struggled to figure out what to do with it all before it went bad. That's a story for another time.
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