What?? Throw the spaghetti on the wall? Yes! Keep throwing it on the wall. One day it is going to stick! In case you haven’t heard about that before, when you cook pasta, you can toss a piece of spaghetti on the wall (or ceiling, if you are feeling feisty) and when it sticks, you know it is done. I don’t think I would recommend throwing a lasagna noodle or manicotto on the wall. Although it would be impressive to see, it might leave a big glutenous smudge. Long spaghetti seems to be the best choice, or perhaps a delicate angel hair or hearty bucatini. Once again, I digress.
Perriee and I have been tossing the spaghetti on the wall for a few years. Most of the time, it falls off. Sometimes, it never even reaches the wall, but we have had a few small wins for sure. Ok- maybe just one sizable one: Airbnb stuck. This is our 5th summer hosting! It is hard to believe we have been rolling with it this long. I am hoping we can develop our space here a bit more so we can charge a little more and generate longer stays by offering the kitchen space for use.
One little project that slid down the wall was hosting dinner parties through a site called Feastly. Although fun, it did not generate any income at all! We made this amazing dinner with spaghetti and meatballs and homemade cheesecake. It was delicious and our friends who came loved it, but it never stuck to the wall or generated any momentum outside of our close friends and family who both humored and honored us with their presence. It did stick to my waistline. This side-hustle pre-dated our time hosting through Airbnb. The silver lining? It served as a bit of a catalyst to get the guest space together enough to show it off to strangers and the improvements haven’t stopped since.
Cabin Corner
We installed the two back windows last weekend! Hands down, one of the easiest and most rewarding projects we have done on the cabin so far. Special thanks to Jonathan from MunozStuccoPA for helping is out with his awesome YouTube videos! The only installation flub we had was nailing the bottom flange all the way across, as opposed to leaving some extra gaps along the bottom for water to flow out, if needed. That was all my bad. Perriee questioned it and I confidently responded on the contrary and we did not rewatch the video to confirm. As directed, we did NOT use the flashing tape along the bottom of the window.
Check out our thank you videos: Before
After:
These windows were ordered at the end of June and finally arrived the week prior to us installing them As you can imagine, we were so excited to get them installed so that is exactly what we did. Since we ordered two of the same window, I assumed they would match. Several minutes after we got the second one in, I noticed that they are different! Ha! There were only supposed to be 4 panes of glass on the top and bottom sections of the windows and one of them has 6 panes of glass on the bottom section! This is one of those things we will call good enough because they are not coming out again. One of them will technically be in the bathroom and the other in the kitchen anyhow, so you will be less likely to notice from the inside of the house anyway. We are blaming this on Mercury in retrograde and Home Depot, of course.
Regardless, the windows open, they have screens, and nothing can mess up the view you get while looking out of them. It is beautiful. I watched some crows dancing in the woods from them the following morning. Overall, it was a huge win.
Homework
Keep tossing the pasta! You can only hope you will end up with a wall-full, but realistically, most will not stick. Don’t be afraid to try different types of pasta either- if you want to try blogging one day, then a basic website the next, do it. The only thing that keeps you from succeeding is not trying. I have recently been listening to a couple of inspiring podcasts that have been getting my wheels turning to think of new ways to make money and getting the guts to try.
Failing Forward is a Cinicnnati based podcast with the premise that even failures can lead to our successes. In that respect, you should hope to fail at some things. Learn the lessons and move on. Use them as learning experiences to do different things the next time. Keep tossing the pasta!
The Side Hustle Show has over 300 episodes packed full of ideas and success stories of people who are now working for themselves. One hot tip was to make a list of 50 ways to generate income for yourself. By the 50th one, you will have a list with at least a couple of ready to eat noodles. And if you don’t? Well, make another list.
We said goodbye to the hoosier cabinet in the tipi and found this bad-boy behind the bottom drawer. It was its own ecosystem (spool of thred for scale).
Making Time for Tipi 