The Start of Our Farmhouse

During our first two years of marriage, we lived in an apartment in a dorm residence hall with nearly 100 college ladies. Those two years are highly documented through lots of pictures, recipes, and sewing projects on our blog. We loved living on campus and being able to walk anywhere we wanted around our “little” college town. If the weather was nice, we would grab a jacket and walk about a mile to downtown and eat at one of our favorite local restaurants. 

For the following year, we moved into a friend’s 2 bedroom 2 bath trailer while she was trying to sell it from across the country. Living there was very different from living on campus! We went from being in the center of a large university surrounded by people all the time to being “in the country” surrounded by cotton fields and horse pastures. We were only about 10 minutes from campus (if that!) but it felt like we were in another town. Walking to eat dinner wasn’t an option, but we did have the convenience of a small back yard where we would sit outside and grill dinner and hang out with friends.

When the trailer sold, we packed our things, turned in our notices at work, and moved two hours away into a rental and dreamed and planned what kind of house we’d love to buy or build and where exactly we would like to have this dream house. We knew it would need to be a little bigger than the house we were in, because we had two sweet boys born while we lived there and those boys needed lots of room to run and play! Like the dorm, the rental house was close to everything! It wasn’t walking distance to any restaurants, but it was walking distance to church and to a paved track where we would meet friends to exercise. We could easily make it to town to eat or shop in five minutes.

After just over four years in that cute 3 bedroom 1 bath house on just under half an acre, we stumbled across a listing for a house that met several of the characteristics on our “list”…

• Open kitchen/living room floor plan
• Space for a play area for the boys
• Two bathrooms
• Lots of outdoor space and not too close to a busy road
• Space for a garden
• Space for a workshop
• Space for current and future pets and farm animals
• Space for a craft room/sewing area
• Something that we could add on or remodel
• Some “crops” ready (even if it was just honeysuckle growing that we could use for making homemade honeysuckle jelly!)

We’re pretty excited about what has been named simply, “The Farmhouse” by our oldest son. He loves to tell anyone he sees (even if they just met) that they can come to his Farmhouse to pick pecans and play in the yard. It’s a longer drive to church and shopping, much like the trailer was, but we will never be far from a snack thanks to the eight million pecans in our backyard!

Some of the rooms got a fresh coat of paint before we moved everything in, and we refinished all of the hardwood floors as well. A few other small projects have been tackled in the last three months, so I wanted to start a blog showing the changes we make before the list gets too long to remember. 🙂

I’ll update with some before and after pictures of paint and flooring (and what we’re calling Phase One of the bathroom remodel that started a few months earlier than we had anticipated!) over the next few posts.