It's amazing how much can change in a few years. And seems time speeds up as you age. I promised to put up photos of the beginning of our homestead. Sadly back in 1986, there were no videos and my film quality was awful, so you will have to use your imaginations.
We moved here in 1986. We had lived on 3 acres in a tiny rural community across the state line in Louisiana. We had homestead there for 5 years and were pretty settled until the school situation became to bad. We had camped out in area where we live now and had fallen in love with this area. So we put our house up for sale and found a house here but the sale pended on whether we sold there or not. Well we didn't. I was teaching school then and Sonny was managing some rice fields in Louisiana. I had gotten a job teaching up here and so we moved without Sonny having a job. We had only 2 weeks to get moved before the school year started and rentals were hard to find. So we resorted to buying a singlewide mobile home. Small compared to our house we had built in Louisiana. We rented the house down there and moved the mobile home to a rental lot up here and hurriedly moved in. That was in 1986. All the first year we looked for some acreage to buy to build again. We can see God's hand in all we did. We finally found the 6 acres and made a really low offer. It was not accepted but we just put it out of our minds and went on with life. Then 6 months later, they accepted our offer and so we bought the 6 acres for $5000. It was a steal and we accepted. God provided the money without a loan and so we proceeded to clear the property. It was cut over so the trees were small and lots and lots of underbrush. It took us several months to clear enough to realize there was a mobile home pad already on the property.
This is what it looked like after we cleared most of the underbrush at the front of the property.
We built a storage building first and in 1988, we moved the mobile home to the already existing pad. We had always tried to do things as we saved the money and we also have tried to find bargains. So we found a little old man and wife team that would drill our well. They had an old pounding type drill so it couldn't be dug that deep. He witched for water which was so fascinating to me to watch. And they had the well dug in a few hours. The Lord blessed us in that he only went 50 feet and the well artisaned.
The water wasn't the best as most springs in our area are full of minerals like iron and calcium. But about a year later we had a man come and install a sand filter. This thing is huge and he makes from his own mold. We moved the moblile home the summer of 1988. It was strange in that Sonny and the boys did most of the work as I was in the hospital for 2 weeks at the time. We have 3 sons between us and have raised them together. We have had full custody of all 3. So we raised them not to be afraid of work so they helped dig the waterlines and to situated everything. I came home to the house set up and ready.
By the end of that summer I was back in full
swing. This was the first year since we married that we had not had a garden.
This is what it looked like at Christmas that year. We had porch built. Now remember we did not have a loan on anything but the house and we were managing to put back a little money here and there to build what we needed. Sonny was working odd jobs here and there and so we were managing ok. We were still having problems selling the house in Louisiana so we did a rent to own which wound up be a terrible idea. (That story will come later).
The next year (1989), we put a metal roof over the house. That gave a little more insulation. To cut costs, we were using a wood stove to mainly heat the house. We did have central air/heat but later I developed allergies to the mold that tended to build up in the floor duct systems so we had to revamp. (By the way: the boys were all in agri classes at school and they learned with help from their dad teaching them as well to build and weld things so they made me birdhouses and even shelves). By this time we had cleared this side of the house and we situated our garden right about this side of the birdhouse. This was our first garden spot.
The next step was 2 years down the road. Sonny had gotten a permanent job working at a lumber mill as a construction hand. A year later he stepped into a Millwright job and then a Supervisor. So we were able to get a discount on lumber. So we sided the house in a log siding.
We put lattice around the bottom. We get a lot of rain in the spring months and being on the side of a hill, the water runs under the house. Not ideal but at the time we had to make it work. We lived with it like this for a few years. (Remember we do things as we have saved the money).
Our next improvement came in the way of an add-on. With three monster teenage sons, it became a necessity. We added on a small room first.
To back up here some, we had a spot cleared off up the hill and water run to the site. We had plans to build another smaller house when the boys graduated and moved out. We wanted a partial underground. Well after the boys graduated and moved along with their lives, we realized we had the mobile home paid for at this time. And we really didn't relish the idea of a big loan or mortgage to pay off again. Our house was comfortable and so we decided to just keep fixing it up and so we expanded the room we had added on. We made 2 rooms and did the outside in shiplapping to match the rest of the house.
We have since cut the tree and installed a chainlink fence around the part past the wood fence. We had daschunds and we even built a doggy door in the side between the door and windows.
O and Sonny even built the doors.
This is pretty much how it is now without the clutter. The first add-on we changed into a laundry room/pantry.
We took the old tiny laundry area and made into a smaller pantry. I never really organized it until this year. The other room where the double windows are we turned into a dining room. We had a terrible ice storm in 1999-2000 which tore down some huge pines, cedar and wild cherry so we took these logs and had them sawn into lumber and used the cedar for the walls inside the dining room. We had the pine treated and used it for flooring.
In the midst of adding these rooms we had completely remodeled our master bath with Western red cedar walls and we had removed the carpeting throughout the house. (Photos will come later).
Since then we have added the gazebo over the patio area and added the cook shack. Then we added another gazebo over a sitting area with a firepit. They will be shown in the video I'm working on.
*************
Well I'm stopping here. As always....
No comments:
Post a Comment