When I was a child, legos were my thing. I was very proud of the fact that I could build anything, especially when the box had a suggested age far above mine.
Pre-teen to teenager: it was the Sauder stuff, you know, that really cheap particle board furniture you bought at Wal-Mart and it might last through one move if it wasn’t damp. I had a coffee tin full of spare Sauder pieces because the same locks, nuts, screws, and bolts were used in all kinds of furniture. I was so confident in my wood-building ability that I charged people to put their Sauder stuff together. Basically, if it had instructions, I was on it. (Even mistranslated instructions, because I had intuition!)
Wednesday, the plan was to get off before 2pm. The kiddos and I were supposed to have an afternoon with my sister and niece. Her internet guy stole the late afternoon (you know, “I’ll be here between 2pm and 5pm”). I went home. Laud, Lucas, and I pull up to… wait, I thought Louis was bummed out because they canceled his order?
This crate, just a little too heavy for Lucas and I to team lift into the garage, was sitting outside the garage. “Stump Grinder” was stamped on the thin plyboard it was packed in.
I couldn’t wait for Laud to load up and get full! I haven’t gotten to build anything solid since the Guinea Pig cages! (The silly three-chicken-run was made of scraps and hurried; not something I was proud of and definitely not solid.)
Bingo! Laud is out and building is on! It came with almost all the tools needed (sweet! 13, 15, 17, and 19 mm wrenches! – yes I’m nerdy enough to love tools.) I love spare 9mm and 13mm wrenches because they are the most commonly lost in my toolbox.
Lots of parts and bolts with locknuts later, I’ve almost finished with the star performer for Saturday and Sunday’s adventures! I enjoy the thrill of completing something practical. I can’t wait to build the giant bird aviary for Becky’s parakeets, our guinea pigs, and baby chicks. I am super excited about the prospect of building! I laughed at my own thoughts while I was building the machine because I actually like the smell of the bolts – weird, right?
I handed the user’s manual and engine manual to Louis – “tada! The machine is all yours.”
Read that again! Wow! It’s a new year full of possibilities!
I’m always so thankful for new years. New seasons, new months, a new week every Sunday morning, a new day every sunrise… newness always reminds me of the opportunity God gives us to make a new start.
Our possibilities this year look amazing!
Laud got a tooth for Christmas (just one, two more are sitting there in the wings where we can see them but they haven’t popped through just yet). He’s growing so fast! I’m so blessed to watch this fast-moving change from totally-dependent-baby stage to exploration-baby-stage!
Thea has learned to read! She’s officially started her “schoolbooks” aka book work. We don’t really start books until they can read. Her favorite school book is “The Beginner Book of Words” – the Dr. Seuss “kid dictionary” that belonged to her dad and uncles! She announced to me, “mom, since I can read, I need real schoolbooks to do work in.” I’m not sure if I’m ready for that!
Lucas can do some crazy cool gymnastics stuff! His favorite thing is to show off his muscles – Kimberly consistently reminds him of the proper muscle names as he’ll flex and say “look at this one.” Lucas told me his favorite thing he wants to happen this year is “work with Dad and build our house.”
Jillian has her first gymnastics competition of the 2024 spring season January 13th! She’s competing Xcel Silver again this year with WGV Gymnastics and is super excited about her routines. Her confidence has grown with her strength and flexibility the past few months. Her self-discipline is growing and took a huge jump right at the end of 2023 when she decided to apply herself seriously to both gymnastics and academics. I’m so excited for what 2024 will bring in Jillian!
Jaquline has set her mind on a goal at the end of 2023 and I’m excited to see where it takes her. She’s refocused her study path toward law. She’s been devouring history, literature and debate, and the history of founding documents like our Constitution. She says she wants to learn the laws, how and why they were written, and how legal changes are made. Jaquline has been learning a lot about household management in the last bit of 2023 and says she will continue that in 2024. She’s also deepening and polishing her collegiate writing skills. She wants to write informational reports and persuasive (as she calls them, “enlightening”) papers well.
Kimberly has her first gymnastics competition of the 2024 Spring season January 14th. Kimberly competes Xcel Diamond with WGV Gymnastics this year. I’m so excited to see her perform with all the training she’s persevered through in the past year. This girl’s strength continues to astound me as she grows. Kimberly also starts her first official college classes this semester. She’s both excited and terrified – probably in the reverse order – about this. I love seeing her set and accomplish goals!
Rebeccah returns to her college a little early this semester for work. I’m both selfishly sad because I will miss her smile, watching her exercise patience with Thea, quietly observing as she paints (oh, by far my favorite thing to watch is someone create a masterpiece in front of my eyes – I got to watch her paint on canvas over this break), hearing her laughter, hearing her gaming; in short I will miss everything about her and there’s a Rebeccah-sized hole when she leaves home. But I love hearing her adventures and chatting with her in her tight breaks between chapel, work, study, and classes. She has such precious little free time and I’m honored when she chooses to use that time for me!
Christina will be taking steps into her career path! I’m so excited to be a part of her next adventure! Resuming flight training is only the start of her 2024 adventures. I am thankful she still shares her hopes and dreams and plans with me. (And I get to borrow her car)
As a family, we bought property and cleared it in the last few months of 2023! This is our first step toward building a home of our own! Our designs are hopefully finding an architect willing to perfect a small, compact plan; hopefully we can start utilities and building soon!
New Phase – Making Offers! #2023 #Family #Encourage #PropertyHunting #Land #PuttingOffersIn #ExcitedForMovingForward #PrayingForFavorAndWisdom #FutureTartFarm #OpenRuralLand #GenerationalHome
March 15, 2023
New Phase – Making Offers!
Finally!
It feels like I haven’t written in a century! We finally reached the phase of savings where our available investment capital (aka cash in the savings account) is enough to make some offers on certain pieces of property!
We know that the only way we are going to find and afford a simple house with enough family room for our dreams is to build it from the ground up on property we own outright. We are consistently told we don’t make enough. We know this. Oh well, the mortgage on a $160,000 property (15 years, after down payment) is approximately $1400/month ~ guess those who have been renting for $2800/month can’t afford a loan. Can’t change the system, you just have to think outside the box!
Anyway, back to the seriously amazing excitement! We’ve been looking at properties and placing offers within our budget. Our budget will grow as our savings slowly does. Someone will agree to let us buy a property from them – or a miracle will pop up where someone owner-finances half a property or some investor decides our family is worth the risk and does a private loan. I’m open to pretty much anything. We want OR land; our family dream is back to a farm with chickens, our aviary, rabbits, the ability to help shelters again, growing 95% or more of our own food again – we are only offering on spots with at least an acre. A miracle would be 5 or more acres close to the WGV area (like that cool little abandoned spot near the turn to trailmark). Our goal is a generational home. Space for our family to stay close. A farm to share food from. Somewhere our children and grandchildren could always come home to. Saving a tiny bit of Florida’s agricultural heritage (teaching things Grandma Jeanette taught me).
Just sending out offers is super exciting for me! We’ve designed and planned and researched. I keep praying this is our family’s next step.
Hopefully we find something before September (when rent goes up again)! I’m just so excited about seeing the light at the end of this tunnel – it’s been a long road. It’s like a restart. I love restarts!
Searching… They say the hardest part of doing something you really want is waiting and planning. They might be right.
We keep getting to the search part.
We are looking for land or a house on land within 10 minutes of I95 in St John’s County, Florida. The hard part is our budget isn’t high. I just want a place my kids can run free, have their pets, explore, we can have eight or ten cars (family lol) over without bothering anyone else, etc.
I’d love old Florida land like property with a touch of wetlands that no one can ever mess up. We are twenty years in and back to our original dream of land and an old house to redo or land and build our own from the ground up.
It feels disheartening sometimes when I realize that we “wasted” (really just rented lol) years because some mortgage company took a risk and we weren’t able to pay the rest in full. I can’t look at it as wasted, though. I have to realize it was just another step. We can never go backwards in time, always forward. We learn from mistakes and teach others to avoid the pits we fell into.
I choose to look at the positive! I choose to move forward. We saved, started the first one. We saved, we were able to do almost all of our business investments in cash (should have paid off house instead and ran the business on loans, but didn’t understand that the only non-forgibable loans are student and home loans lol, lesson learned to pass along), we can, are, and will save again.
I’m a saver by nature. I run on thriftiness. I carpool to save gas, Louis can do all maintenance on our vehicles except for major rebuilds (did to both to avoid new vehicle payments), the one daughter who has a car has one paid in full, we stretch food so that is a minimal expense (no eating out, lots of grown foods ourselves, lots of beans and rice or spaghetti dinners, canning, leftovers, bulk cooking, etc.), we get clothes and shoes from hand-me-down bags (I usually only buy underwear and socks new), and our extracurricular activities are limited to those places family works for.
My kids even say, I’m a scrooge.
So now, we have a pre-approval! (I know, I shouldn’t be excited just yet.) We can’t do a construction loan just yet, but they said a new home loan (builder has to sell it “done”).
If dreams happen, then we could find a builder willing to build on a rural property with total cost was than 265000 and a simple floor plan
My plans 😂
Simple. (Except my pantry is huge 😂)
In our search, most homes have huge oversized bedrooms and stop at 3. It’s tough to find one with 6 bedrooms… and they’d still be sharing! (That’s because I can’t separate some duos even if I wanted to.)
We have prayed.
Like everything in my life, I have chosen to give the sum nd total of it to God and He will direct us where He wants and we will move on from there. If that means awesome new build with exactly what we want small and simple or a 700sqft existing 2br/1ba that we add on to… We are waiting and praying.
Sometimes music just hits me. I love to listen to songs of all kinds. One of my newest favorites was from a movie we watched a little bit ago – “Speechless.” Even though as an analyst I understand that wouldn’t have been accurate for the culture, still, it was perfect for the movie and absolutely perfect for viewing children to understand that they have to stand up for what they believe regardless of their culture.
Today, riding home, I heard one I’ve always loved but haven’t really heard in a while. Carrie Underwood’s “Temporary Home.” But today I couldn’t stop crying through the song because I could see real people in all stages of the song. In my mind I saw three little children I knew (the little boy), my sister before she died (the single mom), and my Daddy (the old man) – only my mind altered the words to say “old man, chair at home, surrounded by people he loves…” and the image was of all of us at the last Christmas when we were all together.
I can’t stop crying when I hear this song now. Even thinking about it.
My family is (fingers crossed, prayers for God’s will regardless if it is ours) in the process of trying to be approved for a new home in a development that comes with a nature park as a backyard and friends we already know and love as neighbors all up and down our future street.
Regardless of whether we get approved, any house we live in is temporary.
See, I moved all over the place as a youth. 19 times in 19 years (no, not every year, longest in one spot was 2 years 9 days). I always found new adventure and opportunities in each new place.
But I wanted my children to have roots.
When we bought our house, I counted out 2 years and 10 days on our calendar and circled it with smiley faces. It meant so much to me to be in one place. God taught me a lot when we faced the loss of our company, our house, our stuff, our income, and what felt like our future – mostly by means out of our control. One bank gambling that we’d have a chunk set aside (which we would have if we hadn’t just had to pay all of it to cover one driver when wrecked because she drove without our permission while upset) meant that they would accept nothing less – we couldn’t get a loan for the amount our house was “underwater,” because so many foreclosures around us (almost every property sold in our area in the last 3 years had been a foreclosure) had dropped our property from being worth $150K to $83K. Even the lawyer said there was nothing we could do.
God taught me to let go.
Let go of my dreams of one place my whole life…
Let go of my trees, roses, things I had tended for 10 years…
Let go of our animal graveyard where we had lovely trees planted over each of the foster animals whose last home we had been…
Let go of my little farm I loved…
Let go of things that we’d collected…
Let go of our repaired table that had been Louis’ parents, the chandelier Louis gave me for the first birthday I had in our house, the big-screen TV Louis had wanted since we got married but we had finally saved and bought for him the past Christmas, the beds that had been my brother’s and were now my children’s, dressers that had been mine and Katy’s and were now Christina and Becky’s, dressers that my Daddy brought for Becca when I was 13 and now were my dresser/mirror, Kimberly’s dresser, and our shoe cabinet, the baby cradle that my Daddy had bought for my Mom when she was pregnant with me – it had rocked every one of my siblings, a few of my children, and was their stuffed animal bed now…
Each felt like a stab to my heart then. Now? I couldn’t care less about stuff. I’m thankful we got to keep Daddy’s surfboard, the girls’ schoolbooks, their legos, and when the auction people came out and took our one vehicle they asked how we got around and Louis told them “the bikes” – so they left the 6 bicycles and the baby bike trailer by writing “rusted and very poor” over the “bicycles” on the list. (Honestly, every one of them except for Louis’ had come off the side of the road and were rusted, repainted, repaired, etc. so likely not worth any real money.)
Temporary.
All of those things are temporary.
The only thing that is permanent is our relationships – love.
Any house we buy will be our temporary home. We will fill it with love whatever size it is. Yes, we’re praying for a spot with at least 5 bedrooms where the children can at least break into 3-2-2 because I’d like a baby room for Thea and Lucas and we want a “guest bedroom/Grandma suite” because we look long-term at something we’ll be buying for 15 to 30 years! The big girls want to come back and stay as they go through college and until they buy their own home after their careers are established (and Mom is totally okay with that!).
Temporary Home.
If Daddy had heard that song, I’m sure we would have discussed how true it is. I’m reminded of him all the time. I want to discuss the issues arising in my professional career – crossroads that I’m not sure if I’m making the logical or the heart decision. I miss his advice! I heard another country song I’ve heard dozens of times about visiting hours in heaven… Oh wow, do I wish I could just talk to my Daddy again!
Someday we all will leave our temporary home. What will be left is our legacy – our love – our heart. Those we have touched. The memories we made. I pray I make the right decisions daily so that I leave as much of my heart, love, and truth as a legacy for those who love me.
We’ve been planning toward our next step – home ownership. We are grateful for the place we are currently renting, but because of the black mold infestation (it’s under control, but we don’t own the house, so can’t remove it) we are actively looking for a place to own. Somewhere that hopefully, we are smarter about and keep (I still miss my grapefruit trees that had just started fruiting after 7 long years!) forever.
Right now, we are still in the “finish paying off debt” stage, but with end-of-business debt down from over $14K to $800, we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel after a little over 2 years. (Yippee!!!!) Next step is to have 6 months of expenses in the bank. Then we start saving for a home.
We’re being really picky this time so it will be a while, but it is fun to discuss, think, and plan!
We have learned that the primary item isn’t size or neighborhood, but location. Driving isn’t pleasant for Louis (I don’t like the “wasted time” either, but I use it to dream up stories, interview fake people in my head, and pray.) so we thought about what type of location did we want. We wanted to minimize driving. But what are the constants in our life?
Not work… (Although I hope I keep these jobs until I retire – my plan as Operations Manager is to eventually shift to a few hours in the early mornings or two or three days a week and be available the rest of the time remotely.) Remote is awesome. I get more done in the mornings (like now, at 5am) and I really can’t stand being gone from my family this long (9.5 hours for my 8 hour day – 1.5 driving).
Not hobbies… because we love beach, tennis, walking, bicycling, surfing, swimming, watching nature, growing things… anything active and we usually make those things happen depending on what is around us or in our own yard.
Not even church… seriously, that’s once a week and most of our lives we spent driving an hour or so one way to the church we were called to.
School was it.
Don’t laugh! Yes, we homeschool. I mean St Johns County. The kids will be going to college at St. Johns River State – Christina and Becky are active now, but based on normal college-bound years, we will be driving to and from that campus for 20 years (if we aren’t blessed by any further editions of Tarts). We love St Johns County (yes, it’s extremely pricy and super hard to rent or buy land here, but it has been awesome home-schooling here and we love the people!). St Johns County has a fascinating, amazing array of trade school and college opportunities for our children – I mean, seriously, our teenagers are college-course-takers. Christina’s credit hours mean she’s entering her sophomore year of college as she enters her junior year of high school! Several young friends I know have graduated FCTC and entered directly into the job force at 17 & 18 years old. Two make more than me! So, educational opportunities are our standard constant that won’t change for quite some time. Plus St Johns County puts us equidistant from Embry-Riddle in Daytona and University of Florida in Gainesville (the goal schools of the first three).
This means, proximity and ease of driving to and from the campuses of St Johns River College and First Coast Technical College is the “location” part of our choice. SR 207 out to Hastings, up behind Masters just along the city boundary, over 16 and north along US1 to the old trash road east of Palencia: any open-rural or agricultural property in that range is fair territory.
Both of Louis’ grandmother’s houses are in this range (Wouldn’t one of those be so awesome? To live in your grandparent’s house!) and the house we currently live in is just off that perfect spot, but close enough that yes, we’d buy this land if we could (build a cozy house in the other corner of the land and knock this rotting thing down, but we love the land!) and I like Wildwood Drive. While driving Christina to CAP one day, we saw a “for sale” sign in the yard of a beautiful concrete block house off of Lewis Speedway & Woodlawn on a bit of land. Nice location. Louis pointed out that one was near CAP, which three more plan on joining.
Anyway, location, location, location: OR or AG in easy driving range of St Johns River & FCTC.
The realization that we will be driving students back and forth from one of two college campuses for 20 years… wow, just wow. That’s pretty cool.
I’ve moved around a lot. My favorite house, architecturally, was this lovely old place in Holly Hill, South Carolina that was built in 1904 or 06. It was amazing.
It was bright without ever turning a light on, even in the hallways. It was two-story with an attic that had three hidden rooms in it! It had three fireplaces, but the one in the kitchen had been closed off. The upstairs had a landing that opened to four bedrooms and two bathrooms with a linen closet on the north end. The bedrooms and bathrooms interconnected! You could enter the bedroom on the far southeast end of the landing, that connected to upstairs bathroom number one, which then entered the northeast bedroom, which had a large walk-in closet that had a sliding door into the huge walk-in closet for the northwest bedroom, of course then you are in the northwest bedroom which connects to the second bathroom, and finally enter the southwest bedroom. In addition to a door into the landing, this bedroom had a sliding door to a very hot upstairs sunroom full of screened windows that could be opened. Daddy used it as a craft room but said it was supposed to be an upstairs conservatory for growing plants. One such conservatory was also downstairs, but it was about three times as large as the one upstairs.
Downstairs had a large room that we turned into the family room. There was also a huge, long room that Daddy said was supposed to be for entertaining and opened to the outside portico with a huge, heavy, beautifully carved wooden door. There were also two dining rooms! One was giant and long like the front “entertaining” room. The three big rooms wrapped the front of the house, connected to each other with double French glass doors. The entertaining room opened to the hallway at the base of the wide staircase with beautifully carved handrails and supports with the same double French doors. Daddy said that was for “grand entrances” like for sixteenth birthdays and weddings. The huge dining room connected to the smaller dining room with a heavy carved-wooden swinging door on double hinges that we loved going through because each way was the “right way” to open it. The smaller dining room was my favorite; it was a long built-in bench around a sturdy oak built-in table that angled along the back wall and around the bright window that jutted out from the house. It was warm in the morning and brilliant all day. Unless you ate after dark, you never needed a light. Every room was brilliant with natural light that bounced off of the 12 foot high white ceilings and soaked into the warm wooden floors and trim.
Daddy said the house was made for entertaining. His childhood house in Savannah, Georgia, was supposedly almost the same as this house, minus the three 6 by 10 rooms in the attic (I considered them “small” in relation to everything else in that house although that is the size of the girls’ barracks now!). Daddy said those were servant’s quarters, and just like the interconnecting rooms and tiny, steep, circular back staircase; they were meant to keep the servants out of sight of everyone else. Oh, yes, one of the walk-in closets had a sliding door that led into the linen closet which was large enough to have the access ladder into one of the attic rooms. The main attic access was this giant pull-down folding staircase. It literally started about two feet from the top of the stairs in the upstairs landing and was a full, sturdy, staircase. Daddy said this was because the original occupants probably had heavy furniture to be moved up and down depending on the season. There was a giant fan in the attic that sucked all the air through the house – you had to open the three outside doors and could have flown a box-kite in the wind it created! This was likely to be used in the summer to get the warm air out before air conditioning was added, but Daddy used it in the winter to freeze the entire house. (He liked the air cold.)
The remaining rooms downstairs included the conservatory off of the huge entertaining room. This was Daddy’s favorite room because he and Mom filled it with plants and our birds. It was Robert’s (a parrot) favorite room too – probably his favorite room from all of our houses. It was about 30 feet long and at least 10 feet wide, more than half the size of the house I live in now! There was also a small “study” with a half bathroom under the stairs. (It had an angled room and we kids would run downstairs just to use this “cool” bathroom’s potty instead of the two upstairs!) Daddy turned the study into one Computer Room. This study was the entrance into the grand master bedroom. This bedroom was sprawling! It had deep, lush carpet and spread 15 by 30 feet! Daddy measured all of the big rooms out of curiosity, and I was just entering my “designing” phase so I measured everything and drew “plans” of that house. This bedroom had double walk-in closets that reminded me of the ones in Princess Mia’s bedroom – the “lady’s” closet had built-in shoe racks for nearly a hundred shoes (Mom’s five or six pairs looked so lonely there), long dress racks, a fold-out ironing board, three tiered racks for shorts, tops, and skirts, cubicles for jeans and such, and dresser-drawers for underwear! Mom used over half of her closet for box storage (there was plenty of partitioned storage space on top of the racks, Daddy said it was for luggage and trunks). The “gentlemen’s” closet was a modest 5 by 10 feet, but still that was huge to me! There was a giant bathroom adjoining. It had double sinks, double cabinets, a shower stall, and a bathtub that looked like a small pool! (We kids used it as a pool!)
And finally, the most important room in the whole house: the kitchen. This kitchen was the first I’d even seen with an island. The sinks were deep and wide. The whole turkey roasting pan fit in one side. But my favorite part was the custom cabinets – they unfolded like an accordion with perfect storage space for quart mason jars (which left regular pound veggie cans with a little breathing room). The kitchen opened into the small dining room so the spectators would join in conversation with the kitchen workers or watch the show.
It was built of sturdy concrete and red brick with real wood everywhere. I used this house as a base for my dream house because it taught me three important designs I loved;
There is never an excess of light and distributing it throughout a house can be aided by windows, glass interior doors, dutch doors, and bright paint.
Having multiple stories rather than one increases the available light and allows for extra living space with less wasted yard. (A three story building is awesome.)
Sturdy, heavy-duty materials are better at keeping weather out (We went through three hurricanes and three or four tropical storms while we were in that house!) and loud sounds out. (This house was on a busy county road yet we rarely heard the 18-wheelers going by.)
One day, I hope to have a similar home either to restore or build – I hoped I’d be able to raise my children in a smaller house designed bright, open, and interconnected like my favorite house, but I have enjoyed everywhere we’ve called home.
Think back to your favorite architecture, was it a childhood home? The home you are in now? A place you visited? Isn’t it neat to think about?
