Our Hillbilly Home - Finishing Touches

This story is about how we got started with our farm several years ago...I was chatting with a friend one day and talking about how we got our house, and she wanted to see some photos so I decided to write the story for my blog and share photos instead of trying to e-mail a bunch to her. If you missed the first part of this story, you can find the links to all the parts on my links page.
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It was a busy summer in 2004 for us. When we weren't traveling doing our warranty work we were spending our time at the farm trying to finish the house as much as possible so we could get moved. DH's knees were giving him more trouble, so we knew we needed to get away from the steps we had in the other house...plus needed to get moved, before he had to have another surgery on them in the fall so he could come home to the farm and no steps, to recover.

We got busy painting the rooms as we could including the trim, since it had been painted before it was faster to paint it, than to try to strip it down to have the pretty wood colored trim I would have liked. Besides the stripper is a killer, and taking all the trim off and outside would have torn up more of the plaster...so we settled on paint for the trim instead.

We got the rooms that would be mostly white done first, so we could start using them. My brother came over and installed some flooring for us in the two bedrooms and my office. Once they were done, we moved out of the cabin and started living in the house when we were on the farm...that gave us the cabin for storage so we could keep bringing things from our old house every time we came to the farm. We have a lot of junk, so knew we needed to move as much before the actual move as we could.


My office got set up first thing, so I could do the business things while we were at the farm...because we didn't spend enough time at home to have time to keep up with it there.


We basically lived in the kitchen, although we did have our bedroom set up, but we had chairs in the kitchen to relax in, so the other rooms could be worked on without always moving things around.

We had help now and then from my brother, Dad and DH's sister...and eventually had things done enough to move in. The final thing that was done, was to sand down the wood floors and apply some varnish to them. We worked on one room at a time...and the last coat was applied to the last room just before we left to go back home the weekend before we planned on moving.

I had left earlier than DH since we had both the car and truck here that time, so I could get home and get laundry started since we had to do some traveling that week. DH was going to put the last coat on and follow me home...and the next time we would see the house, would be when we were moving in!


Finally moving day got here, and we arrived at the farm with the loaded Uhaul. We came in to see how the floors looked, since they had had plenty of time to dry...and found a footprint in one of them. It seems DH had somehow walked on the wet floor, and didn't get all his prints brushed out...so we had one or two dried into the varnish. We never did sand it out, it gives us a funny story to tell, and when the light is just right, we can see them in my sewing room.

By the end of August 2004 we were living on the farm. When we bought the farm, we had no idea we would be able to be living there so soon, but God led the way for us to be able to, even helping with an extremely mild winter (least the first half), so we were able to get the house fixed up soon enough to move in before DH had to have knee surgery. I'm extremely thankful to God for his many blessings and leading us so we could get out of the small town we were living in, and back on the farm.

There are a few more photos in my Hillbilly home set on flicker of the freshly painted rooms if you want to see them. (I don't have photos of all the rooms since some of them are just white paint but there are a few more...plus more of my office and the kitchen.) I am hoping to get some after we moved photos in the set to but haven't managed to yet.

Stay tuned for What's a farm without animals...

...next time on "Our Hillbilly Home".
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More will come once I get the photos gathered, and words written...please forgive the fact that I'm clearly NOT a "writer" AND the time it could take for the next part to show up...a day, a week, a month or... God forbid... a year.
Next installment is here.