The Barn

The barn slab has been poured!

The beams are going up.

It's starting to look like a building.

The walls are up!

A view from the back.

The front of the barn. You can just see our camper to the side. We lived in that for almost a month while we were waiting on the barn to be finished.

The barn's "front door." It feels a little more like home with a welcome mat and some potted plants.

Beginning Pictures

Welcome to our little spot in the country.

Our driveway - it's nice to have caliche put down.

This will be the house site. We've cleared some cactus, but that is about it at this point.

 

 

Here is the barn site. We'll start it soon!

The cleared cactus has to go somewhere for now. And, yes, I got to use the tractor to help clear all this junk and push it out of the way. Jim just might have lost his job of using the John Deere. It was more enjoyable than I thought it would be.

The nice thing about clearing out the mesquite to make room for our house and barn is that we are getting a good supply of firewood.

Aah, yes...the Ditch Witch. We rented this to dig the ditches for our electric and water lines. Jim rather enjoyed using this piece of machinery.

One of the resulting ditches

Getting ready to put the pipe together for the electric line.

Finished

 

 

Woohoo! We have a water meter! It's the little things, ya know.

The sap on the trees looked neat, so, of course, I had to take a picture.

The kids relaxing on the kayak that Troy bought at the Knight's garage sale.

Hopefully, the upper tank will fill up soon and the kids can test out that kayak.

Well...we are under way out on the farm. Land has been cleared and we are gearing up to make the move. We can't wait!

About to be...on the Farm!

A couple of years ago we bought a bit of land just outside town with the hope of building a house on it one day. Well...that day has arrived! We put our current house on the market in June with the expectation of it taking a while to sell due to the current housing market. It was on the market for about 6 weeks. The sale will be final in September. Things are moving forward a bit faster than we expected, but we're not complaining! We have not, however, started to build our house yet. That will not get under way until the sale of our current house is final. We have, though, begun work on "the barn," aka a glorified shed. This barn will be our residence while we build our house. Yes - the barn will have a bathroom and a kitchenette. It will not have heat and air, but it will be well insulated! If the heat gets to be too much, we can always take refuge in our camper for a while. We decided that since most rentals around here require a year lease and are more expensive than our mortgage payment, we would rather live in the barn and  have that money go toward the new house. It will also allow us to keep most of our furniture in the barn instead of renting a storage unit. The only exception is our piano, but that will temporarily reside at my brother's home. So, I am getting used to the idea of living in one large room with my five favorite people for a few months. I'm sure there will be challenges, but I'm actually looking forward to it.

This blog has been pretty silent for a while, but I'm hoping to keep up with it again and document our transition from city people to country folks. And, of course, provide a record and pictures of our house building project. So here we go...we're about to truly be on Old MacDonald's Farm!