Work Party

The icky coop, before:


and after!

This weekend our family hosted a work party (is that an oxymoron?) at our house. If you wanted to help tear down a chicken coop or shovel some dirt in the garden, you showed up at 10. If you just wanted to come for lunch, you showed up at 12. I had kitchen duty, we fed people well with hamburgers, hot dogs, beans, potato salad (which got a shoutout over the pulpit yesterday!), veggies and chips. Including us, there were 32 people over at the house and it was really nice to have people help us and also nice to have people come visit.

I was really touched by the fact that people walked into our little home and said "I like your house"...that's really never happened before because we used to live in a decrepit mobile home. It was also fun to have of bunch of kids running around, they went fishing in our ponds and actually caught some fish! The weather was beautiful as well, not too hot or buggy.

I feel pretty blessed to have such nice people at church that would come and help us out. We've had people wanting to come help us for a long time, so it was nice to finally do that. It was a really nice weekend.

Our branch president knocked down the coop with his tractor in all of two minutes and six seconds- it would have taken much longer to do it by hand! I am beat after the weekend- it was a lot of work to get the house and yard ready and a lot of work to cook and clean up! Naptime!

Aerial View

In a perfect world, I would have started this blog at the same time that I moved to Pennsylvania, but that didn't happen, so I may go backwards at times and talk about older things and pictures you haven't seen. I scanned a copy of an aerial photo that was given to us by the people who used to own this place, I labeled it. If you click on it, it should become larger to see. The barn does not exhist anymore, it burnt down in August of 2006 while my parents were in the middle of purchasing this place. We were pretty bummed, but I think we'll build my dad a shop in a better location and put a picnic area where the barn was right next to the large pond. The two large fields grow alfalfa, men come and bale it in the summer.

We also own a rather nice mobile home on the back corner of the property- the people before us sold off several acres to a man who put a mobile on it and used it when he hunted. The mobile is fairly new and is in really good shape. We use it for storage and it will make a nice guesthouse. I'm organizing a crafting area in there as well! I'm excited to have a space for all my scrapping stuff out of the way! We also inherited a bunch of furniture with it (we already had plenty!) including an aluminum interrogation chair (the man was a cop). So, if you ever watch a cop show and notice the metal chairs they sit on in the questioning room, we've got one!

There's my little house, it's 900 square feet, not much bigger than what we used to live in. We're trying to live civilized and not junk it up too bad. Laura and I still share a room, but it's a little bigger than the 8' by 10' room we had before. I get a bookcase! I never had a bookcase to myself before! The kitchen, dining room and living room are all basically one room with a vaulted ceiling, then there's two bedrooms and a bathroom off of the living room. I really wished we could have had a little bigger house (two bathrooms would be nice!) but I can see why my dad fell in love with this property. It's the best out of what he looked at, and he and my mom looked at a LOT of houses!

The other picture is of the "Liz" pond...the stream feeds it and it feeds the slightly smaller pond named after my sister Laura. We have fun naming things, we're trying to figure out a good name for the long road that goes from our house to the mobile.

I took the pictures of the house and pond in October 2007, we had a beautiful fall.