OUR New Home Design & Farm Update
Good morning from a rather warm day for February in Iowa! This time of year, just about anything is possible with the weather. Will it be a -60 degree ‘polar vortex’ day? Or a 50 degree day, prompting some of the life-long Iowans to bring out their shorts? We just never know.
Looking ahead to future projects helps get me through these cold winter months, and today I am sharing the plans for our personal home that we plan to get started on toward the end of this year, and where we will be living in the interim!
As you probably know, we have been living in a college apartment since we sold our home in April, and while it’s a functional space it’s also teaching us a lot about how to live minimally (and that we have to pick up everything every night or risk tripping over it in the morning!) Our farm has an enormous machine shed (originally for farm equipment) that we will be taking a portion of and converting into a guest cottage, and we will also live in this space while we build our home.
We already had planned to put in a large canning kitchen and extra bathroom as well as an office in the machine shed, so we are just tweaking those plans a bit and doing that project first. This way we can live on our property, have all of our stuff in one place, and work on our home as we have time. When our house is done, this guest cottage will work great for extra storage, visitors, large cooking operations, etc. We recently got to work on the guest cottage, as you can see below….hello there in-floor heat!
In-floor heat install day
Framing begins!
Next up after the guest cottage is the new & improved ‘Critter Cottage’ as I am calling it. It’s a small, 12x20ish building that will have our dogs on one side and our chickens & guinea fowl on the other side. Obviously we will have to separate the bird hunting dogs from the birds to ensure there are no mishaps, so each side will have their own entrance/exits. The dogs are currently in a similar sized building on the property (with their own fenced area attached) but that building needs to come down as it’s not insulated well and doesn’t have electricity, and in general is less than ideal.
Original ‘critter cottage’. New building will be directly in front of this one.
Stage #3 of building at the farm includes our house and gardens, which are obviously the most expensive and time consuming projects. For these reasons we have been extensively planning, creating drawings, consulting, etc and I think we finally have settled on what we want. It’s been a long road, but here are some of the preliminary images.
The entirety of our plans for the farm are more of a 5 year process, and the order in which items get accomplished will probably vary a bit due to a variety of reasons. But regardless, each hour of work we accomplish is moving us toward our goal, and I cannot wait to see what has transpired even one year from now!
It feels good to have a plan, even if it’s a really long and complicated one! :)
We’ll chat again soon, for now try and hold out the rest of this winter…Spring is ALMOST here!
Cheers,
Rachael
The Final Porch Photo
It’s been about a week since we visited our home for the last time, picked up the final items, and took one last photo on the front porch.
The last porch pic!
It’s been a bittersweet experience, leaving the first home we built together from the ground up, our child’s first home, our beloved dog Mia’s last home.
We are excited to move on to our acreage and spread out…to watch the summer sunset’s with sweet tea and fireflies…to chase chickens, play in the creek, and enjoy the wildlife. I mean, first we have to build a house out there, but we will get started on that soon.
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
We have plenty of exciting projects this summer, and I can’t wait to start sharing them with you. Now that we have a bit more time (and aren’t in the middle of moving) I will be catching up.
We’ll chat soon!
-Rachael
Iowa Winter Landscape
The amount of snow we have had this year in Iowa is just nuts, but there is a slight silver lining with this new white landscape: gorgeous photos! Whether it’s wildlife, barns, old homes, or farm fields, Iowa photographers on social media are really taking advantage of this snow.
Each Sunday, I try to highlight one photo on my Instagram page, and I am rounding up a few of my favorites over the last few months and sharing them here with you today.
An old barn, by Iowa photographer Doug Craigmile
These pheasants were captured by Iowa photographer Judene Gardner
Captured by Iowa photographer Deb O’Brien
An old barn, by me!