Flashback Friday - In the Beginning

 

Five years ago, my husband and I found a fifteen acre farm that was in foreclosure located within a short drive to both my in-law’s home and to my mother’s home in Florida.

Over the years of our marriage, we had always talked about having a farm, but it was mostly a distant plan sometime in the far off future.  However, this property was in a perfect location and had so much potential that we did not hesitate to purchase it for what we thought was a song.

Overshadowed by the euphoria and newness of home ownership, we did not realize that the property needed quite a bit of work done to the home and to the outbuildings in order to have a functional hobby farm. It was not anything too drastic, we thought, so we dove head first into our new farming lifestyle.

Shortly after closing was completed and all of the ownership paperwork was signed, we went through the house and the property with a fine-toothed comb to derive at the major projects that would need to be done.

The well pump that provided water to the home and properly only worked part of the time, so a new one was needed. There was an old barn/garage that needed to be torn down and a new one erected. There was a chimney and fireplace that was separating from the back wall of the house which needed to be removed and the wall re-bricked. The cement patio under the chimney was deeply cracked and needed to be replaced. There was a hole in the roof where the chimney had torn free that needed repair.

The list went on and on. It was a proverbial “house of cards”, waiting to fall down if the wrong part of it  was removed.

My husband and I were not working at “real” employment at the time and decided to undertake the projects that we were capable of doing. We estimated that the bulk of the work could be done within a few months. After a  few weeks of working on the projects and remodeling part of the home, it soon became apparent that the updates to the homestead were not trivial in either time or expense and I soon found myself taking on a computer consulting job to pay for ever expanding costs.

Thankfully the computer consultant position allowed telecommuting, so I worked from home. With my husband overseeing, we “farmed” out much of the heavy manual labor projects to building contractors and had no issues with getting the jobs completed on time and on budget.

The highlights of the major projects included a new well pump installed, the old barn/garage torn down and a new garage erected, new gutters installed on the garage and home, as well as a screened in porch added to the back of the house on top of the newly poured concrete that replaced the old, broken slab that once existed.

The projects  that we completed ourselves included interior sheet-rocking, painting and trim work along with constructing a knee-high tall brick wall on the back patio where the screened in patio would attach.   

How hard could laying bricks be?

Well, laying bricks is very hard ... Especially when you have never done it before.  But, we found some instructional video on the Internet and had also watched the masonry contractor who had torn down and rebuilt the back wall of the house.  So, we thought we were up for the task. A couple of days and a couple of false starts later, we successfully built a sturdy brick structure that the screened-in porch could attach to.

To this day, I am still very proud of our efforts and the work we put into our first brick-laying project.

The end result below was a nice new concrete patio on the back side of the house, with a screened-in section attached to the knee-high brick wall.

Not bad for an I.T. Geek who turned into a Farm Girl Freak.