The fall of 2016 brought a terrible drought and we couldn’t burn any of the piles we wanted. We had to let them sit there and dry out further until late winter and early spring of 2017, when we were finally able to start burning them. We had hoped that would be the time we would be starting to build our house. It didn’t quite work out that way though. Imagine that-a plan of ours not working. No! Say it ain’t so! That NEVER happens to the Carter’s!!! Ha! Yeah, right. As soon as we bought the property everyone started asking, “When are you building? When are you moving? Have you started building your house yet? When do you plan to start?” Logical questions. Expected questions. Question we were asking ourselves actually, but we didn’t have the answers. Actually, we still don’t have the answers.
We had this lovely house site cleared, leveled and just waiting for a house to be built. Where’s the house???
The short version: Our initial plan was to build our house by the spring of 2016. Didn’t happen. Summer maybe? Maybe by fall 2016? Still didn’t happen. Winter maybe? Nope. Maybe by spring 2017? Nope. It is now almost summer 2017. We are still waiting. Sometimes patiently …sometimes not so patiently, but we are trying!
This is the house site still empty in April 2017. (Big sigh…..) Those kids are adorable though and they have fun running and playing on the house site.
The Long Version: From the beginning we had a plan. We thought it was a good plan too! It just didn’t work out. None of it worked out actually. We were going to make x amount of dollars from logging the property to start building the house. Didn’t happen. We didn’t make a fraction of what we were promised with the logging and the clean up was horrible. So we didn’t have that extra money to use to start the house.
When we were logging the property Maylin decided she wanted to be a Logger, Cam would be her assistant, and Maleah her driver. She has since moved on to wanting to be a pretzel maker.
We were planning to sell some land we had bought about 10 years ago and use that money to help build our house. Didn’t happen. We still haven’t sold that land due to some issues out there with some less than perfect neighbors. That’s not really their fault though since we are the ones that bought the land with them as neighbors. The problem seems to be selling it with them as neighbors…Oh, well! Anyway, we still haven’t been able to sell the land and use that money for the house. Are you seeing a pattern of things not working out here? Yeah, we saw that too and it made my cry! Jim was promised some huge contract work that would bring in quite a bit of extra money so we could finish building the house. Didn’t happen. The company had extra expenses come up and put off Jim indefinitely. Well, without all that extra money we couldn’t really afford to build another house and have a second mortgage on top of the money we were spending to build the farm. So we tried to find a new plan to move out there. Let me just stop here and say that we have got to be either the worlds worst planners (because our plans don’t work out and we have to change plans all the time) or the world’s best planners (because we have had to plan differently so many times!!!). OK, time for new plans. Again. We considered selling the house we live in but then where would we live? And to be honest, I can’t imagine trying to keep my house and property clean enough for a realtor to show at the drop of a hat. I do have 3 kids (4 if you count Jim) and quite a few crazy critters around the place. We actually live in our house, so it is never clean. It seemed we were out at the new property so much that our housework and chores often suffered, resulting in a less than spotless house and yard. It was normally waaay less than spotless if I’m being honest. If our house sold quickly, we wouldn’t have anywhere for the horse and cow we currently have to go. We could put up fencing but there wasn’t any grass for them to eat and we didn’t need the extra expense of feeding them hay for their main diet all summer and winter.
We could have put up fencing but we couldn’t very well bring our animals to live in pastures without grass. Well, I guess we could have, but that would be an added expense for hay.
We looked at singlewide homes and doublewide homes so we could get out there quicker and sell our home but mobile homes are not cheap. And what would we do with it once we built our house? Were we really ready for a rental house? Where would we put it? Close to where we wanted to build our house? Or farther away in case we kept it as a rental house? If we put it farther away that meant an extra expense of another well, septic, driveway. That stuff adds up fast!
We thought about putting a mobile home over by the cell tower because it already had a separate driveway, but it would’ve required a separate well and septic.
So we started looking at campers. We still do actually. They are easy to move out there and we could move one out fast too. We could hook up to the exsisiting well and septic and not have an extra expense there. But how do we fit 5 people and a large dog into a camper for an indefinite amount of time? Would we all survive???? Where do we put clothes and school books, Jim’s business stuff, toys, and all the million other things that we have in our house that we don’t realize we use everyday? It would be great to downsize some and declutter but a camper seemed a little extreme. I was a little scared! Every option had a different set of up and downs that changed on a daily basis. Every week we would talk and discuss the options again and every week we found ourselves stuck without a good option. We had no idea what to do, so we prayed for patience and guidance. We prayed a lot. Then we prayed some more asking for clear guidance and answers. Nearly a year and a half later we are still praying for patience and guidance. We still have ideas, but we feel strongly that the Lord has not opened the right doors for us yet. We will keep working hard and looking for ways to move out there. Most of all, we will keep praying and seeking the Lord’s will and His timing for our plans. I am only human so Wow is that hard for me….
This is our current house out there…
Maybe it could’ve been Princess Acres Farm after all??? I mean, we’ve already built the castle!
