In spring 2017, we really felt that the Lord was leading us to trust him. Boy, can that be hard! Sometimes the road the Lord wants you to take isn’t perfect-or smooth-and sometimes the end isn’t always visible from your starting point. So you rely on your faith. You trust God to lead you, regardless of how scary it seems. We put our faith in the Lord and trusted him with our dreams and our finances really.
Jim had really felt led to trust the Lord and start the building process last fall, but my fears held us back. Our family of 5 is supported by a small business, so we aren’t rolling in the money and we don’t have guaranteed income. So to start a venture like building a house without all the money to finish it, seemed a BIG stretch to me. I like to have a plan. A detailed plan….in writing please. A plan that works perfectly would be awesome! But…that’s just not how it works for us though, is it?
Jim is much better at blind leaps of faith than I am. I mean he is Saint Jim after all! He had spent a lot of time praying, researching, and thinking about the options over the last year. He felt that we should start the building process and take it one step at a time. I love my husband. I also trust my husband, so I agreed…..eventually. It just took me a lot longer and a lot more time spent in prayer before I felt the same way Jim did though.
Our plans change so much sometimes I wonder why we actually bother making plans though! Our original plan had been to build a simple 2000 sq foot house. That plan had involved Jim getting some contract work, logging the rest of the farm and selling some land we owned. Yeah, you’ve heard that story before, right?
Well, since none of that happened we couldn’t really afford to build a house that big without a mortgage. So we came up with a new plan. Build a smaller house. A 900 sq foot house. Feel free to laugh! I know I sometimes laugh hysterically when I think about living in a house that size with 3 kids! Oh wait, maybe that thought just makes me hysterical period! However, we had thought about it and prayed about it for almost a year. We really felt this was the way the Lord was leading us. So we had new house plans drawn up. House plans that cut the total square footage of the house in half. It also cut the cost of the house nearly in half to a price that was much more affordable to us.
I should probably explain that this house was not going to be a fancy house. In fact, we wanted it to be as simple and as rustic as possible since we planned to use it as a vacation rental one day. We have so many plans for the farm and having a rental cabin is one of them. I’ll explain more about some of our plans in another post. We have so many plans it might take a while…
Back to downsizing our house. First, we had to go to the planning department and get the new plans approved. I was afraid they were going to think we were crazy changing our minds already. Nope, they acted like it happens all the time. Such nice people! They even told us we were due a refund! Did I mention how nice those people are???? The fee we initially paid was based on a 2000 sq foot home. Since our house was only going to be 900 sq feet we got a refund of over $300! Sweeeet!!! I love those people!
Then we had to go to the health department and get the new house plans approved for a smaller septic system. The original house was going to have 4 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms, but the smaller house was only going to have 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. They okayed a smaller septic system and we were set to go! This was a great thing because Joe came and installed the smaller septic system the next week!
Hopefully, now we can get on with the building process and finally get moved out there! Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. It’s the Carters! Nothing ever goes according to plan for them. And you are probably correct!!! Only time will tell…
Ok, I don’t really have a reason for putting sunflower pictures in here…
However, the sunflowers started blooming at exactly the time we started building our new, smaller house. No joking! The day the plumbers showed up to start, the first sunflower bloomed. I am going to take that as a sign of great things to come!
