The Closing
After our fun trip to the lake it was back to business as usual. We are smack dap in the middle of trying to get every item we have stockpiled into the big house moved out and nothing truly proves to you how much you have till you try to move it. We have. SO. MUCH. JUNK. Okay not all of it is junk but a lot is. We have probably managed to keep every item we have ever owned since birth. By we, I mean me. Brooklyn. I may be borderline hoarder/pack rat. It has taken us two 24 foot usuals, about 10 truck/trailer hauls, and there is still a couch left in that place. I can’t even begin to understand how I allowed it to get this bad. I feel for the garbage gentlemen who have had to deal with our pick up since this started because I have piled that curb every trash day. But after about a month of trying to empty it the place is finally empty and ready for it’s new owner.
It is incredibly bittersweet to say goodbye to this house. This is our very first house, the first place Hope ever called home, and been the venue for an incredible amount of social gatherings. It has lovingly been dubbed “Hotel Herman” because we used to have guests and friends stay with us so frequently. It has truly been an incredible place to call home for the past four years. But we have changed and our priorities are no longer to have the biggest house on the block in the best neighborhood close to restaurants and concerts and things the city offers. We want space to breathe and places to entertain our wildest dreams. A place for Hope to grow and roam nature and be able to call her own for generations. That’s why we moved back to the prairie.
So now that we are officially here and all of our things with us we have gotten to work. We had ordered several packets of seeds back a few months ago and now we are getting them started for a fall garden. We mostly have decided where the garden is going to go and how big we can make it as well as watering solutions. So we got some seed starting containers, soil, and started planting. We planted three kinds of corn, eggplant, squash, green beans, peas, broccoli, cabbage, and pumpkins. We forgot to buy popsicle sticks or label sticks though and had to get creative with some plastic spoons…hey you do what you gotta do. After getting all of those tucked in their tiny soil homes we sat them out by the barn to maximize their sun exposer and keep them away from the kittens.
Once the seeds where started we decided we needed to build an additional lean to for the lawn mower and four wheeler to live under. Not sure if you know but wood is so expensive right now! So something we have learned about this property is that my family has found ways to hide little…gems…around the tree lines. So we went shopping. On our expedition we were able to round up all the wood we needed to build this little lean to except the posts and a couple sheet metal sheets but not quite enough. Jaken got busy straight away after we payed his tools from the storage shed which we managed to fill literally as full as humanly possible. Thank you to my past self for making life difficult…But we got things gathered and hit the Home Depot for the remaining pieces we needed.
After about six hours of good solid manual labor a lean to was born! Only a couple hiccups were encountered and mostly just human error involving using the ladder as a shelf and then trapping it. But all in good fun it is done and the lawn mower fits nicely underneath it!
When we weren’t working we made sure to start teaching Hope the ropes on blogging and she is clearly smitten with the camera both in front of and behind. And with it being the Fourth of July I couldn't pass up on taking her photos with the red barn and blue “Forky” the tractor. Very patriotic gal we’ve got here. All in all its been a rather busy but productive time here at the ranch.
