Back in 2010 my husband and I decided to buy a house. However, buying a house is HARD!! We looked at so many and just never felt like we found the right one. Now, let me preface this by saying we are NOT that picky! I just refused to buy something where the ceiling was caving in or move into something that smelled horrid like a cat pee house. YUCK! I am sure our realtor was just as exhausted with us as we were exhausted at looking. We bounced from apartment to apartment until we finally felt like we found the perfect little house. We eventually signed papers in 2012 and started to move in. At this point in our lives we had not yet had any of our children. They were right around the bend!
Fast forward through one second trimester miscarriage, and three healthy babies later, (blessed through it all – even the hard stuff), and we were settled. We knocked out a wall for an open floor plan, moved kids bedrooms more than a dozen times (remember that itch from our intro page it shows here) and made great friends with all our neighbors. Our housing journey was not without its struggles, but we were happy.
Remember that itch i was talking about before? well here it came BIG TIME! we LOVED looking at tiny homes. We loved the thought of not being tied to a mortgage for 30 years. But how on earth could we possibly do that? I mean we live in Maryland where it gets cold enough for pipes to freeze. There are no long term campgrounds near us and if we bought a property and put a tiny home on it would we just be back where we started just smaller.
However, God had plans for us that we had no idea were in the works. My husband got reacquainted with a home school family we knew. Turns out they were looking for some help. They lived on a farm with their family of 9 (yes my friend is AMAZING) so after many conversations a trial was set in motion. From March until September we lived primarily in our 20′ StarCraft expandable camper. We did laundry at our house but spent most of our days helping out around the farm and sleeping listening to the foxes at night.
The 6 month trial was sufficiently successful that we came to a decision point. What should we do with the house and our lives? Do we keep it and rent it out? Do we love this enough to jump in with both feet? I guess the obvious answer to that was YES because here we are three years later and we haven’t looked back. It hasn’t always been been easy (more on that later) but I can honestly say that I LOVE IT, and so does my family.