afarmhousereborn.com

To our many friends who have faithfully followed this blog since we started it way back in 2013, Thank you for making this blog such a fun adventure for Lynne and me to share with you. Our farmhouse is undoubtedly an important part of our lives (and has been for the last 5.5 years), but it wasn’t until recently that we understood that God’s plan was for this farmhouse to be a home for kids in foster care. But no matter what preparation God has done on our house, we still only have two hands, and we want our hands to be holding children instead of blogging away. As I write this, two amazing little foster kids are sleeping under our roof in addition to Evie and Wilson, and I can’t help but think that I want to serve all four of them instead of serving the (never-ending) to do list that comes with an old farmhouse.

The first thing we did was greet guests with homemade pig noses to put on by the front door: It was hysterical to see the little party guests walking around with pig noses! The paper plates were just too cute for me not to buy: When I was pregnant with Evie, I did yoga all the time with a fellow pregnant momma named Ashley East, and we got to know each other through the aches and pains that come with growing a human. She asked for Great Harvest Bread to be at her birthday party and of course it was a hit. What I love so much about Great Harvest Bread’s products are they source their wheat from American farms that do not use glyphosate, meaning people like our little Wilson who are otherwise “gluten intolerant” can eat them with no problems.

As I wrote in my last blog post, when we took up the old sisal rug in our dining room, the floors were coated in the disintegrated rubber backing from the rug. That took up around 75% of the grossness, leaving us with patches like this one: We then took some scrapers and had a family scraping party. It was oddly satisfying scraping it off the floor because it came off pretty neatly most of the time and left a nice ‘before and after’ sentiment each time a patch went away. After we went through and scraped to our hearts’ content, we ShopVac-ed again, then we had another family party (of which we forgot to take pictures): everyone got kitchen towels dampened with water and started scrubbing the floors.

truly it reminds me of when older women dye their hair for a long time and then finally embrace and allow the gray hair to grow, and they gain such a beautiful look of timelessness because of it. After the walls were painted we decided to pull up the sisal rug that’s been on the dining room floor since we moved in. Since we’ve more or less been using the dining room for storage, we didn’t really care about the gross rug, but once we decided to paint the walls and make the room use-able we decided it was time to replace the rug. to carefully get the dirt off and luckily a lot of the rug fibers that had come unattached from the rug were loose and came up with the shop-vac suction.