Living the Dream

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the before & after of the room we are using now in the barn. I thought I would look back at what has been done on the other side of the barn. This is a before look since we haven't made it to the "final" after yet. Slowly but surely it is changing.

Earlier I posted pics of how it looked when the Amish lived here. The following pics are from the time we closed on the farm until now.

This is the room that all the machines were in when the Amish owned it. There is another room (on the west side) that was also used as a sewing/bedroom. The wall you see divides them.

This is the view facing east of the same room.
The doorway you see is what is now our living area. It really is a huge space. The barn measures about 38 x 66. With three floors, that's a lot of square footage. Since we have the custom cabinet business, that will take up a big chunk of space. Our living area will only be around 900 to 1000 square feet on the main level with guest bedroom/craft area upstairs. Until we get the upstairs done, the room we live in right now will be for guests. Here is our son Shane, tearing down the dividing wall. Having no electric in the barn made it easier since we didn't have to worry about wires. The power tools we used were run by a generatorThe wall is down. It really opened up the room. We were also working on the windows.
They needed painting & some were warped.

That day, Shane built some walls for our "bathroom". Steve made a sawdust toilet that worked fine for an indoor toilet. It was an adjustment getting used to that but it wasn't all that bad. It had a regular toilet seat & was at the same height as a "normal" toilet. Better than going outside to an outhouse when it is cold outside. Now we have indoor plumbing which was celebrated by calling our kids & flushing the toilet so they could join us for the momentous occasion! The oval object on the wall is a solar light.
A small panel is mounted outside the window.Blue jean insulation was added to the wall adjacent to our "living room".
We only have heat from the wood stove in that area so we made it as warm as we could.The only way to get to the basement was by the stairs that were under a heavy door on the floor. They were pretty shakey & I always worried about the door falling on my head. Here we had already taken down the basement stairs & were using a ladder.After many hours of planning the layout of the living area that we wanted,
Steve started working on the new basement stairs.It was spring & was warming up, so we turned our efforts to outside projects & the garden. Then the accident kept us from traveling to the farm for a while & we had a lot of mowing, weed pulling & tending to the garden when we did get back to the farm. In August, Steve put up the bathroom walls. By October, we had plumbing.
After a year and a half of using a sawdust toilet & a solar shower,
having a real bathroom is HUGE!
And that brings us to the new picture window & French door.And finally the stairs.
This is where we are now in the process. Last weekend we set a couple new support posts & this weekend we hope to put up some 2x4 walls in the new living area. As I go through all these pictures, it brings back all the dreams we had that got us to this point.
We have to step back every once in a while & remember, we are living that dream.
And as excited as we are to finish the house,
we know that what we are doing now will be looked back on and cherished.