OUR NEW HOME!!

So....here's the big plans we've been working on! We decided a few months back to look into buying land with my mom and dad to all live on. It makes sense for a lot of reasons to raise our children together; for starters, her youngest and my youngest (the twins) will only be 3 years apart (8 little girls all together, Lol!). With deciding to homeschool (at least for grade school) and just generally wanting cool kids, it seemed like a good plan. Plus we all have a desire to live somewhere more beautiful and be able to be more self-sufficient (have a HUGE garden, chickens, our own hunting land, etc). Both of our houses have been on the market (ours since the fall before we even talked about any of this). Their house just got an offer and is closing in 30 days! All we needed in order to get the mortgage on the land we wanted was for their house to sell. So even though our house hasn't sold yet, we are moving near **(an undisclosed place in WI, sorry my blog is still public)** onto an 8 acre property that abuts a state park on July 1! It's BEAUTIFUL and amazing and everyone is SUPER excited! There is a large amazing house on the property too that we are converting into basically two connected houses (we don't like each other THAT much to want to "live live" with each other :)). I'm just so grateful that everything is working out; we literally beat putting an offer on this property over some other buyers by just a day or two! We have a lot of work ahead of us and we still need our house to sell so we can use our equity to remodel and adjust the new house, but there is a lot of peace that came with things being mostly settled. My babies will have a bedroom settled before they are born, yay!! I know a lot of people will think we are weird and doing this is definitely breaking from the norm, but we know we aren't weird, so what does it matter, right!?  We want some peace and quiet, and every person I've heard stories from who grew up on a large amount of land just LOVED it.  I just can't wait to be able to be outside surrounded by beautiful hills and trees without seeing another person and watch my children play, work, hike, explore and learn on their very OWN land!

If you're still interested in hearing more, LOL:

The property has a long, long driveway that sneaks through a grove of trees. Then it opens up to sloping hill and some open space with the house kind of in the middle of the open space on the hill. There are two outbuildings, a 5-seater swingset made out of large branches/logs, a swimming pool, 2 neat oak (?) trees in the backyard equipped with a treehouse, and tons of space. If that isn't enough, a trail by the house opens up that you can follow into the back woods of the property. You can get deep enough that you can't even see the house anymore where it opens up a bit for a nice camping spot. Since it abuts a state park, there will be no developing around this land and it will stay untouched and beautiful for as long as the foreseeable future is.  The actual house is 15 years old and has a rustic/country but modern feel all-in-one.  The house is  what I would call a 2 story house, though it probably has some technical term because the front side of the "1rst story/basement" is underground/against the hill.  All the other 3 sides are not buried at all.  This "1rst story" will be the Weber's house.  We have our own entry through the garage, 3 large bedrooms, and large living room with patio doors out to the backyard with half of the other space downstairs unfinished.  The unfinished space is already roughed out (i.e. piped) for a large bathroom, then two more large spaces are left.  One space will become our kitchen/dining room.  The other space comes off of the garage and is the only space downstairs that doesn't have a full window and feels a little basement-y.  It will have to stay some storage(food storage)/furnace/etc space but will become another smaller living area for us...we're thinking toy/TV room.  And THAT is only half the house!  I'll leave the rest for my mom to describe since that is her house, haha!  It is a 40ish minutes away from James' work, but once we are able to make some minor changes to one of the outbuildings and get cable run, he will actually be able to have his own little office space that he can work at home from about 95% of the time.  We hear it's a really great ward too!  It all seems surreal and too good to be true doesn't it!?  Okay, maybe just for us :)