Several years ago, our family moved into a 100+ year-old farmhouse.
Now, I should mention that we physically moved the house to land outside of town because, if you’re going to go through all of the work to renovate an old house, you might as well pick it up and move it somewhere really pretty.
Or, it’s entirely possible that we are just OUT OF OUR MINDS.
Either way, Dave and I have always had a particular affinity for neglected old homes. We love resurrecting their former beauty and charm. This particular house had been slated to be demolished and replaced with a parking lot {I know it sounds like a script from a made-for-TV movie but it’s the truth}. Of course, we couldn’t bear for this unique old home to be destroyed. Over the years, we had walked through it many, many times reflecting on it’s potential and imagining the former glory of the stately old home. Oh, if the walls could talk. You could practically feel the laughter and love seeped into the old wood floors. I had declared the house to have good, solid bones. {Am I the only one who does these things?}
We decided to take on the project. This led to the sale of the Victorian home that we had recently built downtown {and planned to never move from} and the decision to pack up and move to our newly acquired renovation.
City restrictions prohibited moving a house from one spot in the city limits to another. The obvious question here is, “how did they ever come up with such a law? Was there a surplus of families moving houses all around at some point in our town’s history?” I have no idea. But, lucky for us, the restriction forced us to move the house out to the land Dave had purchased years before. He originally bought this land not knowing what we would ever do with it. Now, we had a vision – this is where we would raise our babies.
In December of 2012, we moved the house.
The big move {read more HERE & HERE}.
Prepping the house for the move took a little over a month. The actual moving day lasted for hours… starting very early in the morning.
After the initial move, the house had to be placed on an already prepped foundation and then pieced back together. Next up, the entire inside needed to be gutted and the real work was ready to begin.
The restoration took a little over a year.
Five years later, our family had grown from a family of four to a soon-to-be family of seven! As soon as we learned of our little surprise miracle baby on the way, we knew it was time for another remodel. The three bedrooms and super small kitchen and non-existent laundry room weren’t very functional for our crew any longer.
We renovated the house in three months time and moved back in a few months before little Luke was set to enter the world. We added a new laundry room, reworked the kitchen layout, updated the guest bath, moved the girls into newly added-on rooms and created a nursery. It was a really big undertaking but now the house feels like home and will work for our family for many, many years to come.
We love this quirky, old home with all of it’s odd angles and nooks. I couldn’t imagine life anywhere but right here on the farm.
