Our fifth wheel is here! Picture post

On Thursday this week we took possession of our trailer!  

  

We put it in an RV park halfway between our current apartment and the land we are in a contract on. Here is our first look at the big guy!

  

I think we got one of the best spots in the park. This is the view out the front door. There’s a wooden patio, a spot for a grill, and a grassy area shaded by six huge crepe myrtles. 

  

Our king sized bed!

  

The sink has these awesome sink covers so that when you’re not using the sink, it becomes one large counter. I discovered the genius of this the first day. Love it. 

  

We were very glad to get a freestanding table and chairs. They’re cute too! Our couch is right next to the table. 

  

This was a surprise. We thought this area would be a bench with a bookshelf and small cupboard above. Instead we got a 50″ TV, an electric fireplace and four large cabinets. I think it’s really nice! We will probably pull out the fireplace (hello? It’s summer in Texas. A fireplace is 110% useless). 

  

Two adorable little helpers on the couch. 

  

This was another surprise! This is the girls’ room. We thought this area was a bunk on top and a sleeper sofa under. Instead there is a third bed below, which is totally perfect. Emily, who is two, can sleep here instead of us having to move her rather large toddler bed into the space and figure out what to do with an extra sofa. 

 

Plus, we took the extra mattress off the third bunk and put it on the bunk on the other side, which made it thick enough to attach the bed safety device. Now Ellie can sleep there safely! She LOVES her bunk, too. The child loves caves and tents so this enclosed area is making her little heart so happy. 

We were going to spend a night or two there and then go back to the apartment and pack some more. But once we were out there we decided to just start living there and not go back and forth. 

I love it. I love it a lot more than I thought I would. It’s well designed, but somewhat poorly/cheaply built, so Andrew is already fixing things and improving stuff. I can see us living there for a few years, no problem. 

It’s definitely hard to pare down our belongings, but I recently read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo, and it’s absolutely living up to its title. Her premise is that everything in your home should make you happy, or spark joy. So, category by category, you go through every one of your belongings and discard everything that does not spark joy. I’ve done clothing, books, and most of the paper. And also the girls’ toys. That was IMMENSELY helpful! Our clothes fit in the tiny closet and tiny drawers. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get to my kitchen stuff, so I’m trying to go through it as I move, which is kinda stressful. But I’ll get it! 

Laser hair removal experience

Words that describe me: hippie, urban farmer, low-maintenance. Not really the kind of person I would assume would want laser hair removal. But after my kids were born, having stubble on my legs triggered a strange overstimulated reaction. I was being touched like 90% of the time by my kids, and having irritating hair on my legs pushed my senses into overload. So I just quit shaving for like a year and a half. I didn’t love the way it looked but I hated the way stubble felt even more. 

I’d been eyeing laser hair removal on Groupon. One day when they were having a 30% off deal I jumped at it. I’ve had two lower leg treatments and I’m really happy so far. It takes about ten minutes per leg and, to me, doesn’t hurt any worse than professional waxing. But I’ve had two natural births so maybe my pain tolerance is on the high side. Here’s what my legs look like the day it’s done.  

  
I’m being very careful with sunscreen on my legs this summer as a result of the lasering. After a treatment the hair seems to grow a lot slower, and I think some of the hairs have stopped growing entirely. 

I’m pretty happy with my decision! Hopefully when all six treatments are done I won’t have to shave any more!  

It’s coming it’s coming!

Our trailer is coming tomorrow! Get ready for a huge picture entry!!! Oh my gosh I’m so excited. 

Testing the land

In our contract on The Land, we have an option period. I don’t know if this is unique to Texas contracts, but for a certain price (ours was $150), the buyer gets a certain period of time (we asked for 10 days) wherein we can terminate the contract for any reason whatsoever. It’s a super nice feature of our contract. We can do whatever testing we want and visit the property as many times as we like in order to get the testing done. I mean, we can’t camp out there for a weekend, but we are allowed to take soil and water samples, dig some holes, test the fences, etc.

Here’s what’s important to us to test before we complete the option period.

Septic: This is hugely important. We are going to be far, far away from city services. The soil and land HAVE to be suitable for installing a septic system and leach field. Fortunately for us, The Land seems to have had people living on it in the recent past; there’s a disgusting old mobile home with water and electric nearby, and a 25×35′ concrete pad poured with water, electric, and some sort of septic system nearby. While we aren’t going to have a septic company come out and check the existing system for usability yet, we can be very confident that the land itself can handle our graywater and blackwater with the proper system installed.

Water: There is at least one well on the property; perhaps two. Andrew got water sample containers from North Texas Regional Laboratory. They do chemical and biological testing. There’s a very specific way to do all the testing and I’m sure he’s going to put up a YouTube vlog about it soon. He got the little jars, drove out to Paradise, got the water samples, put them on ice, and sped them back to Fort Worth all on the same day. And the testing came back clean! Yay! We have water!

Side note: I think our gasoline budget is about to skyrocket 😉

Soil: This is not going to be as important to complete in the first 10 days of the escrow period, but I am going to want to send some soil in to Texas A&M’s soil testing service in order to know how best to amend the soil. I already dug a hole and found that it’s quite a bit sandier than the incredibly dense clay soil we have in Arlington, so that’s going to be awfully nice.

Animals: There’s about 20-30 cows on The Land. Since we’re planning an agricultural operation, but aren’t familiar (like, at all) with raising big animals, we’d like to keep these particular low-maintenance cows on the land. We’ve learned that they belong to a friend of the current owner, so we will try to work out a deal with the owner of the cows to keep them on the land – and, more importantly, to keep the land under agricultural use exemption when it comes to property taxes. Eventually I’d like my own, similarly-sized herd, but moving an hour away and living in a trailer and all the change that will happen when plunging into country life is going to be enough to handle without also suddenly raising large, expensive (and tasty) animals!

That’s all I can think of for now. So far The Land is passing all its tests with flying colors. Really all we’re waiting on is our lender to finish their homework on us and on The Land. We were pre-approved before we hired our Realtor so we aren’t super worried.

And I have to give a huge kudos to my husband. Andrew is doing MOST of the legwork and traveling that we need to be doing right now. He’s in contact with the lender and our Realtor, he’s driving out there to do testing, and he’s on the phone a lot (which I HATE). I love him!

Contract executed!!!

Wow! Words are hard to come by on this fabulous day.

We have an executed contract on 46 acres of land in Paradise, Texas! I am SO excited! All the crap we have been through since October of 2013 has composted into some beautiful fertilizer. Our dreams are not dead; they are alive and well!

It just so happened that Andrew got word about the contract from our Realtor when I was at our church’s women’s conference. Even though I was attending with my sister-in-law, mother-in-law, and grandmother-in-law, I’d chosen to have lunch alone because I’m an introvert and needed some recharge time. Thus, when Andrew told me, I didn’t have anyone around to immediately share the news with. Even though I’m an introvert, I still have to tell SOMEONE when something momentous happens! Anyway, I was just walking around the church with this huge grin on my face, tearing up a little, soaking in the news.

Then I went back to my seat and found a bright pink envelope on it. Our church does this really cool thing for the women’s conference; they have a team of women who pray and read the Bible and write down short notes of encouragement. I believe they are all unique, and we had 4,000 women attending this conference. They seal them and put them on the chairs, asking the Lord to get the right note to the right person. They can be pretty generic, but sometimes they’re oddly specific. When I got to my chair and found mine, I wondered if I should open it right away, and I heard the Holy Spirit say “open it! open it!” I did. Here’s what I read.

I’m not someone who’s prone to cry a lot, but this sent me right from smiling and some tears to full-out laughing/crying so hard the lady a few seats over asked if I needed a hug. If I needed confirmation that we were doing the right thing, I GOT IT. This note is gonna be framed and hung in the trailer. God is SO GOOD.

(And we are scheduled to close on or around May 22!)

It’s packing time again!

Even though I feel like I JUST did this (oh wait, I did!) it’s time to start packing again! Here we go! T-minus 2.5 months until the trailer is delivered.  

 

Red-letter day

Does it ever feel to you that you trudge along for a while and then all of a sudden you have one glorious, terrific, everything-comes-together kind of day? Today was that kind of day.

It didn’t really start out great. For the last couple of weeks Andrew has had very little paying work. We are learning to trust, one day at a time, and this was definitely an exercise in faith. March was one of our best months yet, and February was just about $100 better than March, so we were hoping and praying April would be another of the same. One-third of the way through the month, though, and there wasn’t much. And then last night something was acting weird, and this morning two clients called and said things were broken, so Andrew was kind of flustered on his way out the door.

Then, like, every one of his major clients had things for him to do today. He got his minimum number of hours for the week TODAY. He figured out the weird thing, and the broken things, and got a call from a minor client who wants to do a major building project. Like next week. They’re meeting to talk about Andrew’s proposal tomorrow.

And then, our wonderful CPA has been working on our taxes for a LONG time. GOD BLESS CPAS. All of them, but ours especially. Andrew has been a beast about saving money this year. He saved over 30% of our income for taxes. And today, after waiting on pins and needles to see how much we would owe in taxes, we owe about 12% of our income. Not 30.

Twelve.

We totally sent our CPA a nice gift basket as a thank you.

So, y’all, do the math; we have a lot more money for our down payment than we thought we would. It doesn’t mean we need to spend it all, but we are going to pursue an incredibly gorgeous piece of land we found, that we can now nearly certainly afford to buy. (Ag loans require at least 20% down; we would have no trouble with the monthly payment, but that big cash outlay has taken a long time to save up.)

And THEN, on top of all this business, and finding us in possession of more cash than we thought we had, we decided to max out my 2014 contribution to my IRA. We were saying it was a little disappointing to take money from the down payment fund to put towards retirement, but we agreed it was better for us in the long term. In the next hour, Andrew sold a super specific and random camera part on eBay. When he looked at his PayPal account, he saw that it was, within $100, the amount we needed to complete my full IRA contribution.

Plus the girls and I got to climb trees and play in the rain.   

I just have to say, prayer works. We had a thunderstorm last night which woke up most of the family. Since I was awake already, I prayed. I prayed as a daughter talking to her dad. I told God that although I would follow his lead in wherever we ended up, I love this certain property that we are pursuing. So please, if it’s the right one, could we have it. That was it. Then today when Andrew was having trouble, I prayed for him. I don’t spend hours on my knees entreating someone to listen. I just calm myself, say what needs to be said, say thank you, and I’m done.

So, thank you God. Thank you for this red-letter day, and thank you for teaching us to believe.

Farm home

For the longest time, Andrew and I were at odds about what kind of home to build on our farm land. The main thing that is important to us is being able to build it quickly. We are in an apartment right now in a fairly expensive part of the DFW metroplex. We LOVE this area and feel very privileged to be able to live here, but paying rent and paying on the loan for the property at the same time is a lot. So once we have the property, we want to be able to settle there quickly.

We were aware of two options: mobile homes and travel trailers. I leaned more toward a mobile home. They are bigger for the price you pay, they’re pretty easy to get set up, and you can settle in one for a while. I shared a mobile home with a roommate when I was in grad school and it was a really good experience. Andrew wasn’t as big a fan of a mobile home, mainly because they’re badly built and require a lot of maintenance. And buying a new one isn’t too far off building a small, decent home in terms of price.

Andrew liked the idea of buying and living in a travel trailer. To him, you could get something pretty nice for the money, and have it to use for travel once you’re done living in it. I was pretty firmly opposed to the idea because two small children plus me in a travel trailer all day sounds awful. And the kitchens are just terrible. They’re designed for temporary living, and the idea was to keep us uncomfortable in the living space so that we would be motivated to build ourselves a farm home. It definitely would have worked! I would have been awfully uncomfortable in such a small space.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Andrew and I had different opinions about the matter, but we are that couple that just never fights. We disagreed on which kind of house we’d want to put on the land, but we weren’t putting a lot of energy into it. Just kind of waiting for the right compromise to show itself. And it did! We are putting a steel building on our land.

You’re probably familiar with steel buildings, but in the commercial sector more than the residential. Businesses use them as sheds, farms use them as barns, and churches will sometimes use them for their services. We’d thrown around the idea of getting a pretty big one to use as a tractor shed/shop/storage barn. Then Andrew found this picture:

Awfully pretty for a steel building, eh? And, even better, steel buildings are fairly cheap. And really well made. And can be very well insulated – super important for Texas. Through some research, bargaining, and a Black Friday special, we have put our deposit down on a 40×32 steel building that we will end up getting for nearly half price. We will get the building envelope; that is, the walls and roof, and the engineering specs to use for building inspections. Andrew is doing most of the legwork for this portion of the farm project. He got the awesome deal and has been working hard on drafting the plans for the house while, you know, building a small business, being a great daddy, and being all around awesome. He has been learning so much about building a home, specifically in Texas, and has lots of great thoughts about windows and doors and spray foam insulation and basements. I love that our dream is one significant step closer to reality!

Easy pizza dough recipe

Minutes to Prepare: 15

Minutes to Cook: 10-25

Number of Servings: 4

Serving Size: Makes one 12″ pizza or 4 6″ pizzas

Ingredients

3/4 cup lukewarm water
1 Tbsp yeast
1.25 cups whole wheat flour
1.25 cups all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp sugar (optional)
2 Tbsp olive oil
1/2 tsp salt
Various spices, to taste

Tips

Try garlic power, onion powder, Italian blends, or taco seasoning in the dough. The flavor is fabulous!

Directions

Measure 3/4 cup of lukewarm water and sprinkle the yeast on top. Proof for about 5 minutes while putting together the rest of the ingredients.

In the bowl of a stand mixer or in a medium mixing bowl, add the remaining ingredients. Mix together, then add the water/yeast and mix until it comes together in a ball of dough. You may need up to 1/4 cup more water to make the dough come together. Then either knead by hand or in the stand mixer until the dough passes the windowpane test, about 10 minutes.

Put into a greased bowl, cover, and let rise for one hour.

Roll out onto a greased pizza stone, top with your desired toppings, and then put into a COLD oven and set the temperature to 400. Pizza is done when the cheese is bubbling and browning. This will vary between 10-25 minutes depending on the size of pizzas made.

At the end of November 2014

Obviously we didn’t get the house I talked about MONTHS ago the last time I updated. That was hard to process. We really really liked that house. But a lot has happened since then. Gosh, where to start. Well, I’ll start with finances, then land, and might save family for a second blog.

Finances. The main reason we didn’t get the house we loved was because we don’t qualify for a traditional mortgage, at all, until March 2016 because of having to shut down our business a year ago and starting again in March 2014. If you’re self-employed, our broker said, you have to have two years of tax returns. So much for that idea.

Then Andrew met someone at church who pointed us toward an agriculture loan (aka ag loan because I’m not typing “agriculture” another 45 times). Aha. Yes. We’d always planned to lightly work our land; have a big garden, and some small livestock, maybe an orchard someday. If we took our plans and efforts up a notch to include cattle, we would open up a while new world of agriculture and farming. Plus, there is a congressionally-mandated effort in the ag industry to extend credit to Young, Beginning, and Small farmers (YBS). Young: under 35. Beginning: Haven’t worked in ag for the last ten years. Small: revenues under $250k per year. We fall into all of those categories. So while the incentives probably vary from lender to lender, what this means to me is that there are going to be less-strict underwriting guidelines that the ag credit firm will use for us.

Here’s a big deal though. Even though they’re looking for YBS farmers, they still have some high standards. Yes, we’d get some phenomenally low interest rates and a lender who’s very interested in making our business successful, but they require a 20-30% down payment. And since the land we want to get is in the $300k range, that’s a lot of cash. We don’t make THAT much money. So after doing a lot of research and connecting with an ag loan officer this past summer, we put the farm idea on hold.

(in the meantime, we hosted Andrew’s brother, his pregnant wife, and their two year old in our house for a month, got them moved out, moved into an apartment, and allowed my in-laws to move into our house when they were able to get out of their home in Michigan and move to Texas. It was a pretty crazy two months; my body finally said I QUIT and I got walking pneumonia as a result of everything I was doing.)

All that stuff was being obedient to God’s direction to give away our house. As I mentioned a while ago, the amount of money we were told we would get back from the IRS (THE GOVERNMENT, YO) was about the value of our house. It was also almost exactly the amount of the down payment. We got a portion of the money back already, and I think we are waiting on the rest of it to come in. So…we basically have the down payment now. 😀

And now, land! We keep an eye on Zillow but also like to go drive around in the area where we’d love to live in order to see what’s there. There’s one property that’s just gorgeous, and we love it, but there are a lot of red flags; the current owners are four siblings, all of whom are in decent health and happily retired, so they’re not motivated to sell. They like their parents’ land and are asking nearly twice the tax assessor’s value. Andrew actually went out and looked at it. There’s a house on the property that’s nearly worthless, but the land is awesome. That seems to be off our prospect list for now.

There’s another piece of land for sale that’s nearly 70 acres and seems like it’d be awesome for us. The list price is a little above the tax assessor’s value, but the seller seems more motivated so I bet we’d be able to negotiate them down.

I’m excited. I have lots more to talk about. Family, the idea of becoming a cow farmer (wtf ME?!), what kind of house our family will live in, etc.