Also started some seeds indoors: Giant Roma, two types of onion, lettuce, spinach & broccoli.
Bought a fluorescent fixture from Home Depot and hung it between two mic stands š Easy to adjust the height!
The chickens have fared well over the winter too. Happy cluckers gives us about an egg a day.
As always, click the photos for FULL SIZE!
A big part of our move was preparing the old Cleveland house for sale. We spent countless hours washing walls, fixing holes, painting, repairing etc, etc.Ā After several weeks of work, we had the Cleveland house in beautiful shape! We hired a real estate agent and he came and took pictures and listed the house.Ā To help skew things in our favor, we also enlisted in the help of St. Joseph, burying him in our front garden per our pastorās instructions.
A couple weeks past. I visited the house several times a week just to keep an eye on things, take out the trash, mow the lawn. Then, one day I parked in the driveway and noticed something funny. āWhat the heck is that?ā I thought, noticing theĀ siding on the house. I thought our bad neighbors sprayed something on the house.
I though little more of it other than how I would need to clean it off and went insideā¦
Our carefully cleaned house for sale was ruined! It was raining in the kitchen. I allowed myself just enough time to expel some expletives then ran upstairs. The tub supply had sprung a leak. I shut it off and ran to the basement to shut it off there too, just in case. It was raining in the basement, too
This was not good.
Cell phone. āHello, Carol? Call the insurance company. We canāt fix this one ourselves.ā
I immediately set about trying to save what I could. It was a fools errand, but I had to try.
The entire kitchen ceiling eventually wound up on the floor. The floor itself, buckled pretty badly, 1/2ā³ plus. The counter top swelled and warped. The window wouldnāt open. The cabinets were popping apart before my eyes. The electrical circuit breakers popped. The dishwasher was filled with sludge. Tiles and paint were popping off the walls. There was a water fall down the basement stairs. The rooms in the basement were an inch deep in water. The upstairs bathroom floor was buckled as well. This was not a good day.
The next day it looked like thisā¦
It was shocking to see how it was all just gone.
Everything was removed.
We hired a general contractor to manage all the destruction and construction crews. We had to pick out new cabinets, counter, lighting, tile, paint, carpetā¦everything. Lots of decisions.
Eventually it all came together.
Ā
Ā
Ā
Ā
Ā
Ā
Ā
Ā
Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā 
We finally moved to the country. We now live in the little town of Nova Ohio with a population of about 500. There were more people living on our STREET in Cleveland. The house is a 125 year old farmhouse on just about an acre of land. Plenty of room to grow our own food! Check out the pictures and the captions to get the full story.
Hereās the back-story: We always wanted to live in the country. We did the best we could in the city; our entire back yard was dedicated to our vegetable gardens, but it still wasnāt enough. Add to that all the noise and crime andā¦ daydreaming became talking out loud which in turn became a search.
The hunt officially started on the way back from Carolās momās house in Cincinnati for Thanksgiving 2013. I found a house on an acre in Mt. Sterling Ohio, south of Columbus. We loved it immediately, but thought, āwe canāt take the first place we look at!ā Turns out, there would be another 75 to see before we found āhome.ā Nothing was off the table; we looked at trailers in Darke county and shacks in Ashtabula, houses along the Ohio river in Brown county and just empty land in any other county in-between. We thought about trailers and manufactured homes and even converting a shipping container. We searched the entire winter, with a goal of moving by the spring. As our neighborhood in Cleveland continued to erode, our search became ever more desperate. We put over eight thousand miles on our car, searching, searching, searchingā¦
Ā