The Journey Begins

Thanks for joining me! Many have asked me to share photos of our home renovation project.  I decided the easiest way to do that is through a blog.  So, first, a little background.

Tim and I have been married for 30 years (that’s a journey in itself!) We raised our girls in a lovely suburban home in Gwinnett County, Georgia.  Our cul-de-sac was made up of families who had lived in the same houses for more than twenty years.  We watched our kids play as we chatted in lawn chairs in front of open garage doors.  Then the kids grew up and started going off to college and to new lives of their own.  The garage doors began to close as various moms went back to work.  I loved our friends and neighborhood, but a seed was beginning to grow deep in my heart.

I have loved horses since I was a very little girl.  My Great Uncle Norris even promised me a horse if I would stop sucking my thumb! I stopped sucking my thumb….but no horse.   When my oldest daughter, Amanda, started riding lessons at age 11, I cleaned stalls at the barn where she rode to earn lessons of my own.  Then, at one of Amanda’s horse shows, we crossed paths with a friend I had worked with in my single days.  I made the comment of how we were going to have to quit lessons due to finances, and she said, “We have four horses and neither of us can ride them! Come ride at our place.”  So we began to visit Laura’s farm often and they became even better friends.  To Tim, this was the best of both worlds.  I could ride without the expense of owning a horse.  To me, it only made me want my own horse more.  After several years of me looking at horses on line and dreaming about how to make it work, he finally agreed to let me get my own horse.

On March 14, 2007, we drove to Mississippi and picked up a two year old Rocky Mountain Horse gelding, named Broken Bones Sam’Son’s Even Steven.  That began an 11 year journey of riding adventures with many different friends.  We also added a Tennessee Walker to the family about 5 years after we first brought Stevie home. But that little seed in my heart had grown into a sapling, we needed a farm of our own.  And so began a seemingly endless  search for land that we could afford.

We began searching for a place in October, 2017.  We sold our home and moved to a rental house while we continued searching.  Our realtor, Evan Gholson, traipsed all over 3 or 4 counties with us for 5 months.  Finally, we decided on a place we had actually looked at in October.  It was 27 acres.  We didn’t have to build a house from scratch, as some properties would have required. We didn’t have to tear down trees to make pasture, it had hay fields and a place we could fence off as a horse pasture.  It wasn’t too far for Tim to commute (some places we looked at would have been an hour and forty-five minute commute each way!) It also had a 1962 brick ranch house that had been vacant for quite a few years.  And it looked awful! “But the bones are good,” said my husband.  “But it’s not a white house with a rocking chair front porch and dormer windows,” said I.  Our best friends thought we were crazy.  My sis-in-law cried because she was sure that this journey would kill her brother. But we decided to go for it!  We closed on April 30, 2018.  We owned a farm! But now we had to make it be Home!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton