As soon as we signed the papers, we went full speed ahead. Some of the first things we needed to do was to unbury the home from all the plant growth enveloping it. It was like the villages that have been overtaken by the jungle. We also hired a guy to come bush hog the tall grass around the house and in the pasture. He used his tractor to dig holes for our fence posts. Then we had to cut back growth where we wanted to put the fence for the horses. Once that was accomplished, we started putting up the fence. We had hired guys from Jericho House to help us move, so we hired some of them to come help us put up fence. They were really neat guys, all on their own journeys to recovery. Also, I must introduce Whitney Keen. She worked so hard with us, from day 1 until the end of the journey. We could not have done this without her physical labor! And of course, our daughters, Amanda and Bethany, also helped whenever they were not working at their jobs.
While all of this work was going on outside, we were also removing things from the inside. All of the old duct work and furnace and pipes were removed from the crawl space. The 2 rooms in the basement were painted with vapor lock paint. Whitney and I put plastic sheeting all through the crawl space to block moisture. We had to remove incredibly thick mortar along with the ugly pink tiles in the bathroom, and the pink toilet, and the pink cast iron tub. Amanda was a huge help in this extremely labor intensive job! One of my early jobs was vacuuming every inch of the place. I vacuumed the walls, floors, everywhere I could. You will see from pictures that there were some small add ons to the back of the house. They were awful! Rodents or lizards had been living in those areas for years, and the evidence of their existence had to be cleaned up. Yuck!
Also on the property is a little cinder block building that was used to store eggs from the Chicken House. It is a sturdy, well built little two room building. Whitney cleaned that all out, then we painted it with the vapor lock paint. It became a place to store tools and other items. We call it the Egg House. One of Whitney’s jobs was cleaning out the overgrowth behind and beside the Egg House. We discovered that there was a whole room on the backside that we didn’t even know was there! It will be a great place to store the tractor when we get it cleaned out.
The third day after we signed the contract, we moved our new (used) camper to the back of the house and officially began living on the property, in the camper. We would spend the next five to six months living in our little mini home and using a porta potty that was set up in front of the house! This entailed waiting at the corner of the house for cars to pass so that I could run to the potty in my pajamas!
Journey of 1000 steps 