Our New Home ~ Thus Far ! ( Before & After )

 Last summer when we began to move into our new home I was content to keep the furniture we had in our home at Cedar Pond. I love blue and white and if furnishing and decorating our home was completely up to me I would probably tend to keep all furnishings and decor in that color scheme , adding color accents according to the seasons. Here is a picture of our new living room last summer shortly after moving in.

 Our new home is less than half the size of our home at Cedar Pond. We sold and gave away many furnishings.( I don't think our grown kids have room for anymore furniture in their homes now !) This is the view of our living room from the very small kitchen.

 Before we moved in we stripped out all the wall to wall beige carpeting and installed a wood laminate floor. We covered up all the mustard and brown walls with white paint in several shades of white. (Excepting the wall with the big windows, that is painted a very dark blue.) I was surprised that a lot of the white paint looked blue when we were finished. Yes, we bought only white paint. ( Do you know how many shades of white there are !?! )

 Here is the current view of our living room from our very small kitchen. You can see the blue and white sofa and loveseat are no longer in our home. That is because my husband who has retired wants to be comfortable too. He used to have a recliner , but his recliner will not fit into this house. We went shopping and finally found a living room set we could both agree on. This set has 4 recliners, is gray , and the size of these sofas is smaller than your average sofa/loveseat set and takes up less space in the living room than the previous loveseat and sofa. Win/win, except it is not white. As far as my husband is concerned that is even better !

 View from the loveseat looking into the kitchen and the bedroom ( left of china cupboard).

 This is one good sized living room with large windows looking out onto our fields and woods, with mountains in the background. We put a small table in front of the windows because we spend a lot of time reading and writing while enjoying the view. Plus, in a small home it is good to have a table to pull out for dining with guests.

 We have a scope at our windows for daily viewing of wild life. We see wild turkeys every day as a flock of between 20 - 40 come and go across our fields and into the woods. We also see pheasants, eagles, turkey vultures, deer, coyotes , and other wild life we've captured on our game-cams in the woods. ( I took this picture today and you can see we still have a lot of snow.)

 The china cupboard fits perfectly on the wall between the living room and bedroom.

 The little side table with the fruit bowl on it is an old typing table with wheels. The sides flip up doubling the top of the little table and this is what we roll to the front of the larger sofa when we desire a 'coffee table'. It fits perfectly in the middle of the large sofa allowing us to recline without obstruction , also giving us a place for our cups of coffee and snacks.

 We need the storage these glass fronted shelves directly behind the sofa offer so we placed them in the middle of the large living room as a room divider. This also allows us room to enter the house from the front door ( at right , not seen) and space to walk through the living room to the back bedrooms and bathroom. The bench and our antique overstuffed chair allow a place to read and visit in front of the woodstove that heats the whole house quickly and efficiently with firewood cut and stacked from our woods.

 View of the living room from the bedroom.

 As I was unpacking our boxes of books and magazines I came across some magazines from the now defunct 'Early American Life' of the 1980's .I kept these magazines because they contain much history I find valuable and as I was thumbing through one of the magazines I came across some pictures of a living room I remember liking.

 I was startled to see this living room looks like an old fashioned version of our current living room !

What do you think ?

We have a lot more we plan to do . We'll be remodeling the kitchen , laundry room, and back porch but that will have to wait until next year. We're getting our outdoor stuff done first and also plan on actually enjoying retirement by getting in some fishing and camping. As things are right now, even if we never get around to remodeling, our new home is very comfortable , easy to maintain, and works quite well for us. We're so blessed and thankful for God's many mercies in our lives. We're loving life here at Laughing Dove Farm.

Travel Trailer ~ Tiny Home Away From Home

Cedar Pond was sold the first day we put it on the market May 1,2016. We had 2 offers on our home so we knew if the first offer fell through the second probably would not. We were surprised our home was snatched up so quickly and we'd have to leave by June 15 , 2016. That left us 6 weeks to pack up and move to our home over the mountains and far away. However, our future home was occupied by tenants and my husband had not yet retired and needed to stay near Cedar Pond to continue working until the end of September.What to do ? We moved a travel trailer ( above ) to the back yard of our youngest son and his family.  They live within walking distance to our new home. I lived there for awhile and my husband stayed with his younger brother and family withing walking distance to Cedar Pond so he could commute to his job until he retired.( My  husband came over the mountains frequently to stay here and begin getting our future home ready for us to live in .)

The travel trailer is a 1990's model we paid cash for ( cheap ! ) to use as a home-away-from-home when we visited our sons and their families on this side of the mountains. It soon became my real home for awhile. We did not have time to re-model the travel trailer or glamp it up, but the trailer was in pretty good shape, roomy, the air conditioning worked , and I was truly a happy camper.

Here is the living room of my tiny home (above). The carpeting and upholstery are turquoise and in good shape. I decided I would go with the color scheme. Hey, I like turquoise.I filled the trailer with my quilts, some antiques, my house plants, and my spinning wheels. A girl's gotta spin you know !

I did tear out all the original curtains and drapes, they were pink and turquoise with a lot of frilly trimmings popular in the 90's. I replaced them with simple sheer white curtains. The trailer already had blinds installed in all the windows.

We put a flat screen t.v. and DVR player in the trailer on an antique shelf . We were not connected to cable or satellite , we have an ample collection of favorite videos to watch. You can see the small bedroom off the living room here.

The very small,warm and cozy bedroom with the very small sliding door. A bedroom with no space to walk around the bed. The bed is very comfortable though with plenty of storage in the nightstands and above the bed. You just have to climb over the bed to access the storage.

Since our tiny home / travel trailer was in the back yard of our youngest son and his family, his son would practically bounce out of their home in the mornings and head to our trailer to visit. The first thing he would look for is our cat Blizzard. Little grandson really loves Blizzard and Blizzard is very happy to make himself available to grandson. ( Blizzard is on a bunk in the 2nd bedroom of the trailer.)

What you can't see is the sink and stove to the right in the picture, and the dinette that seats 4 to 6 people to the left front of the picture.

Blizzard and our other cat Miss Marple were never allowed out of the trailer when we lived in our youngest son's backyard. They did not seem to mind at all. Here is Blizzard looking out the window at our son's Mennonite neighbor haying his alfalfa field.

My German Shepherd spent the days outdoors and the evenings indoors with me and the cats.I covered a lot of the trailer's original carpeting with my own handwoven rugs.

Even a tiny home has room for a large dog to stretch out.

All my house plants and the small trees and bushes we brought with us were placed around the outside of the trailer. In July I gained a new puppy from one of our granddaughters and the puppy kennel was placed under the awning in front of our trailer. In this picture our 2 youngest grandsons are talking to my puppy , Luna.

Blizzard was never allowed outdoors but he surveyed the comings and goings from the trailer screen door. I loved living in my tiny home and know I could live this way quite happily. So could my cats. I think even my husband could too. However, he retired, out tenants moved out and we began moving into our new home at Laughing Dove Farm.We are so thankful to our youngest son and his family for their generosity in allowing us , our flock of geese, chickens, doves,sheep and dogs to live in their back yard while we waited to move into our new home.

This travel trailer is now our guest cottage.We had a few guests stay in it quite comfortably. Our grandkids like staying in it when they visit. I fill the cupboards and fridge with snacks and beverages. The trailer has a very nice kitchenette and a bathroom, plus a bunk room with 3 bunks.I am planning on making it even better and doing a teensy bit of renovating. We will be adding a nice corrugated metal roof, skirting around it, and a porch. My once tiny home will be our guest cottage.