Back to Basics - Brick by Brick

The last few months have been completely devoted to gardening and flower farming and now that the temps are starting to go in a more favorable direction, we are back at our primary goal of working toward finishing up our renovations on the farm house.

Because we never do anything in a linear fashion, we are actually working on two projects simultaneously: a toy room refresh and building out our dream screen porch. We are excited about both, but the screen porch is going to be such a big part of our life here, so we are a little giddy about this one. Queue the starry eye emoji...

One of the first brainstorms we had when we bought the house was changing the existing carport into a porch. The view would look out over our future garden space and since Allen and I are both early risers, we envisioned our mornings starting on the porch with a cup of coffee, discussing the day's to-dos and allowing a space for the dogs to hang out while keeping them out of the garden. Now, we are starting to see the dream taking shape and we began laying the foundation for the design this week.

We are trying our best to keep with the vintage theme of the home and when we were building the base for our gardens, we had to take out some old patios that were set into the earth near the home. They were built with turn-of-the-century brick set in crushed granite, so it was a relatively easy job to remove them and gave us the matching material used to build brick steps on another part of the home, so it will have the same look and feel like it's always been there.

Turn-of-the-century brick original to the homestead will be repurposed from another project into the screen porch design. We try and reuse material every chance we get--both for sustainability purposes and to keep with the 1890s aesthetic of the home.

Everything we build is designed with our dogs in mind. They are such a big part of our lives--we have four--so dogs are a part of everything we do. We are building the knee wall just high enough where they can see over it and our hope is it'll deter them from wanting to put their paws up on it and damage the screens once they're in place. We're hopeful this works out, but we are designing the screen frames so they can be easily removed in case we have to replace the screens down the road. We are also having to put in temporary barriers so the dogs can't get through to the garden space and damage any of our new seedlings or existing flower gardens. As much as we love them, they sure can be destructive!

Nyssa, one of our Catahoula/black mouth cur rescues watches intently as Allen cuts brick nearby.

Sadie, Nyssa's sibling stays just far enough away so she doesn't get wet while we mix the mortar for the brick project. Our other two dogs are snoozing luxuriantly on the couch inside, uninterested in all this excitement.

We have a renewed sense of enthusiasm for the renovation process that we have found that we tend to lose each year when the weather heats up. As much fun as it is to breathe new life into these spaces, it's hard work, and we have to simultaneously deal with juggling life, work, and all the unexpected things that come our way. So we have learned to live with a bit of chaos and tools and materials sitting idle while we refocus on the day-to-day until we can come back to it later in the evening or wait until the next weekend. We know one day when we're done with it all, we'll marvel at how we did it--living in a home while we update each room, raising our daughter and homeschooling her, working full-time, and making time to live life, all while following our dreams of rebuilding this farm, one brick, one shovelful at a time.

A future post will show our next steps, but for now, we are thrilled the first step is coming along and we can see the screen porch taking shape. It's going to be such a great addition to the home and will likely be used more than our living room since we all love to be outside so much. Maybe it'll keep the mosquitos at bay and we can fully enjoy the fruits of our labor year round.