Hello!

This is the long awaited, much anticipated blog of our progress in our new home.  We'll use this space to update the progress of our house renovations, chicken keeping, beekeeping, and general rural life.

So to catch you up to speed -- we moved to our new home on 800 acres of land in midcoast Maine in mid-October.  When Anna (my wife) was in college, her dad wanted to invest in some land to put in conservation easement, he found this plot and snatched it up.  We are now the fortunate land owners/caretakers/explorers. :) When he bought the land, there were several old farm houses on it in various states of disrepair.  For safety, he tore down all the houses and rebuilt one house in the footprint of one of the older houses.  He also saved all the original posts and beams to build the new house (and some floorboards as well).  We are living in that house....lucky us!  Here are some pics right before we moved in:

Here's the view of the house when you pull up.

Living room

Kitchen (with Anna working away)

Dining area (boxes and boxes of tomatoes)

Guest room

Upstairs bedroom (with crib -- obviously we haven't moved in yet)

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Upstairs hallway

The house is in pretty good shape, so when we moved in we decided to just do some cosmetic repairs that are easier when the house is empty.  We had the floors refinished, and the main floor painted.  Here are some pics of after we moved in:

Upstairs bedroom

Guest bedroom (come visit us!)

Living room

Kitchen (bless our mess)

Dining area

Since then we've been really busy with travels and visitors, but we've been most busy with homesteading and spring planning.  We're planning to have chickens for eggs, bees for honey, and we're planting a pretty big organic garden.  We're also going to do some selective logging in our woods to get our own firewood.  There are many things that I want to post now, but I'll save them for later to keep this post quasi short.