Living-Deliberately.com

I’ve fought the “digital camera resistance” for a long time. Primarily because I LOVE AND ADORE the Nikon passed to me from my parents-in-law. I love it’s heavy reliablity. It’s tendancy to take fantastic pictures. It’s feel in my hands. I don’t have the budget to allow for a digital that has SLR quality and a “point and shoot” often is so slow that it misses kids-in-action. I don’t want a cheap understudy to make me use my star favorite less.

But…..developing film and putting it on disc is getting expensive. It takes longer to get the pics online. And blogs like this one  (that I found through a blog with a list from a list from a list…. you get the idea) remind me of my tendancy to want to take pictures every single day, of just about every fascinating thing I want to record and remember.

So, very hesitatingly, I”m adding “the best I can get” digital camera to my list of techno-dreams, along with an ipod that allows me to persue another love: lots and lots of personalized music on my play list. Finally, when I crave Carly Simon, she’s just a click away!

So, why is this filed under “homestead dreams”? Well go see that blog, Rurality, for one. But also because we have a new (and yet no so new) bee in our bonet: to build or not to build.

The current wave of discussion: what about building a BARN? Maybe like this one:

from backroadhomes.com.

And turn it into a house?! Getting a barn finished, with a basement foundation, is easier than getting a house done in a decent turn of time and would allow us to move in to one section while finishing the rest on our own timetable. We could finance less of the project and pay cash for a good portion as we went along.

Fortunately, my dear parents raised me in an environment of “houses as projects” and I’m not naive as to what it’s like to live to like that. The bigger questions are:

Can we find land in our budget?

How does a barn actually get raised?

Will this really land us closer to attaining our rural dreams?

Can we do this while living in this house for very long? How much would we have to swing both payments?

Questions like these follow me as I go through my day. When I wipe down counters (or little bottoms for that matter) I’m thinking about it. When I sweep the porch I remember the barn plan has to have a porch attatched. I dream (as in the kind of dreams that 50’s do-wop love songs sang about) of a basment laundry room with a large lab table folding area and all painted out in pale green and white. I’m aware as I garden that even if we don’t live on the land yet, I’d be able to work on the grounds and beds, cultivating growth that would be part of our lives for years.

We are ready for roots. For a place to stay for a long, long time. A place to pour part of  ourselves into with love and sweat and tears and be there later to enjoy what we built.

“I like dreamin’…’cause dreamin’ can make you mine…..”

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