Our Vermont Life: September 2015

So we moved..... again.

But this move was different. This time, we have really set down roots and found our little place in the world.

The seed for this home was actually planted a couple of years ago, when through reading Sarah Susanka's "Creating the Not so Big House", I learned about a co-operative community in Vermont called Ten Stones (the history of the namesake I will share in a later blog post!). After a quick internet search, I learned one of the homes in the community was for sale. I sent this short email to Brian in May 2013:

"I haven't come across anything that makes our dream house book come more to life than this..." followed by a link to the house.

While at the time we did not know that Vermont was definitely in our future, I saved every single image of the home that I could find, and sketched out the floor plan in our house book in anticipation of the day we might build ourselves. During our 2013 visit, even though the home had sold, we visited the community and met one of the families who live here. We did a 10k run in the area and multiple times I remarked (similar to how I said to my father when we visited Vancouver), "I could live here".

As most of you know, we bought a century-old house in Burlington, VT only last summer, that after many months, we had just finished renovating and putting our touch on. All along, Brian and I had been casually keeping an eye out for land in Chittenden county to build our forever home on. As it would happen, not even a week after we discussed staying put in our Burlington house for a couple of years in an attempt to simplify our lives, this house - our house - in Ten Stones hit the market.

We came across it the day it was listed. We looked at each other and sighed a collective "oh oh".

We viewed it that weekend. An offer soon followed. Offer accepted, and oops.... we owned two houses.

We'll skip over the next couple of months, and summarize it with what we learned from it: we're really bad at keeping things simple! Take it from me - don't try to sell your own house, settle into a new job, finish a thesis, and travel out of the country at the same time.

We were incredibly blessed by the kindness of neighbors, new and old. Matt, Casey, and Justin helped load us up in Burlington (with our dependable neighbor Rod making sure we did it right!) and a crew of our new neighbors helped us unload in Charlotte, in a record 45 minutes!

While we still have a number of boxes to unpack and many plans in the works (which are waiting until the thesis is a thing of the past), this is everything and more that we imagined our forever home would be.

The mornings are comprised of long walks in the 80 acre forest-and-meadow we own with our neighbors; Wendell loves running free and chasing after the frogs. Gretta, Beatrice, and Prudence have joined a flock of 30+ chickens and have much more room to roam. Our bee hive now sits among six others (after a punctuated journey - Brian accidentally dropped the hive when moving it from our place in Burlington about 45 feet from it's final resting place - they remained where dropped until Brian had the help of another bee suit-cladded neighbor to finish moving it two weeks later). Whidbey has dozens of windows to watch the songbirds, hummingbirds, and fireflies out of. We can see the starry sky out of the window above our bed and are put to sleep by the songs of night creatures. We have been spoiled by our new neighbors and the harvest of the community garden. We recently ate breakfast in the home I read about a few years ago that started this search for home. And tonight (taking a night off from homework), we are enjoying our first autumn fire in the hearth.

We're excited about all of the plans we have to make it ours, and we're doing our very best to slow down and take it one thing at a time..... at least "slower" for us.