WE BOUGHT A FARM HOUSE Y’ALL!

Not OUR house, but the Fixer Upper Farmhouse is a big inspiration for the fixer upper farmhouse we just bought and are moving in to right before our baby girl arrives!

Tomorrow, Stephen and I celebrate our 5-year wedding anniversary, but we are giving each other our anniversary gift a day early, because today, that gift is, we are closing on our forever home.  Today, we bought a farmhouse!

With our baby girl on the way in May, the last thing we imagined doing… again… was moving. Even though we’ve been in a temporary rental, I was good where we were, already had her room waiting, and the closet full of an overflow of pink tutus. Not to mention, the fundraising we’ve been doing for our adoption, the last thing I wanted to add on top of remaining adoption fees were now moving expenses. Siiiiiigh….

But what’s that saying, when you make plans, God laughs.  And over the past few years, I’ve realized He loves taking us out of our comfort zones. With this now being our 4th move in 3 years, some days I feel like the Israelites taking 40 years to get to the Promised Land, when it should have been a 3 day trip, with my grumbly “Are we there yet?” whine. And although I knew the current house we were in was only a transition home, I’ve just been ready to get to our own Promised Land and finally call a house a “home.”  A forever home, to be specific.  That place where we can plant roots that becomes “our” family home over the decades. We’ve been bouncing around from home to home the past few years, and I’m happy to say THIS farmhouse is where I see us growing old together creating our family history. And this home already comes with so much history because it’s a historic 1951 farmhouse on an acre and a half of land that we look forward to soon welcoming people at…

THE KNUTH FARM

Est. 2016

Who out there is a HGTV “Fixer Upper” fan of Magnolia Farms?  Yeah, me too.  I’m a bit obsessed.  And what started as a daydream of “ohhhh let me just go look on Trulia and see if I can find a farmhouse for sale in the area as cute as Joanna Gaines’ house” turned into, oh my gosh, there’s one available, on my favorite hanging Spanish Moss Oak Tree covered street I always wanted to live on.  But knowing our baby girl was on the way, the last thing I wanted to do was move… again. So I put the daydream aside and continued watching Fixer Upper obsessing over all things shiplap and barn doors and repurposed wood.

Ok, back up… yes, in my past homes, my style has been NONE of the above. When I told my cousin about our farmhouse, even she laughed with “You? A farmhouse? Would have never guessed that one!”  But honestly, there are so many different sides of me, and the foundation of who I am and where my roots come from, as my dad used to always answer when I asked what our family nationality was, “Your bloodline is Southern, that’s all you need to know!” (hence being named after the greatest Southern heroine of them all, Scarlett O’Hara, ha!) And because of it, I’ve always wanted a very Southern home with charm and character beyond the usual Florida stucco cookie cutter home, which has been so hard to find in our area.

And so, though I tried to stop thinking of it, I couldn’t get the farmhouse for sale out of my head and I decided to go check it out one day. One showing led to another and led to putting an offer in knowing there were other offers and we probably wouldn’t get it, but next thing we know, they accepted our offer and oh my gosh did that really just happen?!?!?!?  Paging Joanna Gaines… gonna need some help here to merge my glam sparkly decor into “Farmhouse Chic” as I’m calling it! Hahahaha! Though our past few homes have been ultra girly glam with bold colors, and I loved it for that younger season of my life, this new house will be mostly be lots of clean white, black and pastels. Like our back country kitchen door, I’m turning pastel pink. Because, you know… I still need my pop of pink after all (and trust me, baby girl’s nursery will be abundantly pink to have one room in the house for my obsession). But after years of lots of pops of color, as I’ve grown older, I just want more simple, and I love the look of simple and clean as in these inspiration Pinterest Faves I have pinned.

Y’all… I honestly did. not. think. we would actually get this farmhouse.  There were so many God parting the Red Sea moments involved with purchasing this house that from day one, I have been telling everyone that this house is a true reminder of how God turns the impossible into possible.

I’m not sharing any photos of our house yet because, well, it is somewhat of a fixer upper and needs to be “Scarlettized” over time. Because my first priority is our upcoming adoption and BECOMING A MOM NEXT MONTH! Ahhhhh….  But as I finish projects, I’m sure I’ll be posting some sneak peeks on Instagram and here on the blog as our life unfolds in the farmhouse. (Stay tuned also for a new blog design update I’m working on too to better reflect and share our farm life!)

Some things I’m really looking forward to about this house… after I get used to having a newborn… ha… is having more animals!  I am a huge animal lover and really want to grow a flock of animals to add to our family. For the longest time, Stephen and I have wanted chickens… I specifically want Silkie chickens, or as I call them, the poodle of chickens.  I also want bunnies… and dwarf goats… and maybe a pig… 

And Stephen wants a big dog.  Now that we have the yard for a bigger dog, I just might let Poodle Child have a dog sibling… eventually.  Having been stuck in HOA neighborhoods that didn’t allow us to expand our animal family beyond the ducks and geese I would feed bird seed to every morning out on the lake, I’m excited to now have a piece of property that would allow us to grow our animal family, and for our baby girl to grow up learning to care for animals and grow a vegetable garden with her on The Knuth Farm.

I’m also looking forward to fostering community at our new house.  We’ve always loved entertaining, and our new home came with an in-ground bonfire pit, a basketball court, a trampoline, a built in playground and swing set, and I’m adding a porch swing to the front for long chats with girlfriends over sweet tea or homemade lemonade (because our house also came with 2 huge lemon trees draping over the backyard that I love!)  We are excited for it to be a place we can have friends and their kids over to simply do life together, host bible studies, play, and grow old in. It’s now time to plant to family roots.

Another fun fact… we found out our house was in a movie starring Julia Roberts’ brother Eric. Granted it was a cheesy TV movie in the 90s, but when I heard that, I couldn’t help but laugh. Of course, the house I would pick out, was in a movie. That was just God’s sense of humor right there as He knows my love of watching movies, and uh, being extras in movies and TV shows along my growing up.  ha!

As Helen Keller so famously said, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all…” And with all the different houses we’ve lived in over the years, that it indeed has been… an adventure. But I’m looking forward to Stephen and I walking in the door later today, and our hearts finally saying “Welcome… home.”