Here is what THE BARN will eventually look like from the front.  The roof will be black metal panels and the exterior wall will be a board and batten metal wall panel.  The windows and doors are black inside and out.  There will be barn doors on the front doors and the entrance will have a covered porch with stained wood trusses and supports. 

We took a couple trusses down and amongst all the chaos with our trusses coming down we decided to have a little fun with our friends and have a bon fire.  It was bitter sweet to watch them burn, but we will be moving forward soon and the new trusses are due to arrive Friday, September 27.  We have a contractor lined up to set them on Monday!  The Barn will have a roof soon!

Kale has a vision of what he wants his room to look like and he can actually visualize this enough to draw it on paper.  I'm amazed and how he can draw his space in plan view.  The nut definitely doesn't fall far from the tree.  The locker in the camper is actually for his room.  He LOVES it and has already started filling it with his things!

So thought I would share my thoughts on living on wheels full time tonight! We originally had planned on having plenty of time to finish our barn and then we would concentrate on selling our house. Well, things didn’t work out as planned and we weren’t as far along as we thought we would be when we got an offer so the decision had to be made to rent or live on wheels. After analyzing everything with all of our animals and how that would work in a rental we ultimately decided camper life was our choice.....not the best decision we have ever made! Now some of us love living on wheels. Kale and Dave think this is great! They aren’t as bothered by not having everything just so like Ava and I are. Kale loves the outdoor space almost as much as Siloh does. The outdoor oasis is my only saving grace. I love sitting down in the woods under my lights. We’ve had a couple parties down there and the space is perfect....all except for the walk back to the camper bathroom. My friend

Sometimes there are setbacks and some hurt worse than others.  We took a big blow over the weekend when a storm rolled through.  We woke up to our daughter who was scared of the rain and wind and we brought in our canopy on the camper.  I will have to update on where we are living......forgot to tell the part that we live in our fifth wheel now that our house has sold.  That's another story though.  We went back to bed and Emelia crawled in bed with me and Dave went to the back bunk to sleep.  Then around 3:00 he heard a loud crash and looked outside.  Our trusses even though they were braced came tumbling down.  Now the process of rebuilding and figuring out where to start will begin.  The trusses looked like dominoes except all of them are busted and not saveable.  We called our insurance company so it appears we won't be getting a roof on soon after all.

September 5 is a BIG DAY for our "BARN".  The trusses are up and you can really see how the barn is going to look.  It seems so big on the inside now.  Dave is getting excited.  He will start on the sheathing on the weekend and hopefully we will have a roof next week.   View on the landing!  The kids can really start to visualize their space now!  This is a view from the landing down into our living room witch has a vaulted ceiling.  It looks so cool. 

Several ideas were tossed around as to where we would live if and when our house sold.  We ultimately decided to build The Barn and finish half and live in it for a few years.  Since the house sold and had to close so quickly due to the new buyers job, we decided we could live in the camper for a couple months while the barn was finished. What we didn’t anticipate was the journey that lied ahead. The entire month of July was spent packing our house.  We didn’t have a house to move things into so we rented 3 storage units to hold all of our stuff. Believe me we have sooo much stuff!  I started by figuring out what I definitely didn’t want in the new place and began selling items on Facebook. People started to wonder if I would have anything left by the time we moved! We got the news that we had an offer agreed to while we were at the winery down the road from our old house.  My friend Kara was with me and said we got this!  She said she would come up at least once if not more times a

Our Barn Story all began in 2019 when we put our "forever home" on the market in Illinois.  We built our dream home out of ICF blocks and lived just down the road from our favorite winery and raised our family there.  Little did we know that my job change and commute with have us make a decision to move across the mighty Mississippi into Missouri and begin another chapter in our life. We found land outside of Palmyra, Missouri and purchased 13.5 acres of half pasture half wooded land.  It was a perfect 11 minute commute to my work and the same distance to my husband's work. Everything seemed too good to be true.  The land had some paths down to the creek and the kids created a fire pit and a stone path down to the water's edge.  The land was scoped out for where we would build the barn and our future home.  We needed pasture for our "asses" (minature burrows) that we have from our oldest son's Make-A-Wish.  That's a story for another post, but we de