Our Move Into the 'Big House!'
We finally (fully!) made the jump to moving into the big house! It only took us almost 8 years :)
When we moved to the ranch it had two houses on it, right next to each other. The ‘little house’ was 760 square feet and used to be a chicken coop (you can see it in the picture above right behind the feed truck!).
The ‘big house’ was built in 1868 as the original homestead house for the Sharp family and their nine children.
It’s technically 8 bedrooms, but the original part of the house has no plumbing, outdated electrical, and the horse/hog hair insulation had long disintegrated.
We decided it would be eaiser to fix up the little house to live in at first and we’d fix the big house up or build a house later.
We added a lofted room into the attic that the girls shared, but they still usually ended up sleeping together on the couches by the wood stove in the winter or outside in the summers.
When the kitchen and bathroom addition on the back of the big houses started falling down, we decided to build a new ‘test kitchen’ for creating new recipes and entertaining, with a dorm style bathroom suite and a big pantry. We built that 1.5 years ago and started spending more time cooking and hanging out in that part of the big house.
It got harder to manage keeping both houses wood fires going and walking up in the cold to go between the houses. Brian was hesitant to give up our cozy little sleeping quarters, but we moved our bed and closets and the girls officially have a ‘room’ for their clothes and rodeo things!
The ‘big house’ is still lacking any kind of insulation, but we replaced all of the windows last year which has helped a lot. We put in a bigger wood stove and it keeps the living areas toasty warm. As it’s getting colder at night now, the girls still tend to sleep down by the fire together on couches.
We will look at more permanent heat (and upstairs cool in summer!) options, but insulating the house would require we pull off all of the siding to add vapor barriers and we don’t want to modernize or change it too much. We love that it is still in pretty much the same shape it was in 1868.
