the beginnings

Before I dive into chronicling the renovations and life in the new house, I thought I would like to go back to the beginning of how this house even was to become part of our story. If you're not interested in a somewhat long recap, I'd encourage you move on! This isn't short. :)

In September of 2011, when we planted Christian Fellowship Center Potsdam, we were asked repeatedly, "So will you move from Madrid to Potsdam now?" We laughed and shrugged the question off. Why would we? We had a house we adored in a location that, sure, while no longer in walking distance of the place we would now go weekly to worship, was still in walking distance of Daniel's office. We lived half a mile down the road from my family. Our kids played community ball here, I did more and more shopping here, and, slowly but surely, we were getting to know the people in this small town that we were falling more and more in love with all the time.

And you have to realize that when we moved into the house in Madrid, I declared to Daniel that I was going to die there; that I would never move again. That was way too much upheaval!

Fast forward to a little over a year ago, when I had a dream a couple times in a row.

Now, I'm not one to put much stock in my dreams. I can have pretty bizarre ones, and they can usually be traced right back to my caffeine intake. But in this dream, we were looking at a house in Potsdam.

And I kept having the dream.

I hesitantly started browsing real estate online, but I set out my "fleece": this house needed to meet quite the criteria in order to induce us to move and convince me it was the Lord.

Nothing.

Well, maybe something. A house or two that might be worth a closer look.

After breaking the news to Daniel about all that was going on inside my brain and having him say, "What? Why would we MOVE?" I set up an appointment in early December 2014 to see a house on the other side of Potsdam from where we were living at the time. It wasn't the most ideal location in relation to the church, but it met the basic criteria: in Potsdam (technically, anyway), bigger than our current house, and on more land.

Well, you can't say we didn't look.

I came home wondering what in the world I was thinking. Daniel came home more convinced than ever that our house was a perfectly good house in a perfectly good location. We concluded I needed to cut back on coffee and we moved on with life.

And then Gabriel had another birthday. And his body was bigger. And his friends' bodies were bigger. And we didn't all fit in our family room. And both Daniel and I looked at each other and said, "We've got to do something."

You see, we want our kids to be able to bring their friends to our home, not look for other places to hang out. We want our family room always ready for still another guest.

Cue lots and lots of talk about how we might make the house in Madrid a little bigger.

Drawing. Talking. Erasing. Drawing some more. Calculating costs. Taking a deep breath. Wondering if we were crazy. Shelving it all. The truth is, families have made small homes work for years. There's nothing wrong with that. I can be content. We can make this work. We'll just squish a little more!

And then Memorial Day. Wonderful, special, small-towns-do-it-best Memorial Day. Three of my children marched in the [don't blink or its over] parade with their community ball teams, tossing candy and waving flags. At the small ceremony at the library, we greeted so many familiar and kind faces.

I hurried home to prepare for the guests we were having over to share the day with and all the while couldn't shake the nagging feeling: we should have been in Potsdam, getting to know faces there, learning who those people are.

That evening, after our guests had left, I shared my sadness with Daniel and he said, "You know... for the first time since we planted CFC Potsdam, I had the same feeling. I want to be more intentional in that community."

We weren't sure what it would like, but we determined that we would pray for more open doors and for eyes to see the opportunities before us.

Less than two weeks later, we got an email from my brother-in-law, "You should buy this house."

But... life was busy. We were actually in the middle of painting the exterior of our house, which was a pretty big undertaking, on top of all the regular stuff. But as we scraped and scraped and scraped some more and then finally painted, I wondered if this might be the timing of the Lord. We were in the middle of our very last major house project for some time and at the end of it, ironically enough, the house would be more ready to sell than it had been the entire time we'd owned it. On top of that, I recalled the owner of this beautiful white house, less than 2 miles from the village limits on a quiet, tree-lined road, sharing with us at a homeschool moms meeting that her husband was going to be taking early retirement and they would be moving to Washington state.

Although it was somewhat uncharacteristically bold of me and made me feel terribly forward, I sent her a facebook message and asked her if they would be putting their house on the market and if she could tell me a little bit about it.

Yes, she said, they were planning on putting the house on the market in August. They hadn't thought about a price yet, but she could tell me about the house: at a little over 2700 square feet, the house was an old farmhouse built in the 1850s that now sat on 35 acres of land, much of which is young woods but hides loads of treasures including old stone fences that had been used as pasture boundaries years and years ago. It had been home to their family of 8 for 17 years. They had loved it.

I asked her if we might see it and we arranged to come in early July.

We did, we fell in love, and the rest, you might say, is history. By the end of the month, we'd put in a purchase offer contingent on us selling our old house and they had graciously accepted. We listed our house, wondering what we were thinking doing so with Aubrey's surgery scheduled for only a few weeks later.

Again, so many details fell into place without our even trying to make them.

Our realtor asked to do an open house on the last Sunday in August, which happened to be our last Sunday at church with Aubrey before her surgery (now postponed to September 10). The couple who would end up buying our house were some of the people who came to that open house. What we didn't realize was that the whole time we were in Rochester, preoccupied with all that was going on with Aubrey, they were thinking and planning and figuring. The Monday after we returned home with Aubrey, our realtor contacted us to say that there was a couple who would like to see the house again; could they come on Thursday? By early the following week, we had reached an agreement and had a signed purchase offer on our old house.

Things were moving full-steam ahead, and we couldn't have planned it all better.

I was open to moving if the house was bigger and the location better because it was worth it to me for my family and for what God was calling us to. I never thought God would provide a house for me that was reminiscent in so many ways to the house I was leaving, right down to the wide plank New England pine floors throughout.

We haven't even moved in, and already there is such a clear sense of this being the provision of God for us. We don't know all the reasons He's moving us closer to the church Daniel is pastoring, but we have some clues, and we are excited for what lies ahead. God is breaking our hearts wide open to a whole new community of people and we're praying for great grace to reach many more with His hope.

On top of that, we get to call this beautiful place home. We are ecstatic!

the back of the house, with a pile of stone that the previous owners used for amazing updates in the basement

a small part of the 35 acres, with a glimpse of the red barn hidden in the righthand corner