Welcome to Our Little Paradise | Part 1

We embarked on an adventure in life, all by choice, and today for the first time I’m letting you all come into our home! It’s over a year late that I’m inviting you in…why? Well it’s been a little chaotic, crazy and lots of love happening in our little paradise these days.

After house hunting for months, walking into homes you can’t believe people live in, making offers and LITERALLY never hearing back from the seller, hours online looking at our options and the list goes on. You get me… if you’ve ever been in the season of life called, house hunting. It’s quite literal when it means “hunting”…with the feeling you’ll never find the perfect home and you’re ready to give up. Well we did…we decided to build our “perfect little paradise” and not depend on buying something we had to remodel to make perfect for us!

(these are some of our first pictures and they are blurry, sorry!)

We already had two acres full of pine trees so why not build on what we have and build what we want…so here we go. Now we are embarking on the next craziest happening in life…building a home. So here we are pregnant with our first little one and spending hours over house plans. Only to get house plans drawn up and realize, nope that’s entirely to big and out of our budget…to then start the process over again…looking…searching…drawing. When I saw drawing, quite literally…Bern, my mister aka husband drew up the plans. We found a plan we liked and then began tweaking it and making it fit to what we needed. He spent quite a few hours drawing them out on paper then translating that to his computer software so we could get “real house plans” printed.

So fast forward MANY “talks”, tears, searches, brain power spent on planning…we decided to start.

WAIT. Push the pause button.

With us literally building this house ourselves this could take a few years. Yep you heard me right a few years. With our goal in hand of staying debt free through this process and us building it (not just being the contractor) we knew we didn’t want to keep throwing our money on rent…so….back at it with paper and pencil drawing up plans for a small cottage to build first, so we could move into that and be on our property while we built the “big house”, as we call it. Plus the money we were going to be spending on rent is now ours and we also have another building on our property for future use…i.e. my husbands workshop or who knows what!!!

So here we are living in a “tiny house”. I like to call it a cottage, it sounds a little more quaint, right? Because it is!!!! Over the summer of 2015, before we were due with our little one, Bern and my dad started the process of building the cottage. We had our two acres cleared and dirt work done for the cottage and the big house dirt work too. It had officially begun and we were set out on a trek full of patience and learning! Our initial goal was to be in the cottage before the baby was born, that didn’t happen. We had the baby mid July and moved into the cottage on Labor Day weekend. So moving with a six week old baby was what we did. I’m actually so thankful my plan wasn’t God’s plan on that one…we needed this 6 weeks in our put together apartment!

We pretty much passed all of our permits on a Thursday and moved right in on Friday!!

So here we are moving in with no siding, no porch roof, no working oven/stove (we had to hook it up to propane) no bathroom door, no upper kitchen shelves only the cabinets on the floor, EVERYTHING piled in our little 500 sq. ft. , nothing organized and if you know me that was driving me bonkers, no curtains or blinds, no lights besides lamps and the stove vent light and the bathroom light too of course, tools taking up one entire corner of my cottage, a newborn baby, internet that was junky and barely gave us a signal and I had work deadlines, red dirt surrounding our place and being tracked into our cottage, a metal ladder going to our upstairs (which is only storage no living space), no trim on the windows or baseboards, no bathroom door only a curtain and I could probably go on and on…but I had my little family of three happily on our property, debt free, all piled up in our cottage making strides each chance we could to get projects done, thinking we’ll never get all of this done and here we are…I’m sitting here in our adorable cottage, looking out my front window at a soon to be house, it’s been an exciting journey and one I wouldn’t trade anything for!

There were days I wondered what we were doing. Why we were doing. Yet we pushed through and made it…

So today I’m sharing a little of the process with you all…part two is on the way with the inside along with some God stories to share!

Stay tuned for part 2 so you can have a tour of the inside of our cottage!

Hi I’m Erin a Southern mama from South Mississippi, owner and chief editor of Sixth Bloom a blog helping mom-tographers capture their kiddos and life, talking all things home, parenting and how we navigate through life. You will find me living life to the fullest with my mister (aka husband) and our little one year old, Miss Elle, in our 500+ sq foot cottage as we build our dream house on our two acres! We are blessed beyond measure, love to travel, involved in ministry at our church and in between all of that I run three successful businesses!