Can you believe it is the end of January? When you are living in DIY land cottage renovations the days can fly by and stand still at the same time! Can you relate? We’re living an adventure, we chose to downsize our life when Covid hit. It wasn’t our intention when we moved to Oklahoma in 2019 to take on a renovation project and move to the country, but that is exactly what happened in late 2020.
If you’ve not been here before the Berry Happy Cottage is our Oklahoma Ozarks renovation project. It’s a hodge podge of two homes that were put together, treated poorly by a renter long before we lived in Oklahoma and then we purchased it to create a mini farm for our work and my business.
It didn’t have walls y’all.
like literally.
Some folks do all the renovations before they move in. That wouldn’t be the way we do it. I drove past the gate and saw a “for sale by owner” sign with my friend Janet Ricco Everett, and that evening we had a handshake deal to buy the house.
We were leaving a brand new home that didn’t need anything but to enjoy it.
We began moving in 8 days later. We leased out our intown house to give ourselves a year to love the new space. It took alot of imagination to believe we’d love it in a year. It stood with a non functioning kitchen, 2 rooms without walls to the exterior, joists needing replacing. Let’s just say I am in the habit of visioneering what isn’t there yet.
The plan is to do the work ourselves, Feller is amazing at doing, but everything takes more time when you do it yourself and live rural. We were able to buy the property for a very fair price and it has a workshop already on the property that will house our business and events. It’s exciting to know we’ll own it outright in less than 4 years. 2021 the focus is to spend the year building and renovating and preparing the soil for our gardens. We’ve spent five months rebuilding the joists, the walls, the electric and preparing for the pretty. I’ve lived without a kitchen since August 2020 and it’s been a long six month as we prepared for this week.
The house had so much left from a renter with small children that was left behind. This was the more recently added room (probably 20 years old) and it became the Master first, then we realized that our college aged daughter could almost have a studio style space there if she planned it well and it had its own porch, so we went from this below
To the picture below. My style is cottage with some french country eclectic and maybe a little shabby chic thrown in, and I love a home to have a welcoming ease. We all 3 lived in this space for 5 months with a pull out couch and our bed while we worked on the rest of the house. Talk about alot of together time during Covid without much space!
We’ve just finished the 2nd bedroom’s structural changes so we’re excited about beginning to put in the functional fun…curtains, blinds, trims and begin to live in more than just 450 sft of this 1100 sft cottage!
We’ve taken what was an addition to the cottage and turned it temporarily into our daughter Madi’s bedroom so she’ll have a bit more room for a New York Style space for her living space. We just moved this week into the new to us bedroom in the original part of the cottage. Can’t wait to show you! We’re camping out in it for now as we trim it out and prepare it for the pretty parts.
This week I’ll catch you up on what we’ve done so far to the cottage on Saturday. We’re so glad we made this move, to commit to downsizing in Covid times, to focus on enjoying what we have where we are. It’s not been easy, in fact it’s been really hard, but most worthwhile things are.
Excited to share what’s coming up in the next six week!
God bless you today and everyday.
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