The Driveway

Our Family / Our Dream

My husband Robert and I, are both artists. Robert makes his living as a freelance Art Director, while his first love and passion is to create in wood. I'm a painter and a photographer, although through the years finding time to do either while raising and homeschooling five children - has been difficult. We've dreamed about renovating or building a barn / house / studio for many years with the intention of investing more of ourselves into our art. I do have a studio in my current home and I have been painting recently - which is refreshing! But I'm still raising three of those five kids and mothering all five... Noel, 21, Shaughn, 18, Isaac, 12, Lily Anna, 10, and Sophia Hua Kai, 3.

Time to paint will be even more illusive now that we are selling the house and moving to the twenty acre Dawkins Lane Farm. I say moving to the farm when in fact, there is no house! We have to build one. And we plan on doing this without a mortgage - cash as we go! (To be debt free is our goal.)

And we don't know where we might live while we build. We've considered a small apartment in nearby LaGrange or even the "are you out of your mind" idea of moving a family of seven into a tiny camper with a few tents on the side. Ugh. Perhaps we'll do all three.

I'll post more later about the history of our dream and the specific plans we have to build. For now just know that this is an incredible dream coming true right before our eyes. We will build our barn-house with our own hands. We'll have friends to help and we will contract out some of the labor, but for the most part - we're building it. Glorious fun. And hard work like I've never imagined.

We've witnessed God's gifts and miracles in many ways and this is another one! I plan to document this journey and the building process here. So follow along and enjoy.

Blessings,
Robin