01 Beautiful Re-Claimed Log Cabin Found

Renovating a Log Cabin into a Farmhouse

Our journey began years ago. We found, purchased, and reclaimed a log cabin into a farmhouse. Our log cabin farmhouse started toward the end of 2010. My husband was out of work and we hated living in the city in Georgia. In all our years together, we had never lived in the city. 

We always owned our own land, animals, and privacy. We certainly did not have any of those living in the city. I wanted to try and live in the city while attending college.  I was dead wrong for thinking that, I hated it.

Roadtrip

Autumn was in full swing. We always take a nice drive to the mountains to view all the leaves changing before winter sets in. Being from the north, we appreciate all the seasons knowing how brutal winter can be sometimes.

We decided to head up north to Tennessee as we have done a few times before.  We visited a good friend that had recently moved there and we fell in love with the Tennessee mountains in that particular area.

Finding an Old Abandoned Log Cabin

During one of those visits, we stopped at McDonald’s for coffee before heading back to Georgia. While I was getting coffee, Raymond took our fur baby on a “nature walk”. When he returned to pick me up, he showed me where he had taken Briana on her walk, and there it was……our future home up on a trailer!

It looked like someone was ready to move it somewhere. I thought we were too late to purchase it. Not that it mattered, even if it was for sale, we had no money, no job, and definitely no place to put it!

Building Comes as Second Nature

This isn’t the first time we tore down an old building and rebuilt it. We have done this very thing 28 years earlier in New York. We tore down a 100-year-old Victorian farmhouse, garage, and barn. Those 3 structures were 100% free.

While Ray was out hunting, he saw a bulldozer and other equipment at an old house he used to drive by all the time when he was a child. One day he stopped and asked what they were going to do with the buildings. The men said the owner wanted them torn down.

He didn’t even have to come home and ask me if I wanted them. Ray asked if they could give us a week to tear them down and haul what we could salvage ourselves. They contacted the owner and he gave us permission.

Trials and Errors

We ran into so many problems when we tore down the house, garage, and barn. The first major one, Ray had to have a double hernia operation because he lifted more than he should have. Fortunately, this came at the very end of the teardown.

We only lived a few miles down the road and hauled most of the lumber on the back of our pickup truck. We pulled nails for what seemed like a year! The lathing strips and insulation was cumbersome also.

The wood floors we pulled up had a stamp on them from the state of Washington over 100 years earlier. Our neighbor sanded them for free and we only added a clear finish to keep their beauty.

Losing Our Home

So sad was the day we handed the keys over to the bank. At the time, we had a $60,000 mortgage. We couldn’t make the payments any longer and we entered into a “friendly foreclosure” with the bank. Working for ourselves was very difficult. Our jobs consisted of logging and building houses.

At the time; all our job leads were exhausted. I was a stay-at-home mom who homeschooled the children. We both agreed this was more important than me working outside the home.

We lived in a very remote area in upstate New York and any job was hard to find. It hurt deeply to leave the home that we worked so hard to build together. I was in my late twenties and was just diagnosed with Fibromyalgia and was suffering from the cold, long winters. The doctor suggested a warmer climate to help my symptoms. Which we did move to Florida. The move did help quite a bit, but I never got over the hollow spot in my heart from losing our home.

Homesteading in Florida

We left New York and landed in Florida only to fail again after 8 years. As we did in New York, we homesteaded and basically lived off the land. We ate what we killed or grew. Our goat farm consisted of 149 goats. We sold the milk and the Boars for meat.

My son birthed his first goat at 8 years old! Florida was a far cry from NY and NJ where we are both from. I hated every minute of it. I lost my spirit living there.

Moving to the City

Eventually, we moved to Georgia where our lives began to pick up financially and substantially. We lived in our first purchased home and lived there for 8 years. I realized we longed for country land and to build our own home the way we wanted to. Hence, bringing us to finding this log cabin that we turned into our beautiful and peaceful farmhouse in the beautiful mountains of Tennessee.

If you missed our “Introduction to our log cabin”, check out this reads Log Cabin Farmhouse Introduction.

Continued next time-

Did we buy this cabin, find a job, and live happily ever after?

02 Purchasing a Log Cabin is the next chapter, please read on.

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