We built it!

These are some pictures of our house that we built while living in Louisiana. We only lived in this house three months after we spent over a year building it. The beams are from my dad's original house that burned down and as you can see the craftsmanship is rather crude. These beams were made by slaves way back when. They even kept the wooden pegs used as nails back then. I loved the beams, wood floor, tile kitchen that was cool in the summer, the wood stairs we would slide down on sleeping bags, the wood paneling in front, and the fun side closets that would lead to the storage space on the sides of the roof upstairs. I used to love the sound of rain on the tin roof. I loved the large bathroom with two sinks and the toilet in a separate part. I used to love going right outside to a child's dream playground in the woods. Playing and swimming in the nearby creek, swinging on vines in the woods, and playing in the gully's collecting bottles. It was a fun three years!

This fireplace brings back memories of scraping off the leftover mortar on the bricks taken off the old home that burned down. We spent hours cleaning those bricks and I think my have helped lay them. This is the old wood burning stove that could heat up the house in the winter time and if you touched it you wouldn't get burned. We spent many a cold days sitting by this stove:-)

Here is a view from the back of the house. Isn't that live oak tree huge! It makes our house look tiny. When we lived in the double wide trailer during hurricane Andrew, a branch from a live oak tree like that took out our entire porch. Good thing it didn't hit our house!

This Louisiana Christmas was a trip down memory lane. We even stayed with people who live on the same street we grew up on. I even got to go running in my neighborhood...oh, that is a funny story. Whenever Brian and I would go running we would take a stick with us in the unlikely event a dog attacked us. Most people don't have fences and their dogs are free to roam. It's the Louisiana country way to do things. And EVERYONE has a dog. I'm sure people must have thought we were crazy running with a stick in our hands. I did encounter a dog on my first run. Brian ran that route right before me and said he didn't see any dogs, so I didn't bring a stick. Well, I did encounter a dog and I'm sure he was nice, but I wasn't going to find out. I ran fast and kept looking back at him and telling him to stay. I ran the three miles up the road hoping that the gas station at the end of it was open so I could just call someone to come and pick me up so I wouldn't have to run by that dog again. Well, that gas station that was there when I was young was gone, just an empty lot. So, I had to run all the way back! I carried a stick on the way back and did for every run after that:-)