• Do-It-Yourself,  SchmittFarmhouse

    One Room At a Time-The Living Room

    Tweet Almost immediately after my husband and I bought our first house, we started dreaming about our next one. It was not a matter of discontentment, we loved our house, but we are dreamers and started putting together our ideal forever home. In hindsight, having this list was the motivation we needed to look at our now current (and hopefully forever) home. One of the items on the top of my list was a living room and a family room. I wanted a space without a TV when you walked in the house. We are not huge TV watchers anyways, in fact, we have been in our current house almost…

  • Do-It-Yourself,  SchmittFarmhouse

    Folks, We Have A Pantry

    Tweet My Farmhouse Friday updates have been basically nonexistent because there has been nothing to report. I joked the other day I feel like the house is going backwards not forwards because on top of the mile long to-do list of projects, we have 3 messy humans living in it, one of which is zero help in cleaning it up. He certainly knows how to make a mess though and has started a lovely habit of throwing his food everywhere when he is done eating. But I digress. This update is to say there is indeed an update. After a month, we have a pantry. I know this is a…

  • Faith,  SchmittFarmhouse

    Put Down the Expectations

    Tweet My word for the year was authenticity. And right now, being authentic means admitting to myself (and ya’ll) my expectations set me up for a dark dive into struggle.  See, buying your dream farmhouse with dreams to fix it up is very different from living in said dream farmhouse in need of fixing up. Pinterest boards full of Farmhouse decor are exciting, but ants covering your counters and bathrooms not working are not. I have spent hours aimlessly wandering or doing nothing because I am so overwhelmed by it all. Perhaps though the aimless wandering gave me ample time for much needed soul-searching. I realized in all this expectations…

  • SchmittFarmhouse

    Farmhouse Friday Update #1

    Tweet One of my favorite grammatical tools is alliterations. Hence the title of my blog-Amanda’s Annotations and now my Farmhouse Friday Updates. Currently I have very few super fun and exciting updates, but I did include a few more pictures of the farmhouse and property for your perusing. The past two weeks have been full of a lot of troubleshooting, fixing problems, and spending money. This has been tough on us because J is a saver and I like to spend money on currently frivolous things like new curtains and paint.  Alas, I have practiced great self-control as I pay for things like fixing the furnaces, mold remediation, appliances, and…

  • Do-It-Yourself,  SchmittFarmhouse

    The Story of a City Mouse and a Country Mouse

    Tweet Aseop’s Fables were some of my favorites as a child and the story of the city mouse and the country mouse ranked near the top. While I didn’t grow up in a huge city, I am through and through a city mouse. My dream for the longest time was to move to a big city, sell my car, and live in a cute little studio apartment overlooking the busy streets. And then this city loving girl fell in love with a country loving boy. This turned out to be handy when I moved into a downtown apartment and had mice. One night I perched myself on top of my…

  • SchmittFarmhouse

    It Starts with Sacrifice

    Tweet   In September of last year, my dear husband and I looked at a house. It was a big white farmhouse on three acres and we immediately fell in love. And I mean in love. We started talking and dreaming and pinning ideas on a secret Pinterest board. The house was a foreclosure so in our budget and although we were not looking for a house, this house was perfect. It had almost every detail we wanted in a house. It also had a lot of details we didn’t want like mold and mice.  But nevertheless, we moved forward.  Did you catch above we looked at it in September?…

  • Community,  Minimialism

    New Clothes Every Two Weeks?!

    Tweet This summer I am taking an ethics class and was assigned, as in all my graduate classes, a research paper.  For this class, I chose to deviate from my normal topic range and tackle the idea of sweatshops and cheap labor.  (ok, the topic isn’t that far from the normal range of issues I am passionate about) I have to admit, I would be the first to say I do not agree with sweatshops and I am semi-careful about where I shop, but I still love to shop and love a bargain. In my research for the paper, I came across a book- Overdressed: The High Cost of Cheap Fashion. …