Trail of Trials- The Beginning!

There is never a really good place to start a journey when you aren't sure when it began.  I'm starting with today.  My hands are covered in kilz primer.  My shoulders ache from painting a ceiling, after painting wall after wall after wall after, well, you get the point.  Lots of painting.  Today, I feel in love with a house.  Better yet, today, I feel in love with MY house.  It doesn't really feel like it is mine yet, we've only owned it since last Friday, but I'm working on knowing it well enough to call my home soon.
We started looking at old, run down, abandoned, foreclosed and oft falling down houses last summer.  It was sort of a hobby fueled on dreams with just a touch of reality to keep it interesting.  We knew we wanted out of our typical 1970's rambler: boxy house, boxy rooms, boxy neighborhood. We knew we wanted out of the town of Zimmerman- the back yard of towns in which my husband and I were both raised in and had hoped to get a little further away from.  We knew we wanted something to call our very own, since we'd meshed our prior lives-children, homes, pets, exes, furnishings, hopes and dreams-  into a jumbled array of whatever worked but nothing that we actually chose.  Most of all, we knew we wanted an adventure, together.  I think it's become a pilgrimage of sorts, and I've decided to share our trail of trials.

So this is our house, the basic little box that we somehow managed to raise 7 kids, a multitude of dogs, cats, a handful of gerbils and hamsters, a couple of bunnies, and 1 ferret in.  I've lived in this house for almost 10 years, and Jeremy has been here for 15.  We will be leaving behind a house that was filled with love and laughter, occasional tears and has a few dents to prove that it was well lived in.  I'm not sure how it will feel to close the door one final time and know we will never call it our home again, but I like to think that we take the most important part with us.
Knowing that we wanted to move away from this house, and this neighborhood, and set out for parts unknown but still within easy commuting distance, we started our search last year.  We had a lot of fun looking at homes.  We wandered around caution tape that pointed to giant holes in the floor boards, saw evidence of Realtors that had fallen through stairways, and plugged our noses through vacant homes filled with cats (or squirrels or worse).  We drove from one end of Minnesota to the other, discovering cute little hamlets along the rivers and forgotten farming communities just one or two families shy of becoming a ghost town.  We looked more earnestly this spring, and finally, after a few dud offers on other houses, we bought a medium sized two story home in Grantsburg,Wisconsin, and this blog will be the story of our new home and our new life.  Welcome to our new home!