Baby it's cold outside!

Baby it’s cold outside!!  Just last week we had the most perfect fall days, and as of this morning it feels like winter already!!  This morning we woke up and it was 55 degrees in the house (just a little chilly!) but that didn’t compare to the 14 degrees it was outside, plus the windchill!!  And when we woke up this morning, there was a little snow on the ground!  Our first snow of the season!

There are no complaints here! I actually love this time of the year, the beautiful snow, cuddling up in bed every night, and knowing that Christmas is right around the corner.  The best part! We still don’t have any ‘normal’ kitchen appliances (just a propane camp cook stove) but with the cold weather, now we don’t need to worry about a refrigerator!! See, there is always a silver lining!!

Yesterday, in preparations for this cold snap, we did a lot of preparing!  We had lots of wood pallets and we were running low on kindling.  Scott cut up the wood pallets and brought all the pieces into the house.  While he was doing that, I was working inside – vacuuming, using up all our water to fill up our ‘faucet bucket’, wash all our dishes, fill up the toilet tank and clean the toilet, and even clean a little too.  Since we knew it was going to get cold, we wanted to have all our buckets full, so yesterday afternoon we filled them all up!  Scott even found a few extra buckets so now we have 10 total to fill with water. 

I’m perfectly happy not having full electric, not having running water and not having a kitchen, but honestly I’m not exactly looking forward to filling up the water buckets this winter… it’s going to be cold!!  But we’ll be so thankful someday soon when we finally have running water.

You may be wondering why we don’t have running water yet or electricity – well it’s because of several things.  Basically it comes down to money….  We spent everything we had on getting under roof.  Now we could easily go into debt to get the things we need, but the whole point of us moving out here was to not have a mortgage and not owe any money for anything  (still working on this as we have a few bills to pay on, but we have made big progress toward this goal!!).  Because of this, we don’t want to go further into debt for our water and electric.  But no need to worry about us! We have so much to be thankful for – the little bit of electricity we do have, a nice warm wood stove to keep us cozy all winter, and each other!! 

We also haven’t sold our house yet in OH.  There has been an increase of interest lately, but no more offers.  This is something we are really praying about as it would be a really wonderful blessing to have our OH house sell.  Right now we are just waiting on that right person to come along and fall in love with it just as we have!

I hope you all have a warmer week than we are having!!  But I’ll keep you posted on how much wood we use, how often we need to us out wood stove, and how cold it gets inside and outside.  So far our insulation is really helping!!