The Next Plan for Us…

Sometimes I wake Martin up by turning up the volume on my computer ever so slowly with this song:

Now more than ever.

Over the last year, the course Martin and I have been traveling has changed sooo much.  There has been so much dreaming and dreaming.  I haven’t mentioned any of these plans to you even though they’ve been in the forefront of every decision we’ve made these last months because (1) we didn’t know if this dream could really happen and (2) I don’t think we really knew how to grasp it even if it DID come true.

It wasn’t until we’d been in Germany for two weeks that we knew for sure:

It’s our little family realizing something we never thought we’d do for a long, long time: we’re settling down.

{Love Where We Live} page

We’re back in the United States.  We arrived on Sunday morning.  By Monday night, we were back in the tire house.

Last June, we moved from Germany to the United States.  I thought that saying goodbye to Germany for three months was like retracting my wings.  Germany instantly equaled challenge every second for me.  A foreign world showed me bravery and joy.  Of course, those three months started to grow as a calling kept us in the US for 11 months.  We returned just last month, and of course it became all about prepping for this next journey.

Oh I aboslutely adore Berlin.  But I could never get rid of the itch to be in rural America in the mountains.  It was buried deep in my heart.  It has been deep in my family for generations.  (My ancestors left their German speaking world in the 1800s and settled in this not-yet-a-state region of America.)

I never thought that being the girl back in her home state was ever going to make me grow no matter how much I looooved it.

Boy was I wrong.

Gadanke was born here.  Martin and I both learned to fly here.  We met here.  All our dreams have always begun from right here.

So what are we going to be doing in the Wild West of America?  We’re building a little home.  By “little”… you know what I mean.  teensy.  By “building”… can you guess?  Yeah.  We’re doing it all ourselves.  Martin has been researching geothermal heating systems in school for months.  I’m not even sure I knew what that was before.  (Don’t worry if you don’t either; I’ll fill you in.)

Oh!  But we’re not building this home from scratch.  Boy howdy! (I’m trying to sound more country.  Is it working?)  I’m just going to have to show you this backwards plan we’re so excited about.

Here is home-to-be:

I’m not even joking.

We’re converting a house made for airplanes into a house made for US! The plan is to remodel the upstairs in the back of this airplane hangar into a little 700 square foot (65 square meter) loft.  We’ll enclose the open attic on the upper right, bring up the ceilings, and do about a million other remodeling projects.

Gadanke will still be running full steam.

Martin is still going to be working on school AND developing his dream engineering business.

Our dreams for the summer are going to need so much more than just 24 hours each day.  It’s exciting.  It’s overwhelming.

We’ve got a lot of de-cluttering and cleaning to do first.  Also?  This airplane needs an engine so it can get out of the way.

So that’s the plan!  We’re both super excited to share the process of making THIS home with you in the coming months.

This decision hasn’t been easy.  But yet at the same time, it was soooo easy.  Deep in our hearts, we know this is just right.