An Old School House

I love to plan outings for Sunday after church. Today we had the opportunity to explore an old school house built in 1920. One of the perks of my husband Gary being a real-estate broker, is getting to keep an eye on all of the interesting new properties that come available. We have seen some pretty great houses and properties over the years while searching for properties that might interest his buyers, a lot of whom are buying rural properties. We also hope one day to find a wonderful medium sized rural property for ourselves. I love the convenience of living in our small town close to the schools, but we want to eventually get back to a more rural setting.

The other evening Gary was browsing properties for his clients and came across an old school house on an acre, about half an hour from here. He knows I love old buildings like this, when I was a child I imagined how wonderful it would be to live in my old church, with all of its rooms. When I saw the pictures of the school house online, with its little auditorium stage and hardwood floors, I new I had to go take a look. So that was our Sunday outing.

We all had fun exploring this great old building, and had fun imagining how we would fix it up if we were to buy such a property.

Here are some pictures, I failed to remember my camera, but the phone cameras did a pretty good job. This is the front of the old schoolhouse, I love the nice tall entrance, and the old mossy cement stairs were great, not to mention the huge old Rhody bush in the front, which must look amazing in the spring.

The first room you enter must have been the main school room. Great hardwood floors, and best of all a little stage, we all thought it would be so fun to have a little stage in the living room. Plus all the built in cupboards would be great storage.

The main room also had this wall of windows that could be restored so beautifully.

There were other rooms, like a big attic, an nice bedroom, a huge basement that looks like it would be a great rec. room. The kitchen was interesting, with lots of little drawers, and this strange turning shelf, certainly lots of storage potential, it would be interesting to know what it was originally used for.

The property also has a wonderful shop/garage, with its own huge attic, which I only got a picture from the backyard of. Gary and I thought it would be a great building to build a wood shop in half for Gary, the other half a crafting studio for me, and the attic, Gary thought he would love for an office. This property had a little more fixing up than we thought, and only one real bedroom, otherwise we might have just been tempted. What a fun project house it would be though.

The yard was great, the kids found a climbing tree right away. A lot of the timber had been removed so there were stumps everywhere to explore. It had plenty of room for gardening and chickens and goats if the stumps were removed.

We spotted some interesting fungi in the yard, quite a bit of this beautiful orange fungus, at first I thought it was plastic, but we found it growing all over a big patch.

There were wonderful toadstools all over the yard, I'm not sure why, but I just love patches of toadstools and mushrooms, we used to get fairy rings of mushrooms on our old property that would pop up from time to time, and look really great.

More toadstools.

We also spotted these beautiful fall ferns, such amazing colors of green to amber.

We explored the house and yard one more time, wonderful old building! We headed home and had one more surprise on our drive- Camels!?!

We were driving along a winding country road and spotted two camels out among some trees in a field, we were driving, but my daughter captured a quick picture with her cell phone. Not something you see everyday. We all got a kick out of them. Perfect addition to our wonderful Sunday outing!

I also thought I would share a fun quick Thanksgiving craft that I made with my Sunday School class today. This Thanksgiving Tree is made by wrapping little squares of tissue paper around the eraser end of a pencil, dipping it in a little glue and pressing on top of a construction paper tree trunk. The kids had a fun time working on this craft. On the tree trunk we glued our thanksgiving verse that I printed out.

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his love endures forever. Psalm 106:1

This would be a fun activity to do with kids while they are on Thanksgiving break.

The turkey is thawing in the fridge, and this will be a week full of cooking and cleaning, and prepping for Thanksgiving. The weather is getting colder and colder, and I am looking forward to winter just around the corner! I hope everyone had a nice weekend!