It's been a while

Boy did life ever happen! We're still looking for that farm, and still taking photos. We scrapped the Etsy shop for now, and are working on building our own website. I was going to just start up a new blog for our new directions, but figured I would just keep this one going.

Here was what was meant to be the first post in the new blog, some of this rehashes what followers already know (ah yes, that same old farm we couldn't buy):

Of farms and photographs

Welcome to our little corner of the web! Right now, this blog is meant to chronical our plans to buy a small farm as well as our photography. Hopefully one day it will chronical our life on our farm and what's selling in our photography shop! Currently, we do sell our photos through several PODs (print on demand), but we are hoping that in addition to buying and or starting a small farm, we will be selling our photos on our own site. Both of these ventures will take time and money, but stick with us if you want to read about the adventures in both!

First, let me tell you a little about the photography. We've both been interested in photography since childhood, and have been selling our work on everything from prints to mousepads to greeting cards through several outlets. While this has been a great way to "stick a toe in the water" so to speak, it takes a lot of the control over the final product away from us. We will continue to offer what we already have up on those sites, but we will only be adding new things to the greeting card site (http://www.greetingcarduniverse.com/picturethis). Building our own site is going to take time, so I can't say we have an ETA on a release of that. We're looking at vendors for printing right now, and researching shipping options.

Now, the part that has us pretty excited (not that photography isn't exciting): the farm. I have farming in my blood-my grandparents both grew up on farms, and a great, great aunt and uncle were popcorn farmers. Sounds fun, huh? About a year ago, while we were house hunting, we came across a little farm for sale. At the time, we hadn't discussed actually starting to farm on the acreage, we were just enamored with the property. Why, I can't really say. I guess it was one of those "love at first sight" moments that you can't explain. It really didn't make much sense really. We wanted a three bedroom, two bath ranch with a basement that didn't need any work (been there, done that with our current place). This was a two bedroom, one bath house with no basement that needed a LOT of work. In fact, it was abandoned, even the yard looked like a field because it hadn't been mown in years. But we loved it. So we looked at it, called a mortgage agent and dreams of a farm began floating in our heads. And the mortgage agent quickly put the kibosh on that-the house wasn't mortgagable (we tried more than one mortgage company and more than one way to get that farm). So much for that place. But, it planted the seed for the idea of beginning a farm.

While we wait for the right place to "crop up" (sorry, couldn't help it), we're researching all the aspects of owning and running a farm, from fun stuff like tractors to serious stuff like business structures and taxes. We'll check in as we look at the aspects and as we shoot new photos.