Timshel House

It was our very first weekend at Timshel house, we were sleeping on airbeds and sleeping bags, eating around an old, dark, scuffed up table (which I later refinished), and loving every minute of it! Monday was Jericho's 8th birthday and my folks were there exploring the property with us and gearing up a big to-do for the birthday boy. The weather was cold but sunny. Just right for hiking around the hills of our 40 acres.  Sunday night, we settled in around the wood-burning stove and played games together. Of course Jericho was beyond hope of sleeping. But we tried anyway, and soon enough, Monday morning arrived and brought with it a wonderful surprise--SNOW! I realize that snow in March is nothing remarkable to most people, but for us San Francisco folk, we were downright enchanted! The contrast of the white dust blanketing the vivid green moss and grass was stunning. The red bark of the Manzanita glowed in the sunlight reflected off the bright s...

Five and a half years we've been married, and lived in a city the whole time. We met and got married in sunny San Diego, California, and after a year there we were tempted by higher wages in the Bay Area, and decided to make the move to the cool gray city of love, San Francisco. We love everything about the city: the fog (named Karl), the culture, the shops and amazing restaurants... But we were lacking one thing: land. We longed for wide open land for our kids to run free. We're homeschoolers, so I guess the freedom-mindset is in our DNA. We really do like to roam. Finally, last summer we began to look at houses with property. "This one has 5 acres!" or "This one's on 120 acres, but boy is it a fixer upper!" We looked at huge houses on little chunks of deserty land and we looked at huge parcels of beautiful rolling hills--with no house built yet. After a rollercoaster of one escrow process falling though, we toured a ranch in Mariposa, Califo...