West Ladies Home Raising Update

Dear Friends and Followers,
    Its summertime! Hope y'all are staying nice and cool! In this kind of heat we go to the garden early morning and late evenings to harvest & weed.
 Tomorrow the humidity/temperature is supposed to be lower, so we hope to spend most of the day out there weeding & mulching. That's one of the keys to a successful mulch garden- keep the mulch coming on!!! Despite a few weeds, our little garden is just beautiful with all the butterflies flittering around the zinnias & cosmos. The cypress vines and moon flowers are in bloom, & we are still getting lots of cucumbers for our Mean Green juice and other good things we make with them. We still have potatoes in the ground & will harvest some tomorrow. Nothing like new potatoes with a dash of cream & lot of butter--or coconut oil! (I know that sounds funny, but add a dash of sea salt and some nutritional yeast and you have a very healthy potato that tastes good!)
 A sweet friend in Texas gave us a huge pack of Orange Glow Watermelon seeds, they are sprawling everywhere & are loaded with melons. We can't wait to eat them--have y'all ever had orange watermelon? 
 And in-between all this garden work we are canning, eating watermelon, (that comes from a local farmer friend) and working on writing and taking pictures for the fundraiser! 
It sure has been wonderful hearing from many of you! 
 I would love to share this story with you:
 A mom who left a comment on our Homestead Blessings Blog,  shared that her family really enjoyed our DVDs and that her young sons would watch the films and re-enact their own version of the Homestead Blessings DVD series, (which I thought was fun and cute enough) but then she said her boys even named their "show"--Boystead Blessings!! We were all reading the comment out loud and started laughing so hard we cried and had to hold our sides!!!  What a blessing! 
We love to hear from y'all! Please keep the comments coming!!!  We will do what we can to keep y'all posted. 
Over the last 2 weeks we have received many donations though Youcaring and through the mail, for our new home-raising quest, making the monetary total this morning: $4,244!  
That's so  great! Yeah!
 For the first phase of the building we need about $8,894.00 more. This will help us get our home up and dryed in!  
 A neighbor and friend has offered his work crew to do the actual work of drying the house in!!! Our home will be 960 square feet, plus porches.
So now we could use your help to spread the word for materials costs!
 
  HERE ARE MAIN MATERIALS FOR STAGE ONE:

• POSTS                      
• LUMBER   
• CEDAR SIDING       
  
• METAL ROOFING 
  
•  DOORS
• WINDOWS

• 2 PORCHES 

Total price    13,138.00

  Yay!! This will get our home dryed in!
We are grateful for many of the other material donations.

•  We have been given a large amount of old tin, for ceilings and wains coat . 
  
• A friend has given about $1,000 worth of stove piping.
  
• Another friend donated a nice enamel tub.
  
•  Fence post, loan of tools for finishing, and a  great discount for  the materials  for framing and drying in. 
  

We will continue to keep the cost as frugal and low as possible . We are so grateful to you all for sharing our vision of our home building with your families, churches, homeschool groups, and other peoples . You can give them our links and blogs so they can be a part of this new Homestead Blessings adventure!
www.youcaring.com/thewestladies
https://www.facebook.com/homestead.blessings.9
Great to hear from all of you and please stay in touch! Thank you for your prayers- we are very blessed indeed!!!
Love and Blessings,
Vicki and girls; Jasmine, Cecilia and Hannah