About Pleasant Home
My great-great grandfather Otto Christianhemmers homesteaded in 1898 in a little hamlet a few miles from where I currently live called Pleasant Home. They farmed potatoes, cabbage, berries and had a sawmill. It is rumored they donated the lumber for the church in Pleasant Home that is still standing.
Otto Christianhemmers, his son Henry Hemmers, Henry’s wife Stella and their daughter Margarette. Approx. 1908.
Just down the road from Pleasant Home my grandmother purchased a little farmhouse in the 50’s. This house had humble beginnings as a chicken coop! The story is - the original farmhouse on the property burnt down and the owners moved into the chicken coop and gradually added onto the coop to make it their home.
In 1991 we began renting my grandma’s home when she moved to a senior living community. It was a tiny farm house on 1 acre of property in a beautiful area on a small country road surrounded by farms and plant nursery’s.
The little farmhouse just before Grandma moved out.
My husband and I raised our three boys in my grandma’s house for 13 years. We had a love hate relationship with the house through most of those years. It truly was tiny (700-900 sq ft) with no cupboards or closets, no insulation, no furnace and no air conditioner.
It had pull down stairs to the attic that we converted into our boys’ bedrooms.
There was a portable dishwasher that I hooked up to the kitchen faucet, that would inevitably soak me often when the hose popped off the faucet.
We had mice and shrews in the house constantly. No matter how many holes we plugged, we always found another critter.
We had a wood stove and oil stove in the main room downstairs for heat. It got nice and toasty in that room, but the rest of the house could be freezing at times!
Grandma getting warm by the oil stove - the same stove we stayed warm with
If I forgot about a load in the washing machine on the back porch in the winter; our clothes would be frozen in the shape of the washing machine bowl!
When it was super cold outside, my husband would lay under the oil drum outside for the oil stove and heat up the drum with a torch in order for the oil to flow in the lines.
our little farmhouse in the winter
When we peeled some wallpaper off one wall - a window fell out! LOL It wasn’t even framed in. That little incident started a whole house remodel.
Our family - Christmas 1995 - on the front porch of the old farmhouse
It was quite an adventure living in that house. But we wouldn’t change it for anything. We were so blessed to be able to live out in the country and experience all that we did.
When I started my business I wanted a name that represented our time in the old house and a tie into my love for family history. I always loved that my ancestors settled in a place called Pleasant Home. So it was that I named my little home business - Pleasant Home.
our little farmhouse right before we sold it
