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Meet Bessie: Built from ancient IKEA shelves and a whole lot of DIY determination, she is our nearly 8-foot-tall, 10-foot-wide “super-bookcase”. We began with three standard and two narrow IKEA Billy bookcases. To match the Craftsman-style baseboards, we cut out the trim behind the entire unit, built a platform base, and wrapped it in matching baseboard—making Bessie look truly built-in. After securing all the cases to each other and the wall, we added plywood to

As part of the requirements to become an international adoption caseworker, I had to complete several certification steps and classes. One particularly eye-opening step involved having my own brain assessed. That’s right—before I could help children, I first had to hand over my gray matter for inspection like it was a used car being appraised. The test identified which brain chemicals were purring along nicely and which were sputtering like a lawnmower that hadn’t been

Although we lived in Florida for almost 15 years, it never quite felt like home. North Carolina, on the other hand, felt “just right” within a matter of months. We soon realized that while we don’t need to be nestled deep in the mountains anymore, we do need to see them—every day. THAT, along with building the cottage on the ridge, is what makes NC home.

Sometimes, as we work to simplify our lives at Two Rocker Ridge (TRR), our mission to simplify often reveals surprisingly obvious solutions. We’d just never thought of them. Like everyone else, we had a standard knife block on the kitchen counter for years. We never loved it, but it was convenient—and it’s just what everyone did. When the kids were very young, we moved it to the top of the refrigerator for safety (inconvenient, to

We think grocery gettin’ is always a chore, but one particularly mundane grocery trip turned out to be anything but. Yup! The boring grocery routine ended in some drama. The excitement was facilitated by, of all things, a really ugly bird. She appeared about two-thirds of the way up our driveway as we were returning with our grocery bags. This was no delicate sparrow we’re talking about. She was nearly three feet long and stood