Start Here

Hey there, bestie!

If you've clicked around On The Creek for more than five minutes, you probably have questions.

Why do I live in a log cabin by a creek? Who was James? How did I become a mom through foster care and adoption? Why am I always renovating something? And how did a blog that started with a foreclosure somehow end up containing gardens, grief, thrift-store furniture, books, single motherhood, questionable dating decisions, and whatever else I'm currently figuring out?

Fair.

I'm Tiff, and this is the abbreviated version.

It started with a house.

2015

On The Creek started in 2015 when my husband, James, and I bought a foreclosure in rural Ohio.

And when I say foreclosure, I don't mean somebody forgot to update the kitchen cabinets.

The house needed work. A lot of it.

We started renovating it ourselves, and I started this blog to document what we were doing. Back then, I was an uptight perfectionist with very specific ideas about how everything should turn out.

The house. The projects. My life.

Cute. Anyway.

James and I spent the next six months turning that neglected property into our home. Somewhere along the way, On The Creek became about more than renovation. There were gardens, thrift-store finds, furniture makeovers, DIY experiments, and all the ordinary pieces of the life we were building there.

Then our family grew.

2020–2021

Our path to becoming parents wasn't exactly conventional either.

In 2020, Braxton came into our lives through foster care.

We eventually had the opportunity to adopt him, and in December 2021, his adoption became official.

It should have been the beginning of an entirely new chapter for the three of us. Instead, ten days later, everything changed.

The part where the plan fell apart.

2021

James had melanoma. On December 15, 2021, he died.

I became a widow and a single mom ten days after becoming Braxton's mom on paper.

There isn't a clever transition from that sentence because there wasn't one in real life either. The house was still here. The garden was still here. The projects were still here. Our son was here. I was here.

But the life James and I had spent years building together suddenly looked completely different.

Read James's story →

Read about our adoption story →

So...what now?

2022–2024

For a while, I didn't know.

Life after James wasn't some inspiring montage where I immediately discovered my purpose and emerged with excellent boundaries and a capsule wardrobe.

It was grief. Parenting. Houses. Gardens. Family. Learning how to handle things James used to handle. Figuring out which parts of our old life I wanted to keep and which no longer fit.

Sometimes rebuilding meant something profound. Sometimes it meant figuring out how to fix something because nobody else was there to do it.

Eventually, I started another renovation project. I gardened. I thrifted. I changed my house. I changed my mind about things. I tried stuff.

Some of it worked. Some of it spectacularly did not. But somewhere in all of that, I started building again.

Curating a life I love.

Now

These days, On The Creek looks a little different than it did in 2015. So do I.

I still renovate houses. I still garden. I still drag home old things because I'm convinced I can make them better. I'm raising my son. I'm figuring out single life. I'm reading books that occasionally break my brain. I'm learning what I want, what I don't want, and what deserves a place in my life.

That's what curating a life I love means to me. Not creating a perfect life. Not pretending everything worked out as planned. Just paying attention to what I'm building with what I've got.

Some things get planted. Some things get fixed. Some things get brought home. Some things get let go. And some things require three trips to the hardware store because apparently I learned nothing from the first two.

That's life on the creek.

Tiff