Bought the Farm

A little over a year ago my husband and I were having our annual New Year’s discussion. We sat down to discuss what our goals were for the year. Among the many topics we discussed was our need for more space and how we could arrange for it. We had a two-bedroom house… and four children… four children who are home the majority of every day because we are a home educating family.

Our home- built circa 1855

We discussed (again) the possibility of building on an addition. But our 156 year-old house was surrounded by a barn, studio, limestone slab porches, patios, sidewalks, ancient trees, a cistern, and our garden beds. Building on required losing one or more of those things. And with all the other requirements involved, that option didn’t seem reasonable.

"studio" with stone basement behind  house

Then we revisited our interior remodeling ideas. We tried to figure out if there any walls that could be moved and rooms that could be re-sized without changing the footprint. We got out the scale diagrams we had made. We determined that we could carve out a tiny bedroom if we moved an entire bathroom and shifted everything in our utility room. Or we could make an even smaller bedroom if we converted the breakfast room into one. But we’d have to wall up the pass-through window from the kitchen, and the kitchen would lose some of its view. Ultimately, it was clear that if we had no washer, dryer, hot water, air conditioner, furnace, etc. during a remodel, we couldn’t really live there, let alone “school” there while we remodeled it.

So we hauled out a laptop and took a look at the real estate offerings. We had been doing so at intervals for years without anything appealing falling into our price range. This time there was one listing that interested us.

listing picture

“Wonderful Stone Dutch Colonial Home with 3 bedrooms plus a study, 3 baths, 5 fireplaces, wood floors, new Anderson Windows (3 years old), Bryant furnace on 30 acres +/- with a Horse Barn and a lake. The home has a fireplace in each bedroom, study, and living room. There is a large bedroom and study on the main floor with two additional oversized bedrooms upstairs, and an unfinished bonus room. This private horse farm is just 3 miles from Spencer and is in move-in condition. The home sits at the back of the property and offers privacy with wonderful views. The outbuilding that holds the horses has water and electric with 6 stalls built in, each stall has an attached fence outside. This home has only had two owners who took excellent care of the property. There have been may upgrades done to the house over the years. The newer Bryant furnace with built in humidifier still has about a 5-year warranty left on it. The insulation in the roof has been updated R49 rating and the home is equipped with a generator hook up that also runs the water pump. A horse farm like this is rarely available with its excellent location, amenities, privacy, situated on 30 +/- dream-like acres with a lake.”

part of the property's lake- listing picture

It sounded pretty amazing. We set up a showing. But at the showing, I was immediately put off by the inaccuracies of the listing. It was NOT in “move-in” condition. It was obvious that the sellers had not taken “excellent” care of the property. There were only 4 horse stalls, not 6. Only 3 stalls had corrals, not 4. (The corral posts were rotted out, by the way.) I even found out later that there had actually been three owners, not two.

The other initial turn-off was that the house was dirty. What do I mean by dirty? Well, here are a few examples. One area of the home looked as if someone had splattered ketchup all over the walls. The kitchen cabinets had jelly handprints dried onto them. There was excrement stewing in un-flushed and grimy toilets. Need I say more?

The walls and floors were all pretty much like this.

Another drawback was that the owners had not completely moved out. There was a mishmash of stuff cluttering every closet. The attic space, basement, and garage were an impasse of jumbled junk, obscuring our ability to actually see the home. You’re probably thinking, “Lighten up, woman. They were moving. Moves cause clutter. How bad could it be?” Let me give you an example. As I peered into the garage from the steps down to it from the house, I made the mistake of pushing the button to a garage door opener as I fumbled for the light switch. Stuff fell out of the garage as the door opened. With the help of the realtor, I had to cram it back in so that I could close the door again. (And I couldn’t walk through the garage to do it, but had to go outside!)

part of the brick pile in the summer time

I could go on about the interior, about wobbly banisters, scratched floors, and ancient appliances and fixtures, but I’ll move onto the outside of the home. It’s more entertaining. The yard area was terribly overgrown with ivy, weeds, bushes, and small trees. There was no place for children to play. There was a gigantic stack of bricks, a steel door, and a large pile of trash next to the garage. Did I mention that the door on the side of the garage was missing a pane of glass and snow was sifting in on all of the owners’ things? The handrail from the back screen porch steps was broken off and lying on the ground. There was a pile of dirt and missing grass from where they had recently dug up and replaced the well pump. The gutters were full of leaves and sticks. A dog had dug up the yard. Later, once the now melted, we found lots of garbage strewn around (food wrappers, broken plastic toys, millions of balls, medicine in blister packs, articles of clothing, golf tees, drink containers, etc.) 

gutter twisted in heap in unkempt pasture

In the area between the garage and the horse barn, in a pasture where the fence was literally falling over, there were many plastic doghouses and corrugated aluminum sheds for hogs spread about. There were baby pools full of filthy water, ramshackle fenced off pens here and there, seemingly at random. And all of it was overgrown with tall weeds and thick with last years’ leaves, weeds so tall and leaves so thick that you could see them despite the blanket of snow. The wood piles had long ago toppled and were rotting on the ground. And the horse barn was full of untidy piles of incongruent items (like winter coats, hand-held video games, and bowling balls mixed in with piles of straw hay, broken feed buckets... and more drink and food wrappers.) The stalls were coated in manure and hog slop. One side of the horse barn was missing its gutter, etc. etc. etc.

So there was all THAT, but I also decided that I was not enamored of the farm for other reasons. Five drafty fireplaces... wouldn’t that make our heating bill higher? Plus, I figured the house had them for a reason. (Perhaps the power went out frequently and they were needed for heat.) Besides, they were a danger to my young children, and how would we find time to chop enough wood to feed them all, let alone haul it all in, start the fires, and keep them all going?

The ¼ mile driveway also worried me. How would we plow it? How would we keep the gravel graded? How would we keep it from getting overgrown?

a small section of the drive- late fall

The more I thought, the more impractical and crazy the thought of purchasing the farm seemed. Hay fields: we didn’t need 15 acres of hay for our poultry and one goat. The lake: my “no-water-on-my-face-if-I-can-help-it,” non-swimming children would probably drown. My husband didn't even really know how to fish. I knew more than he did in that area, and I'm not overly fond of fishing. The horse barn: we never in our wildest dreams imagined owning horses. The woods: there would be hunters. There would be deer eating anything we tried to grow. There would be ticks, requiring nightly monkey sessions and exposing us to the possibility of contracting Lyme Disease, or the more than 5 other tickborne Diseases. (http://www.cdc.gov/ticks/diseases/ The kids might get lost in the woods (there was 150 acres of classified forrest directly behind the property) or die of poison ivy exposure. (I'm only half-joking.) The septic system: endlessly washing cloth diapers wouldn’t jibe with that, nor would a family of 6 that made lots of soiled laundry and dirty dishes. The well: we’d only have water if the power was on, and the electric line trailed along a treed fencerow longer than the driveway. The odds of it going down were good. And in the event of widespread downed lines, we’d be last on the list for repairs. In other words, if the power went out, we wouldn’t even be able to flush a toilet without some artful engineering... or a generator!

the biggest fire ring

The upshot: I was not interested at all. I figured that it was an “open and shut case.” But later, talking it over with my husband, he was surprised by my reactions. He had immediately fallen in love with the “ranch” (as a set of previous owners called it- not the ones who were selling it.) He was seriously considering it. Being a big thinker with big dreams, he could easily look only at potential and not be frightened. He pointed out that the home had many items that we had included when we had made a list of qualifications for our ideal home. It had a better bedroom setup, more bedrooms, and bedroom closets. (Our historic home was shy of those.) It had attic space. It had a bonus room for a play/school space. (We were schooling in the breakfast nook and there was no attic.) It was closer to restaurants and stores. (We were 30 min. from everything but a gas station and a car wash.) Unlike our place, it had a spot for the kids to ride bikes and scooters. It was closer to a Catholic church. It had a two-car garage with a big workbench. (Ours was a detached model T garage.) It had a study that could serve as a guest room when needed. (Our guests slept in the living room. Well, actually, we slept in the living room and gave them our bed.) It had a barn for our animals. It had some fencing. There were multiple fire rings for bonfires. There was plenty of room for a tree fort. (We had just built one.) It had a basement (as opposed to our inaccessible crawl space.) The road it was on was less trafficked. In fact, the home was so far from the road that traffic would not even be an issue. (Our road was heavily trafficked.) It was a place of natural beauty and opened doors for us to be more self-sufficient.

our well-used list of criteria

What could I say? Technically, he was right. When we had previously discussed the possibility of moving, these were many of the items we had agreed were important to us. We even had a list we had referred to over the years to refer to again. 

I pointed out that it was still far from his work. He countered that he traveled for business a lot and he would be closer to the airport if we moved. I complained that although grocery stores were close, the co-op where I shopped was farther away. He pointed out that he worked near it and could bring home the groceries. I belabored the fact that it was a maintenance nightmare. He stressed that the only way to avoid that was to buy a house in town with a small yard or a condo with a maintenance plan. He said he couldn’t imagine living in town again. He just couldn’t do it. He was too spoiled by the space and privacy we had, by the freedom and beautiful views. Plus, he loved having animals and longed for some land of his own (what I call his "man land.")

morels in the woods

I had to admit it. McCookie Cutter housing developments, which are primarily what is available in our area, weren't a good fit for our family. Most older homes around are now either broken up into student rentals or are too small for our family of 6. I was losing ground. I mentioned my fear of stray hunters’ bullets. He said we could put the kids in neon hats. I think he sensed that he was winning at this point. He stressed that we could fix and clean. We could put in a garden space, fruit trees, a strawberry patch, flowerbeds, a play-set, and a sandbox… things that our house had that the farm did not. He reminded me that the taxes were low, that the house had abundant privacy. He pointed out that we could row and fish. We could camp on our own land. We could hunt morels, and make more maple syrup than ever before, etc. Again, this was technically true, but I doubted if we could actually pull any of that off, given our 4 kids (ages 2-12) "homeschooling", the animals we already had, his extensive business travel, managing haying, mowing, stringing the goat fence, etc. etc.

oldest 2 kids camping across the lake from us

I decided to get in touch with a fellow home educator and lover of rural life, Robin. (Visit her blog about all things rural at http://rurification.blogspot.com/) I thought she would probably be a good judge of whether my overactive imagination and chronic worry-wart-ism was getting the better of me. I laid out my fears and some of the "biggies" in my seemingly endless string of concerns, asked for her honest advice, and got a helpful response. (See it here: moving-to-country-more-things-to-think) Ultimately, she confirmed that my fears were founded. Here's how she summed up my predicament. "In the end, it’s not really about pros and cons, but about how much of country reality can you tolerate. We and our neighbors tolerate this stuff pretty well – we just wish there were more hours in the day to get everything done." I had to decide if it was worth it. It was time for the rubber to hit the road, as the saying goes. Was I all empty dreams and ideals? Or could I tolerate the realities that we had laid out when dreaming.

My husband and I discussed and discussed the pros and cons. In the end, it was clear that he really wanted to buy the farm. I knew that moving somewhere was necessary. And I figured if it made him happy, we would all be happy, right? Plus, I think I had always loved our old home more than he had. Maybe it was his turn to pick a house he really loved. And after all, I was the wife, right? So….. I acquiesced, and we bought the farm. I just hope that we won’t also buy the proverbial farm as a result! Stick around and you can see how we fare with our new place. Hey, we already survived the first six months! And if they are a good indicator, you're in for some beauty and humor along the way!

the sign I made for the end of our long lane