One Man’s Negligence is Another Man’s Treasure?

It Starts With not knowing

Buying a home, and especially a homestead, when you don’t know much about buying them is an adventure. There’s something new to learn around every turn of the process. Did you know, for example, there are limits around lot size for FHA and Conventional loans? We sure didn’t when we set out to get our first piece of “heaven on Earth.”

So you figure out the finance bits, and then you start looking at homes. You look out in the country, as a city dweller, and see these old houses without considering the farmer way of life. Every spacious property is gorgeous and full of potential. The old barns and outbuildings are perfect for your future implements and animals. This is going to be great!

You go through the house, it looks good. Sure, the floors are sloping a bit and the odd remodeling work isn’t to taste, but you aren’t buying the house to be a villa. You’re buying the farm to build a life of living on the land. The beauty of it all distracts you from the lead doors, the rotting trees, and the other “adventures” it has in store for you.

Then you move in

After an exhausting day of closing, signing, moving in, and shuffling kids you look for a refreshing drink of water. It’s green. You try the left behind water filter…the water is still green. So you think “let’s go to town”. When you went to town from the home you owned yesterday it was a 30 minute drive tops. Now it’s an hour minimum and three hours for your big shopping trips. The “free” well water is going to be supplemented by drinking water from your favorite grocer. Oh boy!

Not much later, you start looking into the property and you find some really old paint. After some research, you discover that you have lead paint exposed around the farm and in your house. In the master bedroom, the failing wall paper is covering (but slowly exposing) lead paint underneath. A new project and learning experience that you’ll get to once it becomes urgent, like when your two year old finds a tear in the wall paper and pulls it the week after you move in.

So you head to the cities to pick up supplies because you’re going to need to deal with that. $800 later and you have the molding, caulk, paint, and paneling you will need to get the room back into a “sealed” state. You start to realize that buying the 102 year old house in “paradise” was not the adventure you thought you had signed up for. Homesteading has turned into home-safety-ing.

The rose Glasses shatter

If this hasn’t broken your spirit yet, there’s more! Reception by the people in the area is…weird at best. Everyone wants you to come to their church, tell you about the people who lived there last, and then ask what you do. You explain that you manage a security company. They scratch their head at how you can do that remotely. Your spouse explains to the baffled neighbor that you work in computers not physical security ,and a look of “Oh…” starts to settle in. You’re not one of them.

As you share your vision of bringing live stock and plants to the property and proudly call it the “farm”, you meet unimpressed looks. We’re not farmers, we don’t come from farmers, and we don’t have a farm in their eyes. The appropriately sized tractor for your property is a novelty to them. It quickly becomes clear, you’re an amusement. Part of being in the country was meant to be isolation from noisy neighbors, but it’s been traded for nosey ones who aren’t likely to embrace you warmly.

So then what?

In the end, it all comes down to your why. For us, we did it because we needed a place that was big enough to find purpose. Raising animals, giving our kids something to take pride and responsibility in, to see the world a little more the way God intended it and a little less like some city planner envisioned it. The house sucks. The land needs a ton of work. You don’t fit in. Yet, these aren’t the reasons you moved to the homestead.

People think we’re crazy and that’s not just an assumption; they have been very forward with us. Maybe they are right. Regardless, the vision of building the home that raises well rounded children continues to drive us despite the challenges. The journey is way harder than we originally signed up for, but our ambitions are worth more to us than the conveniences of the city life we left behind.

If you have a dream to homestead, then you should know it is a journey filled with all sorts of unexpected adventures. Don’t lose sight of why you are doing it in the first place, or you will risk making the changes in vain. The darkest days are the ones when we get so focused on the growing lists of things to repair, maintain, and do. The brightest days are the ones when we can look up and know that we’re making a difference little by little in building the life we want for our family. It’s a journey, and we fully intend to make a treasure of the history of neglect in our little patch of heaven on Earth.