Welcome to the Farm

Last Friday, I closed on my dream home: an 1801 farm house on just over three and a half acres.

For the last month and a half during the buying process, I’ve been dreaming up how I would write this blog post. I’ve written and re-written it at least a half dozen times. Past versions of this post were lengthy and emotional, but in the end, I decided to keep things simple. Maybe someday I’ll write the emotional part too, but for now, I just want to share the happy news in photos. I’ll tell the story another day.

Note the belongings in these photos are from the previous owners. I took most of these photos during our home inspection, before they had moved out.

We have lots of room here to grow as a family. There are four bedrooms and two full baths. There’s an enormous walk-up attic, and a basement perfect for storing preserves. There’s a two car garage, a work shop, and a barn with three stalls and room to expand. There’s even a little former-milk house that will become our chicken coop, and a tree house for Ben!

There’s also lots to keep us busy. Everything is certainly functional, but our wishlist of upgrades and modifications is lengthy too. The first will be the upstairs bath, which has the strangest toilet/vanity configuration I’ve ever seen in my life:

After that, I’m hoping to make a few changes in the kitchen to gain some more storage and counter space. Then there’s the outdoors: a pasture to fence, gardens to till, and compost bins to build. There will be plenty to keep us busy!

I’m sure many of you are wondering what happened to my grand remodel plans for the house we’re in now. That’s the sad part of the story, so I’ll give you the short version. Once we started working with a builder on our remodel, we found out the township wouldn’t grant us permits for what we wanted to do without extensive work to the existing structure. It was going to cost us thousands and thousands of dollars BEFORE the addition even got started. Much as I didn’t want to accept it, the numbers just didn’t make sense so I started exploring other options, and that’s how we stumbled upon the property that I ultimately bought.

It was a hard decision, but I think the right one for us. We own a piece of history, and get to start our own story here. I couldn’t be happier!