Questions and Answers about our New Farmhouse!

Questions and Answers about our New Farmhouse! Everything y’all have been curious about since we moved into our new 10 acre homestead!

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Our homestead dreams have come true with the purchase of this farmhouse and land.

This is what we have been working towards, basically since we got married.

I’ve been sharing a lot on here about the process of selling our farmhouse in town, and buying this piece of land out in the country. As we were coming up on finishing the remodel of our old house, we were keeping a sharp eye out for something that met all our requirements. We wanted another older house that we could renovate (that would also bring down the price of the property), we wanted at least one acre, it needed to be out of town a certain distance, etc.

So when we stumbled across this place, it seemed like we had found our match!

It had somehow been for sale for 2 weeks already (which is unheard of in this fast market) and the pictures on the listing were absolutely terrible, didn’t do it justice AT ALL. But it had almost 10 acres, it was out of town enough, and it was in our price range. So we went and looked at it.

And we fell in love.

So we started the process of buying it and selling our old place.

And now a few months later, we have been living here on our dream homestead and absolutely loving it!

If you are wanting to see the tour of our new homestead click HERE.

So understandably, I have gotten tons of questions from y’all about the house, land, and various other things. I just thought I’d compile all your questions here in this blog post and answer them all at once!

Questions and Answers about our New Farmhouse!

Do you live in an area you are familiar with?

Yes, somewhat. It is about 30 minutes away from our old house, in a whole different town. So I’ve been up here some, just because we know other people who live in this town as well. But it’s a lot more spread out than the place we moved from, and I’m finding that I have to re-learn where all the closest stores and everything are.

So surprisingly, even though it’s still the same valley, and not all that far away, it seems like a totally different place! Haha But we are adjusting, and we’ve got our new grocery store, new feed store, greenhouse, etc. And we would love to take a day some weekend to walk around the town and just see what all is there just in case we need it later.

How big is the new house?

This house is 1,456 sqft. So about 200 sqft bigger than our last house. Which doesn’t sound much bigger, but I’ve been shocked at how much more room this seems to have. Like we need to buy another couch because the living room is so big!

Are you going to paint the outside of the house?

Yes, eventually. Just like everything else on the house, the outside will change too. It currently has vinyl siding that is getting pretty old and damaged. So that will all be replaced with something more durable and then painted.

I’m not sure if we will stick with the white, or maybe do a dark brown or dark blue. Ideally something that would pair well with anther bright yellow door!

Be sure to share your color ideas down below so I have some inspiration!

But that’ll be an expensive project and there are other things that need to be done sooner, so that’ll probably be years down the road.

What is the first thing you are tackling with the renovation?

One of the first things that has to happen with this renovation is the foundation. It doesn’t have a deep enough foundation, it’s basically sitting on the topsoil. So the house needs to be jacked up and new footers poured.

And obviously, that would be an important thing to do first, because jacking up the house can disturb a lot of other things. So we wouldn’t want to do any tile or certain things that could crack or break when the house shifts during the process of jacking it up.

So foundation first, and then we can start on the fun stuff of re-arranging the rooms in the house and making it all pretty!

Will your decorating style change up at all in the new house?

No, not much, both this house and the last one were 100 year old farmhouses so my style will generally stay the same. I really love old, antique looking artwork and furniture, which works perfectly in these old houses!

I’m sure my style will evolve and change as the years go by, and I’m always hunting for new pieces, but the main antique / farmhouse style will be here to stay for a long time yet.

Do you plan to renovate slowly as you have the money, or do it quicker?

We are planning to take this one slowly. We did the last one faster because the goal was to sell it so we could afford more land. But now that we have almost 10 acres, there is really no rush to finish it fast and spend all our money, because we will be here for a long time anyway.

So possibly next year we would start on fixing the foundation, and go from there. But we aren’t going to be doing anything this year for sure. With the move, new animals, more land to manage, a new baby coming in about 6 weeks, and having a 1 year old and a 2 year old to wrangle, it just seems like too much. So, Lord willing, renovations should officially start in 2022.

Any more animals, or not right now?

Right now the plan is to wait on getting anymore animals until next year also. Before we moved out the old owner sprayed our pasture with a strong herbicide (arg!!!) so I feel really uncomfortable having any animals on it. Even our chickens, I wish there was an easier way to keep them around the house and off the field. Our sheep are in the yard on the side of our house for the summer because that wasn’t sprayed. But I’d love to get a milk cow, and that’s not even an option until the herbicide wears off because that’ll go straight into the milk.

So right now we are just watering the pasture and might see if someone wants to graze their steers on it (telling them about the herbicide of course). Because some people don’t care and just want to graze their cows somewhere. That’ll help get rid of it faster and increase the pasture health for when we do put more animals on it.

The new animal we are hoping to get in 2022 is a guard dog! I’d love to have a big dog to go out with the kids and defend the animals against predators. And then the milk cow might have to wait until late 2022 or even 2023. But of course, we’d love to get a couple hogs for meat, some geese and ducks, more chickens. Always more chickens. So we’ll see how soon that all happens 🙂

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What are your plans with all that land?

Y’all.

We’ve got big plans for this land.

Not just animals, but also a garden and orchard. We are going to be planting a bunch of different (non-fruit trees) in strategic locations to block the view of neighbor houses. Because we like to be recluses haha. I think we are going to use the South west chunk of pasture for a fruit orchard. Right behind the house we will fence off a big area for a garden. The South east pasture will be for hogs. Milk cow and sheep will be rotated through the back 5 acres.

Those are just some general ideas we’ve come up with. I’ll share more of the process of course and also why we’ve chosen those places. But needless to say, we definitely have big plans!

How old is your house?

This ol house was built in 1923 so it’s coming up on 100 years old.

Which just makes me so happy.

I love old houses.

Are you comfortable sharing the financial side of the buying / selling process? We are struggling to be able to afford any land, so curious how you all did it.

I don’t mind people knowing the financial side. It has never been something that bothers me to share. I just know it bothers people sometimes to hear about it, so I wasn’t going to share unless people asked. But I’ve had enough people asking about this that I thought I’d share the basic numbers for what we bought and sold for.

Back 3 years ago when we bought our first house, we bought it for $115,000. We put less than $20,000 into the renovation because Luke did all the work himself. And obviously the market has risen A TON since then. So we were able to sell it for $320,000. Talk about the Lord blessing us with the timing of all that!!

Then coming into buying this new place, it was $399,000. That was pretty much the very top of our budget. But with how the market is, things are going so fast. There isn’t much out there with land for under $500,000. So we went for it. We put 40% down with a big chunk of the money we made from the last house. Then we still had some extra for emergencies, buying supplies, or if anything went wrong on the new house.

So it worked out pretty perfectly. We have a higher mortgage obviously, but still totally affordable with what Luke makes. And just the fact that we were able to find this much land, with a livable house, in this crazy market, for less than 500 is shocking to me.

What are you most excited about with the new land?

One of the main things (besides being able to be more self-sufficient) is the freedom of letting the kids run outside by themselves. Our last house was right on a pretty busy street. The yard was fenced, but that wasn’t even attached to the house, so I’d have to walk them out to the safe play area.

It is just such a load of my mind that if a toddler gets out the door, there isn’t much they can get into. Our road isn’t very close to the house here. And even if they got all the way out there, literally 2 cars drive on that road a day.

It’ll be so good for the kids to have that extra freedom. To be able to be outside more. Be able to just explore and run around. It makes my mama heart happy.

Those are most of the questions I got about our new place. We are just loving the space. The view. The ability to be more self-sufficient. We feel so unbelievably blessed to have been able to afford this homestead. And I’m so excited to share more of our journey with you!

And blessings!

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