New year, new endeavors. I’ve been meaning to start documenting this adventure, so let’s add blogging to the mix!
2015 was the year I moved from the city to the farm.
The backstory: My grandparents lived on a 23-acre farm. They’re getting up in age, and had started talking about how it is probably time for them to downsize for the past couple of years. And the talk got serious last year.
The hubby and I have always talked about having land, even when we were dating, but in a it’s-highly-unlikely-that’s-going-to-happen sort of way. I wanted to save every puppy up for adoption, and the hubby wanted to have a separate building for an art studio. Whenever one of us started talking about an endeavor that would need more space that what we had, the other would say, “When we get the ranch!”
One evening, we started talking about my grandparents moving off the farm. And what if we could get it. Our two dogs could run all over the place. Maybe the one that seems to be scared of the world is really a country dog stuck in the city. It would make us be more active. We would get to spend more time outdoors. We would have to build things. We could have chickens. We could grow vegetables. Hey, this sounds like it’d actually be fun! And we were talking about practical things; not the usual whims that resulted in “When we get the ranch!”.
Once we made the decision that we wanted to do it, there were a lot of questions to track down. Can we get internet there? (Yes, but not as fast as in the city.) How do we finance it? (It’s different than a mortgage.) Should we sell our current house or rent it? (Selling ended up making more sense.) What would we do for work? (Work remotely.)
And now we’re here! The details about negotiating a remote working situation, everything we did to get our house ready to sell in between two international business trips, the work we had done to the farmhouse before moving in, and what we were doing to learn more about farming can all be saved for future posts.
I’m excited to be here, and also a little bit terrified. There are an overwhelming amount of projects on every front. The house needs more work. The pasture is mostly weeds and anthills. We need to build a dog run so that we can start transitioning our dogs from city life to country life. We need to build a coop to get those chickens. And the list goes on. All we can do is start tackling one project at a time. And I’ll try to document our successes and failures learnings as we do.