Happy Anniversary!

October 22, 2020

It has been just over a year since we purchased the old farm and boy has it been a roller coaster ride. We went back to the beginning and read all our blog entrees to see how far we’ve come. There were quite a few things we had forgotten about!

When we closed on the farm on September 30, 2019, none of the 7 buildings were suitable to live in and we had only 28 days to be out of our apartment. Our first task was gutting the 3 car garage and the apartment over it. We put up insulation and dry wall in both spaces, then we moved in.

So our life on the farm started with us living in a one-room studio apartment with no kitchen or bathroom; in fact, no running water at all.
Around our bed were saw horses, lumber, hardware, tools and saw dust. We were living in a construction zone. For toilets, sinks and showers, we had to go to the house across the courtyard and endure the smell of smoke and mold, and spider webs everywhere. And there was no heat in either buildings.

We spent the first 4 months working on getting the loft apartment livable with a full bathroom, a kitchenette, and a gas heater. While there was still more to do, we turned our focus on the house.

What started as a small demo job of cabinets and drywall, turned into a complete gut job – down to the studs and dirt floor. What we thought was drywall throughout the house was in fact lath and mortar. It was a HUGE job to remove it all. We completely rebuilt the pillars, girders and joists for the entire floor. We removed and rebuilt two load bearing walls, one of which was an exterior wall. We have removed and installed new plumbing throughout the house, including adding a master bathroom. We removed the old furnace and most of the HVAC ducts. We’ve become friendly with several of the employees at Menards, seeing that we go there 2 or 3 times a week – and sometimes 2-3 times in one day!!!

During this last year, we built a Fort Knox chicken coop, built chicken tractors and raised 53 meat birds, started our apple orchard with 30 trees, planted and harvested our garden, started a huge compost pile, gutted and cleaned most of the outbuildings, and harvested over 30 gallons of honey! We’ve made soap, fermented vegetables, butchered some of our chickens, canned marmalade, made 2 gallons of bone broth, and have made this place our home.

When we first moved to the farm, we thought we’d have the house ready in 9 months. It has now been 12. But we are still undaunted. So many things were unexpected and we had to renovate more that we planned, but we looked at each set-back as an opportunity to learn new skills and make the house our own.