Back during the summer Brien and I decided to pull the trigger on refinancing our home and using the equity to buy some land, an idea that we should have moved on years ago, but we just kept putting things off. I will never forget the first day back to school walking out of Hinkley High School on the phone with the bank, putting the Kibosh on everything and saying, "Let's just wait." But alas my amazing husband stepped in and took over and it was all settled within a few weeks!
With the financial stuff taken care of, we could start looking at property! Hurray! It's been our dream for years to move to the country, we even got so far a few years ago, as to call our real estate lady that found us our current house, to start searching for homes in the some of the small towns east of here. After years of being sent listings we came to the conclusion that, that our options were super limited.
It was either get a beautiful house on 1 acre, wah-wah, that's not country living if I am 40 miles away from Target but still sharing a fence with my neighbors, while looking into their kitchen...No thank you. OR live in a double wide on 40 acres, so that's real country, however, with my irrational fear of tornadoes, I did't want my house to have seams or get blowed away. So back to the drawing board.
One night we had an epiphany... Get land, get plans, build house on land, move there, live in country on acreage and have a house that could withstand a storm. Seems easy right?
Wrong. By the time we had our act together, there was NO land available to buy. It seems everyone is having this idea to move the country, therefore depleting the available properties. In a few months it went from 50 to like 4 plots of land. So we looked at ALL 4. It was slim pickin's let me tell you...
One was land locked by 2 other properties and we would have to make a road and run electric poles to, yeah, there goes like 50k right there. The next one was across the road from a pot farm, with the sweet smell of marijuana wafting across the street. The next one had a little slice taken out of it with someone living in a trailer house on the corner of it. Weird huh?
The last one we looked at, we hit the jackpot! Tucked away, marginally flat, only one visible neighbor and all of the soil samples, septic plans, well plans and electric plans were already done... HOW on earth did we get so lucky? We put in a random offer the next morning and by lunch time we were under contract, say what?!
We closed a few weeks later and TA-DA! We are now officially land barons, well as much of baron as you can be with 43.5 acres. We are SO exciting, I am getting all the feelings just typing about it right now. While there are no trees (okay there is one that's about 4 feet tall), there are also no neighbors or their children screaming in the back yard or parking their RV in front of your house, I think we will make it work somehow...
It is perfection. Endless blue skies, the mountains on a clear day and the only sounds you can hear are from the cows on the hill and the neighbors' goats and horses. The kids love it, riding their bikes, hiking through the middle or on the trails that run the edges, playing in the dirt. I think they will do just fine being country kids. They already have a list of all the critters they want to have and I think that if they get their way we will end up with some kind of crazy farm! I can't wait to get started and to be living in our new favorite spot. Hopefully in the spring when the weather warms up we can get going with building and enjoying our little slice of heaven!
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