Oh, this month has taken a toll.
I think somewhere around August 28th or so, I made a promise to this growing belly of mine that September would calm down. It wouldn’t, couldn’t possibly be as crazy as August.
When it comes to our land, we have all sorts of idealistic views around maintaining as many of the trees as possible. But of course, not all of them can be saved. Not all of them should be saved. But how do you decide which trees live and which trees live on as firewood, hugoculture logs or lumber for our home?
- Hire someone who knows far more than you.
- Take your time and do things in stages.
Can you imagine buying a house unseen? Well maybe not unseen but perhaps you walked around the outside of the property, poked your head in the front door and peeked in the windows?
That’s a bit what it feels like to jump head first into land ownership without having spent more than four hours traversing the property since we first came across the listing.
Thus continues my ongoing series as a lead up to the full story around what we’re buying, the plan we’re hatching and the vision we have for the rest of 2015 and a good portion of 2016.
When we first started to explore the possibilities of purchasing a place to call our own, it was rather daunting. Extremely complex, particularly because we haven’t considered ourselves particularly tied to one city or zone that would at least limit certain variables. In our search, we ran into incredibly cheap parcels that only upon further investigation were revealed to be bound by unbelievably costly building permit requirements. Square footage minimums. Other by-laws and city rules that would quickly curtail our dream of taking our time and trying to minimize how much debt this whole endeavour inevitably puts us in.
I’m sitting here at home on a Saturday night instead of hanging out on a sailboat with friends and while I was really looking forward to a little getaway on the water….RAIN. It rained today. It’s still raining. It looks like it might just rain tomorrow and even Monday and I couldn’t be happier about it. The rain part, not the botched sailing plans the first time this year we even made plans to be on a boat.
Figures.
I saw this article pop up on Facebook and couldn’t help but chime in with my own thoughts after taking the time to carefully read through the author’s words as well as each and every comment.
Some of the rebuttals and supporting sentiments were funny. Others were scary. Most seemed to be based on “Oh my friend does this…” or “I did that and this is what I felt…”
“Things do not change; we change.” Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Between the two of us, Scott is the researcher. I’m pretty good at following directions, I often immerse myself in something (knitting, yogurt or bread making, chickens, goats) but if I ever want to track down the real story or the best of something, Scott’s my go-to.
It was at the point that he described what instantly became my dream property that I started to laugh inside at how different my wants and needs are today than they were a mere few years ago. No elevator. No doorman. No indoor gym, parking spot, public transit accessibility.
Continue Reading…
As we plan for another hectic, whirlwind of a year, it’s hard to imagine what things will look like twelve months from now. Even six months is a bit fuzzy.
Sometimes I can’t help but ask, “who exactly do we think we are?”
A couple of ‘kids’ who really can’t call themselves kids anymore because we have a kid of our own and are both beyond our twenties (well, Scott’s still got a few weeks left to enjoy). We’ve each held down retail jobs, spent most of our time working in marketing and only recently discovered what we’d been missing by establishing a more personalized connection with food, animals and the land where we dwell.
“Farming is a profession of hope” – Brian Brett
The other day a group of homesteaders and farmers I know were circulating stories of everyone’s biggest failures. At the time, I considered mine to be a wasted investment of far too much hay that went moldy before we could even get through half of it. As a result, I’ll be trekking back and forth into town for hay over the next few months, kicking myself that we didn’t have better foresight (and ultimately, ventilation) to protect our investment.
My answer has changed today. Lost money doesn’t seem to compare to the loss of a life, especially a feathered one that was handpicked out of a dozen to be just one of two pairs of webbed feet on this little homestead.
Land.
All day, all night, in the back of my brain is the ongoing weighing of options, toying with ideas, dreaming of the various paths we can go down in our hunt for a plot of land to call our own.
How many acres. Which province. Does it have a house? How about outbuildings. Know the zoning? Need to be cleared? Forest-y or pasture-y?
Farmable?
Well? Septic? Hydro? Phone? Internet?