Strap in for a story about the good, the bad, and the ugly of finding and going ‘all in’ on your first homestead. Over the past few months, we’ve had a little bit of all of it and I am ready to try and put this experience into words for you!
Buying a homestead, or any sizable piece of land with more outbuildings than homes, was supposed to be an extremely exciting activity. I had been looking forward to this day for a few years and trying to manage my growing expectations. Unfortunately, and nothing against my Northern Wisconsin natives, but ‘keeping a home’ does not mean the same thing to most sellers as it did to us. A vast majority of the homes we looked at on any sizable lot had been in disrepair for many years. These places were ROUGH. Like ruff rough. To buy a homestead up here felt a lot like buying someone else’s neglect. When the land and the livestock are your prerogative, your home apparently is not. My husband made it very clear that we were making a HOME purchase together, and the land and aesthetics needed to come second. We balance each other out well most other days.
The challenge: find a home that was comfortably move-in ready for our family that also had the woodsy, hilly, secluded homestead feel that I was looking for. Charm and function, reality and dreams.
Here is a condensed version of what five months of homestead hunting over the summer ended up looking like:
We moved into a rental house full of someone else’s furniture and layers of ‘notyourown’ dirt. Our stuff ended up in a storage unit and we each packed a suitcase of clothes and a few boxes of entertainment to get us through what was supposed to be ‘only a month or two’.
DAYS pouring through Zillow and similar apps, foreclosure alerts, auction homes, FSBO, local real estate agent listings and making lists of options only to discouraged by some combination of poor land quality, too long of a commute, or very obviously a fixer upper we couldn’t handle on our own.
Hours spent with our realtor driving all over the countryside across three counties looking at anything with potential. This includes one property that we physically could not get to with our vehicle through the winding wooded ‘driveway’, left the car and walked for ten minutes still not reaching the home site, and turning around to leave knowing my husband would never plow this. Spoiler alert, we ended up in a tough plowing situation anyways. Never did get to see what that house looked like…
We reached out to friends and family who might know a guy who knows a guy who might sell a back forty of hunting land to us for new construction.
Quickly realized we would never make our money back on new construction in Northern Wisconsin, let alone get electricity or internet to a lot in the middle of bum-frick nowhere.
Late night mental gymnastics, wondering if I could draw up plans for an earth ship home and somehow convince my realistic husband that constructing one of these would be a fine idea.
The depressing notion of having to consider a *gasp* house in a neighborhood really set in around month three. We started opening our search to include city houses with larger lots. I cried over the thought of having three lonely fenced in hens penned up next to a manicured lawn garden and not being able to walk around my yard in my underwear. Heartbreaking, but summer was coming to an end.
Finally! The joy and disappointment of finding a seemingly great opportunity and putting in an offer, only to lose over a thousand dollars in savings to a very disturbing inspection report and a stubborn owner. It was heartbreaking to walk away from that ‘first love’ home. We knew it was the right decision financially, but at the time it was a huge blow to our morality.
As the dust settled on getting out of an accepted offer on that first house, the advertisement for our future homestead came on the market late one evening. After having been thrown around once already, we scheduled a tour with skeptical minds and excited hearts. We so wanted this home to be ours, but we were very nervous about loosing more money to the purchasing process or future resale.
After a lot of prayer and soul searching, we decided to go all in on this hidden gem. With hesitant support from hopeful loved ones, we started the purchasing process. Don’t get too excited- the good stuff was still months away!
What a mess negotiating is. The back and forth took so long, that between putting in our offer and coming to a deal we conceived a child and had to redo some negotiations again! No joke. Nitrates in the water and heated bedrooms suddenly became more important. So now we had a tentative deal on a farm, a baby on the way, and emotions through the roof.
We took some major hits on the purchase of this place. The foundation (built in 1904) is in worse shape than advertised, some of the equipment we were promised in a bill of sale ended up sold somehow (weird, idk how that happened), one of the barns may need to come down, and some unknown creature is living in most of the outbuildings. We still hope the purchase price reflects the roof and siding replacement, the septic system needing to be upgraded, and the time it took to clean ALL of the previous owners’ personal affects out of the home before we could move our things in.
Did I mention the owners were retiring to Hawaii and left almost thirty year of living behind in this house?
But here we are. We legally own all 21 acres, two pole sheds, two barns, one rudimentary shop building, detached garage and well house, and five bedroom two bathroom farm house lovingly referred to as the Eggen Homestead.
And it is beautiful. Despite all of the chaos and overwhelming amount of work that needs to be done to get this place up to snuff through the next year, we are incredibly grateful to have ended up here. We were kind to our budget and have some savings left over to purchase the tractor we will need for mowing and snow blowing large areas year-round. Mrs gets her chickens (and bonus space for turkeys, ducks, goats, alpacas, and sheep) and Mr gets a home he is comfortable in that is great for hosting our large families. Our little homestead baby will have the sweetest little farmhouse nursery and acres of exploring to do as we teach them to love and respect nature.
The land is gently rolling with a couple acres of woods and lots of grassy prairie. The barns are falling apart (hubby’s opinion) and full of potential (my opinion) that we are excited to develop. There is foraging galore consisting of ten apple trees, cherries, plums, elderberry, raspberry, blackberry and things we have yet to find off of the overgrown paths. There is a vineyard with three hundred mature grape vines that we have a lot to learn about before harvest next fall. Soon, there will be a pumpkin patch and crazy large vegetable garden to make all of my dreams come true.
It was a crazy ride. We wore our seat belts. We prayed and cried and prayed some more. We leaned heavily on the great wisdom of our parents and lifelong friends. I think we would do it again… but I can’t say it would be any time soon. We might need at least a year to walk this one off!
Welcome to our new home, from the Eggen Homesteaders and Drifted Way.
