Starting out
Once upon a time, we thought we were homesteaders.
For me, that word always brings one of two images to mind: the classic old farmhouse with the el connecting to the barn surrounded by gardens, fields, and outbuildings stretching up toward the woodline, or acres of trees with a dirt drive leading to a freshly cleared area where the harvested timber has been used to build a tiny starter cabin run by solar or wind.
My husband and I always thought we would end up in one of these two situations. It was what we talked about and dreamed about from the time we started dating. We weighed the pros and cons of building from scratch to purchasing an old established farm and renovating. We started house hunting long before we were married, and probably before we should have. Life seemed to be in constant flux. During our search which started in July of 2013 and ended in July 0f 2017, we went through so many changes. My husband changed jobs, we got engaged, we soon after discovered we were pregnant, had a wonderfully simple and inexpensive wedding, had our beautiful little boy and lost ourselves completely in the joys and terrors of parenthood for about a year. I only went back to work part-time after his birth, and eventually was able to change jobs so that I only worked from home. During that time, my husband was braving a commute time of 75 minutes one way. Spending 2 ½ hours a day in a car was definitely taking a toll. It was time to stop dreaming and make a change.
When the lad was about one and a half we threw ourselves back into the hunt. We dragged that poor kid all over Midcoast Maine looking everywhere from Swanville to Newcastle and as far inland as China. You can plunk me down on just about any road in that bottom right quadrant of Maine and I could find my way back, and I cannot claim the world’s greatest sense of direction.
We looked at tiny houses, houses that were nearly 3000 sq feet, antique capes and modern constructs, foreclosures and houses that stretched the budget to the max. It really isn’t that we didn’t know what we were looking for: we had some strong definites…or so we thought. With each home tour, the list simplified. We went from a 20-acre minimum down to a 2-acre minimum. From needing a full-sized barn to having at least one outbuilding with space for more.
The first place we ever looked at is about 5 miles from where we ended up. It was an absolutely gorgeous old federal built in 1800; the property also housed one of the town’s earliest post offices. It had a center chimney with a built-in bread oven and water basin, a wood cookstove, an amazing kitchen with back stairs that lead to what had clearly been servants quarters, and a library with a built-in bookshelves and five acres of garden and woods.
It was our dream house. I am so incredibly proud of us that we didn’t get it.
The logistics were wrong for the time. We both would have been facing close to 1-hour commutes to work and the house also had windows that hadn’t been replaced in many decades (if ever), a dodgy sale history, and a mold and moisture problem that the current owners are still dealing with. I still give a wistful sigh whenever I see the house, followed closely by a sigh of relief every time I notice that the bulkhead is open on any remotely sunny day in an attempt to dry out the flagstone basement.
We realized then that we’re history junkies. We love fantasizing about the background of the house and the simpler time that was its heyday. We also began to realize the impracticality of such a house when coupled with today’s fast pace. We weren’t in a situation where we had the funds to throw ourselves into homesteading as a full-time lifestyle. We would both be working, at least at first, and didn’t want to spend all our free time on fixing up a house instead of growing food and raising animals.
We looked at many more old farmhouses during our journey, hoping somehow that someone else had already dealt with the major issues despite the low price tag and we could simply revel in waking up in a piece of Maine history. Four years and forty (yes, literally 40) houses later we found our new home. And it was absolutely nothing like we had dreamed.
We now live in a 1997 cape on two acres. The land boasts its history in the form of old rock walls and bottle dumps dating back to the 1800s, but nothing about it cries out homestead in the conventional sense, and it’s not what we had pictured at all. The plus side of this is that we aren’t dealing with peeling lead paint or living in a yurt which would have been the outcome of several other places we saw. The downside is that the land has been rather neglected for the last decade, is completely overgrown, and doesn’t have a flat spot anywhere on it. We’ve got our work cut out with us in a completely different way.
We’re coming at the homesteading life from a completely different angle than we expected. We’re not even sure you can call what we’re doing homesteading. For that reason, I thought it might be good to share our story, as we live it. There isn’t one straight path to a simpler, more sustainable life. For us, it started with the simple chicken…