Dreams Really Do Come True – A Tour of Our New Farm

In your heart of hearts, what’s your dream?  You know, that dream that you haven’t told anyone – except maybe your husband or your best friend.  That dream that you’ve held close for a long time and hardly dared to whisper it for fear it wouldn’t come true.  Well, dreams don’t always come true, but a HUGE dream just came true for our family.  Yesterday, we purchased a Hobby Farm.

So let me give you a little tour of the farm.  You’ll be hearing a lot about our exploits, successes, and failures in the coming days.  First off, let me say that we haven’t moved in yet.  We have some interior remodeling that needs to be done before we do move in.  But that being said, I’d love to give you a tour of our new property.

The Farm Pond 

The pond is about 1 1/3 acres!  It’s 18 feet deep at the center, so it’s nothing to be trifled with.  It has some fish in it already.  But the previous owner told us that he mostly fished it out. So we have already placed an order to stock it further.  We pick up the order for fish in April.  The fish come in bags!  Something I didn’t know before.  I’m sure you’ll hear more about it leading up to and including our fish order pick up.

We do plan to fish this pond from time to time, which means that we will need to pick up fishing equipment – which we don’t currently own.  Also, we will require our children to wear lifejackets while swimming.  None of my children have swum in anything deeper than 8 feet before.  And only one of my children is a ‘fairly proficient’ swimmer.  But we really do plan on enjoying this feature.

The Farmhouse

The farmhouse has 3 actual bedrooms and another room that they called a bedroom, which is really the size of a small office.  For now, that’s what we plan on using that room for.  It also has two full baths, a main-floor laundry room, a main-floor master bedroom, and a nice deck off the back of the home.

Trying to make sure that we are taken care of if we are ever without power in the winter, we also plan to install a wood-burning stove.

Unless you’ve been with me for three years, you wouldn’t know that the stove we plan to install in the farmhouse is the same stove that we purchased when we moved into the house we are leaving shortly.  The cost of the stove was about $5,000.  So when we moved into our house before our farmhouse, we went to have it installed.  Yeah, it was going to cost an additional $5,000 to get it installed!  We weren’t anticipating that outgo, so we never got it installed.  In our move out to the farmhouse, we are better prepared for the outlay and will get the wood-burning stove installed this time around.

Another change that we’re making to the inside of the farmhouse is removing a wall between two living spaces.  We host a mid-week gathering of our church (of around 40 people).  We want to be able to continue that in our new house.  In order to accommodate that, we needed to remove a wall.

Our Old Barn

I love old barns!  The fact that this one is ours make me all the happier.  Yes, this one needs a little TLC.  It is missing some of the planks on the eastern side, but according to our inspector, it’s actually in pretty good shape.  It will take some cleaning out and will probably not be done or used this year – or even next, but it is set up for a few cows in the bottom half.

The top half of the barn is a farm storage area – mostly for hay, I’m guessing, but we’ll see what we decide to use it for as we ‘grow into’ the farm.

The Morton Building

One of the things that we are missing in the farmhouse is a basement.  Right now, we have quite a robust storage room in our current basement.  We will NOT have that in our basement in this house, and even if we did, our ‘basement’ is really a root cellar that we have to go outside to access.  And it’s certainly not where I want to be keeping our extra food storage.   Part of this building is going to be made into a climate-controlled storage area to make up for what we’re losing by not having a basement.

The other part of this building is going to be made into two small apartments with a common ‘living area.’   We want to take care of our parents as they age, and our goal is to remake this building into a way for us to do that.

Chicken and Goat Barn and Storage Building

So what you’re seeing to the right is two buildings that were built abutting each other.  The small building on the left has been used as a chicken/goat barn in the past.  We will probably use this for chickens and ducks to start with.

The larger building more in the foreground on the right is a large storage barn.  We will probably house our riding mowers in here.   We also envision this as being a shelter for us to use when we host large church picnics in warm weather.  Both of these buildings need to be cleaned out before we can use them for anything.

Apple trees on the Farm

This farm already has about six mature apple trees.  One of them is a “Fruit cocktail” tree.  This means that it’s an apple tree that has had four different kinds of apple tree stock grafted onto different main branches on the tree.  At the property that we’re moving out of, we’ve planted four apple trees, but none of them are producing anything of note yet, so we’re so excited to have these six mature apple trees!

Garden

I don’t have a separate picture of the garden area, but if you look at the big picture of the farm above, you’ll see the garden in the area near the road.  We plan to use that same area to plant our garden this year.  I still have a lot of planning to do for the garden space.  I’ll write more about it as planting time gets closer.

What About You?

But our dreams aren’t the only ones that ever come true.  I’d love to hear about your dreams below!  Then I’d love to hear what you are doing now to make those dreams into reality later.  Please share with us below so that we can all be better prepared.

Together let’s love, learn, practice, and overcome!