I have been wanting to move for some time, for about the past five or so years. I visited a total of 92 properties, in my town and as far as two states away, maybe even three states away.

We kept running into snags. The right price the wrong covenants, no zoning/covenants but super high price, poor location, great location but too much house, almost everything right but the future neighbors were relatives of the Hatfields and McCoys, and on and on. We couldn’t find the right combination of everything we needed and wanted.

More space, more garden area, bigger training fields, potential for livestock, and less house. Most of what we do is with our dogs, with our kids, or in the dirt. Our home is our cooking together space, sleeping space, and hang space when we are not outside, so less house most definitely.

I was getting ready to make an offer on a property one morning, we decided it would work, there were a few kinks we had to work out, but more or less, perfect for what we wanted, plus gorgeous acreage with water rights.

But one last check on new listings, why not. I had made a habit of checking listings first thing each morning, why not one last check before we made our offer.

And there it was, on MLS for about  minutes. I called our realtor, told her to make an offer and to list our house. It happened that quick, and I am glad it did because offers piled in right behind ours almost just as fast.

So we packed up and moved my training facility, my husbands wood working shop, two offices, our household, production garden equipment, and about thirty of our plants.

So what magical property worked for us and our dogs and my future facility? It is a small farm house on small acreage, and only three miles to town.

Someone recently asked me if it was one of those old quaint and charming farm houses, good structure but just needed some new paint, a titch of TLC?

No it is none of that. This house does not have good bones, it is not charming, and for sure not quaint. I would imagine at one time this property was loved and some great projects went into it, but it has lived under decades of neglect, dysfunction, and I am pretty sure peppered with a bunch of hatred.

But I knew this was our property, I had looked long enough to know what, where, why, and when, and for whatever reason my husband and I do well with this kind of thing.

The ‘needs repair’ in the description didn’t scare us away, every house needs some repairs, but truly, it underestimated what was really going on with this property by about the length of the Grand Canyon. We understand those 1950-70 houses, we know what to do with them, and the remodel and repair work are something we are really good at.

So here we are. We have begun stripping away layer after layer of neglect, layers of dysfunction, and scouring the property of the hatred that was here. And you know what, you can feel the property start to take a deep breath. There is beauty here, there is SO MUCH potential here, and as the layers come off it becomes pretty exciting.

Chainsawing, mowing, weed eating sheep, and mapping out room by room the remodel work that should last us the next couple of years, oh and two new toilets, the other ones kind of sort of didn’t work. The remodeling of my future facility, and my husbands shop, we finally have everything in one place instead of five places, and that in and of itself feels super good.

As fencing has begun, our dogs have a temporary ‘green screened’ yard that will allow them running space, laying in the grass space, and chewing on bones space.

This morning while we were in the back field picking up old farm equipment parts I called Rhumb to me, and in that oh so perfect early morning soft light, she stretched out, opened up, full speed, and the look on her face clarified that this was the right place for us for now.

So here we are. As with all of our properties over the years, we have lived by the Lupine Ladies words “leave every place more beautiful than when you arrived’. This property is already more beautiful than when we arrived, the bar was set pretty low, but we can see where we want to go with it all, there is great potential.

There is always a starting place … and this is now ours – Nancy