Well….Why not!?
Fake it ’til you make it right?
I’ve never been the type of girl to want a huge mansion and expensive clothes. I’m more of a cottage in the woods, gardens, books everywhere, surrounded by animals type of girl. You know, the kind of girl who’d probably get hung as a witch if I lived in 1692 Massachusetts.
I’ve always dreamed of living the “simple” life. Of not having to work my life away to make someone else rich. To be able to spend my days gardening barefoot, covered in dirt, a few loyal hounds by my side.
Just 5 short years ago I was about as far away from that lifestyle as you can get. Living in the city, my partner working in Manhattan, trying to grow salad greens in a bucket with plant lights in our pantry because we had no access to outside space.
A lot has changed in 5 years. In 2018 we were able to purchase our first car, and a short year later we packed up said car and moved 7 hours north, to a rental house that we had never seen in real life. It was a true leap of faith. We had no idea if the rental house would really even be there when we arrived, or if the whole thing was just one big scam.
Thankfully it wasn’t a scam! And for the first time in both my partner’s and my life, we got to live in a single family house. With a yard! Yes, it was a rental, so not fully ‘living the dream’, but it was a huge upgrade from where we had been before.
The plan was to live in our rental house until we could save up enough money to get a home, and some property, of our own. But life seems to have a way of throwing wrenches into our plans. Covid hit, which impacted our jobs and then the housing market went crazy and our landlady decided that selling her house was looking a lot more lucrative then continuing to rent it.
So with our new, lower, incomes we were forced to move in the midst of a global pandemic. The rental market was insane. We were truly nervous about where we were going to end up. Thankfully, in a rare stroke of luck, we did end up finding a new rental house in the knick of time!
And here we are now, 5 years out from our initial move into the country, living a great life but still without a home to call our own. So that’s the goal! Well, the big picture goal at least. There will be obstacles we have to figure out along the way. Both my partner and I work remotely for outside companies. However, we’re both working towards owning our own businesses too. We have quite a bit of debt we have to clear, and we need to replenish our drastically depleted savings before we’ll be able to afford a house of our own.
Thankfully, in the meantime, life is pretty good! While no, we don’t have a homestead of our own, we do rent a single family home with an amazing yard. There’s a lot we can’t do here in regards to setting up our dream homestead, but it’s also a far cry from growing greens in a bucket in our pantry!
And that brings me to the point of this blog. I want to document our journey. There are plenty of homesteading blogs out there already. This is not a homesteading blog…yet. But I hope that someday it will be! I want to show that no matter your starting point, you can reach for your dreams. Through hard work you can strive to improve your life and live in harmony with the world around you. And you can have a whole lot of fun along the way!