The Homestead in Transition

We are taking the Homestead out for a spin!

Some of y’all know that Matthew and I have 3 grown kids between us and that two of them have been living on their own for a while now.  The other, my daughter, just turned 22, so she’s well within the timeframe of needing to flee the nest.  She’s been planning to do so.

Now, that would leave Matthew and I in this big old 5 bedroom house on not-enough-land-to-have-the-animals-we-want (or think we want).  We could sell the Holler and buy a little farm somewhere, but here’s the thing:  we’ve never actually lived that lifestyle where there’s milking to be done every day and dirt under the nails every night.  What if we did that and decided it was too much of the kind of work we don’t want to do?  We could be stuck, having given up pretty-dang-good for not-that-fun-at-all!

So, what to do?  What to do?

Well, lucky us, we have some friends who live on a couple of acres only about 35 miles from here and they have an old barn/apartment on their land.  That could be cool, but if we move down there, what will we do about this place?  Don’t really want to rent it out to strangers.  We want to have continued access to our fire circle and the river.  Also, we want to be able to continue having family game nights here and holidays and so forth.  How to swing that?

That’s the really brilliant part: all our kids (and partners) are moving back in here and will pay rent.  It won’t be a hardship for them to leave the places they’re currently living in which, while nice, don’t have a lot of space.

So we will keep one room here that is ours, for when we want to stay up here for some reason.  One boy and his partner will take the office.  The other boy will take an upstairs room.  The girl will keep her room and her partner will move into the other (sometimes ya need a little more space!)

And we will traipse off to Aromas* to live in a barn.  I can’t wait!

*Aromas is this kind of place.