Let Me Take You on a Homestead Tour

Hello! Would you like a (virtual) tour of our homestead? And a running commentary on what we plan to do with the space? Then come along! Let me give you a tour!

Don’t forget your muck boots! You will for sure be needing them! These cute rainbow ones came from Aldi. Or you can just be like our most frequent guests and buy your own pair of muck boots to leave here! Haha.

Here is the beautiful view you will see as you come down our gravel driveway. *Sigh* I’ve always wanted a gravel driveway. It’s the little things, y’all.

And here is our home! It’s small but mighty. Perfect for us. Sure, it needs some work here and there, but we are just so happy to have such a wonderful and stable home on land that we don’t mind the downsides one bit. However, our dreams for this area are to work on landscaping and “curb appeal”. If we ever become millionaires, I will put a cute front porch in right there, but since we don’t actually ever use the front door, it would be ridiculously impractical at this point in the game and therefore will probably always be a little bit bare and underwhelming. Unless, of course…the million dollars.

And here we are at the back! Which is really the front door. This area gets all the traffic and therefore I would like to spruce it up with some nice landscaping and maybe even a rocker or two.

Next up we have a fenced in backyard that is sloped but totally functional and beautiful! It currently has a small patio area, a fire pit and Theo just put up a clothesline for me! I can’t live on a homestead and not have a clothesline, can I? This part of our property frustrates me a bit because it gets direct afternoon sun, so we can’t really hang out in the backyard from noon on. Practically, we may hang some sails to create shade over the patio. But eventually we want to save money to make a deck with a pergola type shade covering where the patio currently is. It will just make that area so much more functional and useable!

Next (to the right of the house and the clothesline in the above photo) we have our “side acreage” (we are so creative with names). This area has several mulberry trees and harvesting them was fun! Over here in the top left corner (first photo) I want to plant a large sunflower field next summer, as well as some wildflowers. I also would like to make this area (second picture below) a fun kids area with a trampoline and slack line/American Ninja Warrior stuff between the trees. Hopefully we will be able to build some forts or tree houses as well, and if we get a playset it will also go over in this area.

We have an area that we refer to as the “second back yard”. Ha. It’s kind of this weird area that isn’t itself fenced, but happens to have fences around 3 sides and a barn taking up most of the fourth side. It’s also fairly close to the house, so next summer this is where my garden plot is going to go! There will NOT be a giant burn pile right in the middle of it all.

Barn 1 is serving as a storage area, it has a workout corner with all of our workout gear and it’s a total mess no matter how hard we try to stay on top of organizing it. The kids like to play in here, too. One day maybe we will get a ping pong table and some other fun indoor rec room type things. This barn also houses a very creepy room that will be Theo’s workshop once we can get those awful moldy cabinets ripped out and the whole thing cleaned up and made leakproof.

Barn 2 is almost connected to Barn 1, but has a small walkway in between. It is all set up for animals (horses) with five stalls. Up until yesterday, we didn’t have any animals in there- but now we have 3 piggies in one of the stalls! As soon as we can get a fenced area set up for them outside (pigs are notorious for being able to get through any fencing), they will be outside 98% of the time. We would love to board some horses in this barn, but clearly the first priority will be getting this barn cleaned out- we inherited a lot of mess with our five acres.

Right outside the second barn is our chicken coop! We have done a lot of work on the coop and it’s basically the only thing that we have accomplished since we moved in. There are still a few more things to do, but it’s doing just fine housing the chickens at their current level!

Now as we head out past the chicken coop, we hit raw land. The first area contains the creek running through the middle of it, and we affectionately call this area swamp land. We have no idea what to do with this area as it has a creek and a (tiny) pond, and is quite often swampy. If we can get the water contained, we will most likely put animals out here in this pasture. If I ever built a second house on this property, it would be tucked back where the pond is now.

And if we walk through the creek (aren’t you glad you brought your muck boots?), we would arrive at the back pasture. This pasture is fenced for horses, so if we ever board horses, we will have them back here. Theo is also planning on making a berm for an at home shooting range back here. In the future, I hope to have some bees way back here. For now we use it to go for evening walks around the perimeter and we’ve enjoyed hitting a baseball with a bat back here. We could have our own soccer field or baseball diamond back here if that ever becomes a need!

And that’s all of it! 5 acres can feel both huge and tiny on any given day. I tend to feel discouraged at the “slow” progress. Right now, it absolutely appears that we have no control over the land, and that we aren’t using it to it’s full potential. But at the same time, I have to remind myself that just one project at a time is sufficient and since we have only lived here for 7 weeks, we are doing just fine. In seven years I will unearth this blog post and be amazed at the progress, although I bet it will look way different than I imagined!!!