So much went into our purchase of this place. This has been the culmination of 15 years of dreams, successes, patience, frustration, work, and the Lord's continued blessings. We had a few potential purchases fall through for various reasons in the past couple years and it was frustrating, but in hindsight I am so glad they didn't work out. What we have here is so much better in so many ways. God is so good to us!
Let me take you back in the journey just a bit and tell you what we were looking for. We were looking for acreage anywhere from 2-20 acres. It really depended so much on what it had to offer as far as terrain, water availability and layout. We wanted usable land, not something too steep or too rocky to use. We wanted a home with a nice layout, but we expected a fixer-up because that was going to be highly likely because of our budget. Plus, we don't mind a challenge, we wanted a diamond in the rough that we could make our own. Fertile soil was important because we wanted to be able to grow things, water rights were a very definitely a plus. Water rights are hard to come by in our area and when a place with water rights can be found it is expensive (many times it put a place $100,000 out of our budget range) so we had to stay flexible on this item! We wanted to be in the country, but not so far that the fuel to get to and from town would be too expensive. Speaking of expensive....we had a max budget of $200,000 the further under that number the better. To say there are VERY few places in this range in our area would be an understatement....most had some very big issues that would have been hard to work around.
So with that criteria in mind this is what we ended up with. Five beautiful acres that are gently rolling with deep fertile soil. A small, comfortable home that needs some work and character, but is efficient and well built. Let me clarify a little....the structure is well built, it features 2x6 exterior walls and it is well insulated. Other things like fixtures and wear surfaces are not so much (typical of a manufactured home of this era), but at least those are easy to upgrade and fix in time as needed. There is a 22x50 covered carport/hay shed pole structure (an unfinished shop) that has an insulated roof but no walls yet. The former owners didn't finish it, but that is fine, we get to finish it how we'd like to. There is another small shed for storage with an attached shelter area for animals. The best part? The property has water rights with the irrigation system all set up already!
Here are some pictures of the property the weekend we moved in, enjoy the tour.
Back yard area with our little chicken coop already moved and situated. Everything needed a good mowing and the hay field was more than ready to be cut when we moved in.
Looking northeast, the backside of the property which is a hay field.
Standing under the carport/hayshed area (soon to be the shop) looking toward the white shed/animal shelter.
Standing in backyard looking at east end and back of home which faces north.
Front of home faces slightly southeast.
As you can see we have a lot of work to do, landscaping, painting, updating, character to add, and customization to do. We feel like we found the very best place for the money....we paid less than we were going to pay for another place a year before we found this place. We managed to stay well under our max budget as well. This was mainly due to the fact that it was a hard to finance property because it wasn't on a typical foundation, but we had the ability to work around this financing issue, and to have the foundation certified by an engineer, our excellent credit score and down payment amount played a part in this as well.
We feel so blessed to have found just the right piece of property for our family. One day we hope to be able to build a new home on this place, but we have a few kids to get through college first. We'd like to pay the place off and build the home ourselves with cash (that is a ways down the road, for now, we are making it feel like our home and enjoying it.)
We have already done some improvements to the place and I hope to post that progression as well. In the coming posts I will show you before pictures of the inside, specifically the kitchen, that will be interesting. Did I say interesting? I think I meant to say a little disgusting....I'll let you be the judge.
