There have been a lot of moments in our lives that have spoken out to us…
…Defining moments, terrifying moments, questionable moments, and truth-seeking moments. Through the years of our “wake up”, we made a relationship with our feelings of escaping the city life. We did our best trying to rise above these moments and stay on our path to wellness, productivity, and the mental and physical health of our family. However, we knew that in time, we would no longer be able to simply push through these times of angst.
So, we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and did something about it.
Living in the city was normal to us, or was it? As we had been born and raised in the environment. An environment where the stresses of traffic, crowds, lack of community, living restrictions, cost of living, lack of seasons, high taxes, and a faster pace than we could keep up with, consumed us.
We felt it all along, but it was our growing sense of truth that began to get the better of us. In our dating years, we were young and ambitious, but not about what you may think. We moved into our first tiny, smelly, and moldy apartment. None of that mattered to me, as long as I had my lovely by my side and at least some sort of an area to grow plants and some food.
We began by growing some of the basics.
Space quickly ran out as our ambitions began to skyrocket. We knew it was time for something bigger. Finding our next, just as small, smelly, and moldy apartment, we had more space to grow food and plants. We jumped on the opportunity. We now had the space for container gardening. As I picked up every bakery bucket from work, we quickly developed our first container garden.
This was it! We were on to something. Let the momentum begin!
The lovely one, had some sewing skills and I had some understanding of growing plants, nothing could stop us now. The lovely one, began making personalized quilts and baby onesies by hand. Then personalized aprons. For me, it was personalized succulent arrangements in antique containers and a bucket foraging habit. Our plan was to start a business selling our creations and growing as much food as possible using buckets. We were onto something! We soon started selling our product.
Then BAM! We hit a wall.
The lovely one began talking about marriage and having babies. I stressed that this was not the place to raise a family. The small, smelly, and moldy apartment was no place to call home for my family. Quietly, the lovely one began to save money. You see she had a vision of her own. One that I wouldn’t be able to talk her out of this time. I began to lose hope that we would never have a place of our own to start a family.
Just as I completely gave up, our opportunity arose.
The telephone rang one evening. It was the grandparents. We were excited to hear from them to have the same chat we always had. Grandpa said, “so we have been thinking. We are tired of renting our other home out to slobs and parasites. We were wondering if you are interested in buying it.” My stomach dropped with anxiety, as the lovely one’seyes grew in size with excitement. This house was 75 miles away from our comfort zone, and more importantly the ocean. The first love of my life.
So, we decided to leave all family and friends behind to begin the next chapter.
The new house was great. A real home. A 7500 square foot yard that I could expand our garden in, but most importantly to start a family with the lovely one. First things first, lets stop trying not to have babies. Next let’s paint this empty canvas of earth and start producing as much food as possible. Soon came fruit trees, perenial herbs, and annual veggies.
I got bit by the permaculture bug along the path.
So, we built an herb spiral, compost locations, deep mulch systems, and water harvesting. The path to a productive food forest was on its way. We saved every bit of kitchen scraps and were well on our way to being city dwelling homesteaders. We began making herbal tinctures, with our lavender, rosemary, and other herbs. Comfrey salves and cold compresses. The need to outsource compost was a thing of the past.
Now we just needed some chickens, because that’s the first steppingstone to raising animals, right? Aww, we were well on our way. Life was good. Fresh healthy eggs every day, harvesting fruit growing from our trees and veggies from our raised beds.
Then it happened.
The homeowner’s association caught wind that we were keeping hens. Soon we received the memo. You have 28 days to find a home for your chickens. Our world felt crushed. The whole system was now broken. Our closed loop now had a void in it. Well let’s go out with a bang and learn how to harvest and process these chickens.
I mean, that was our whole plan to begin with, right?
To have our chickens for fresh eggs, free labor in the garden and food when they reached the appropriate age. Only, we had never done something like this before and we certainly were not mentally ready for something like taking an animal’s life. After much research, we quickly assigned each other our jobs during the process. I was to do the killing. The lovely one was to de feather, and we would both take a stab at the processing stage. We had a really hard time, as we spent a few years with these gals, and we were sad to see them go.
We never really “shook” that moment of being told that we had to remove an important role in the health of our family and homestead.
Having a bad taste in our mouth with our HOA, we had also run out of space in the back yard for growing food. As we continued to grind and punch the corporate clock day in and day out, I had an idea. I could get rid of the thankless front lawn and grow crops there.
BRILLIANT, RIGHT!
I better check with the HOA though just to make sure that I would have their “blessing.”
DENIED!
The HOA did not approve this idea, stating that it was more “aesthetically pleasing” to stare at grass than healthy fruits and vegetables for our family and for the community. This further hindered our momentum. We would walk into our corporate jobs with our heads held low, work our butts off day in and day out, then drive in traffic to get home whilst still having to water the front lawn, so that we could stay in the good graces of the HOA and grass happy neighbors. It was time to make a serious change for our family and our mental health…
…BUT HOW?
During the rise of the pandemic, we were reminded once again that we wanted to become more self-sustaining. We were already doing pretty good, but it wasn’t good enough, for we still relied on outside assistance. We wanted to get further away from corporate grocery stores, because we knew that there was an agenda.
There is always an agenda.
So, when the lockdown mandate hit and schools closed, I was put into a position where I had to take a leave of absence from my job. Life as we knew it was about to take a major change. We didn’t fear being locked in and not being able to go out, because we were already somewhat ready for a time like this. We also knew that we could only last for so long due to a lack of land and community.
So, we did it.
We called a realtor and put our house up for sale. Now where do we go? We had several ideas such as, Northern Idaho, Texas, Oregon. We soon realized that home prices were already on the rise and many Californians were having the same idea. Idaho became too expensive, Texas seemed too flat and hot for our liking, and somehow, we just lost interest in Oregon.
I had a great idea, so I thought. Let’s just grab a map, hold hands, close our eyes, and point to a spot.
When we opened our eyes, we saw Tennessee. But we had never been to Tennessee and we knew nothing about it.
Let the research begin…
We read about the state every day. Researching the different areas, weather, natural disasters, soil quality, and community. Upon deciding on the general area, we now had to see about jobs. This was especially difficult because schools were closed, leaving us scratching our heads about what to do. I was already on a leave of absence, so we decided that the lovely one make a few phone calls to see about the possibilities of transferring. Just so happened there was an opening in the general area we had settled on.
Now what?
Now to begin the search for a house. This was probably the hardest part, especially during a pandemic where real estate was beginning to get out of control. We knew that we had a few factors in mind for our new property. This is important to know, and to think about before making a plunge like this.
We needed land.
At first, we wanted as much as we could get our hands on. 10 acres sounded about right. A descent house. Nothing too fancy, but just enough to fit us into. 3 bedrooms was about right and 2 bathrooms was all we really needed. After living in a 1,300 square foot house for the last 7 years, we knew that this was enough, but certainly nothing less. So, we looked day and night at pictures of properties. Found some we liked, but properties where flying of the shelf and the real estate inventory was beginning to run slim.
Oh wait! We still need to somehow find a real estate agent in the area, but how are we supposed to do that when we were still living across the country. I could fly back and forth from California to Tennessee to scope things out, but there were only 2 problems with that. We were at the heat of a roaring pandemic…
…and homes were selling so rapidly that it did not make sense to fly back and forth. We felt that we had no time to shop around for the “perfect” home. So, we went on realtor.com and clicked on virtual walkthroughs. Then clicked on contact an agent. This was all very new to us, so needless to say, we pissed off a few realtors.
But it wasn’t our fault!
We felt desperate to get out of California as soon as possible, during this crisis, where nobody knew what tomorrow would bring. Will there be a complete shutdown? Are we looking at a Marshall Law type of scenario soon? Will our food supply be affected soon? Will they force us to stay in California? Out of panic and desperation we (wait for it) scheduled multiple showings with multiple agents on the same days at different times. This was not the smartest or courteous thing to do and definitely not one of our proudest moments.
But let’s backtrack just a bit.
We did have some realtors flake on showings, so our thought was to schedule with multiple agents just in case one does not follow through. Well, a time or two they both followed through. But what if they flake? So, we scheduled with another one. So, here is what happened, they all came through and we saw some properties 2 or 3 times back to back with different realtors.
We felt horrible…
…but we were in desperation survival mode and we figured “well how would they even know”? Turns out realtors actually talk to each other and there is actually a thing called property showing logs. Who would’ve thought there was such a thing?
The search continues…
Ok, Ok, Ok. Enough shenanigans, we can’t be scheduling showings with multiple agents anymore because of our impatience, paranoia, and distrust about what the media is telling us. So, we found an agent. The first thing we said to her was, “look, plain and simple we need a realtor that is a badass and will cut through all the bullshit.” She agreed to that and eventually found our home. We put an offer on the property site unseen. Hell, we didn’t even know if we would even like Tennessee. We had no family or friends there.
But… Sold! We were out!
Packed up our family and made the drive across country leaving everything behind and didn’t look back once. So, what will we do when we get there? For 5 ways to start homesteading in the city, click on over here!
Cheers,
Jason
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