What was I thinking. :)

Greeting everyone. :)

Thought we would share with you a journey we had started a few years back but still in the process today of renovating an old barn into a place to live.

Setting the stage:
In 2002 we lived in a small town in Michigan, I have never liked living in town; growing up on a farm in Wisconsin. We have 3 children, Jeffery, Tori and Chelsea. The oldest, Jeffery was 13 with not a lot of options started hanging around with lets just say less than ideal friends, Drugs and alcohol were common place for idle hands.

So as a leap of faith we loaded up for a road trip to my home town in Wisconsin to scout out old homesteads, my brother in law new of an old farm not far from him. The place consisted of 6 acres which had 13 structures and all but one were concrete with steel roofs, no one had lived there in more than 18 years; the previous owners had died and their children had no interest in the place, all of the building were still full of all their belongings.

The house had been ransacked by school kids over the years but for the most part all the other building were left untouched, horse collars and old tool still hanging on the walls, 26 pieces of old machinery still scattered around the property which most were buried in the tall grass and trees from the unattended homestead.

The one child who had inherited the 40 acres sold it to a local fella and he was looking to subdivide and sell of portions. He was happy to do a land contract so arrangements were made and within a month my eldest boy and I moved there as my wife and 2 girls stayed behind in lower Michigan.

At this point it was quite a challenge, September 1st we signed the papers and started the huge task of cleaning the place up. No electricity, no running water, and no place to live. My brother in-law gave us and old camper and after about a month we finally received power, but water was still retrieved from one of the 3 cistern well via hand pump, really rough living through the winter months as we started cleaning out the house which took more than a month.

I will post some pics of the place as we it was before we move there and shortly afterwards but going to leave it up to the readers here where this blog will go from here. We have lots and lots of pics of this journey from then till now but at this point we are in the midst of the barn conversion, so do you want to see the progress up to this point or just some renovation pics?

Thanks for stopping by and taking the time.
Cheers – Jeff

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