Home on 129 Acres

In the final stages of negotiating to buy our first house, we were $1,000 under what the sellers wanted. In hindsight, it was just $1,000, but it was hard for us to up our offer. In the end, we wrote the microwave and little chest freezer that were in the house into the contract and paid the extra $1,000.

Since then we’ve joked that we have a $700 microwave and a $300 freezer (don’t ask me why the freezer got undervalued… although the microwave makes really excellent popcorn).

Despite low-balling it, we do like the freezer too. It’s small, but it allows Matt to feed his habit of always being stocked in case the apocalypse arrives.

Small chest freezer full to the brim

Because Matt keeps us so well-stocked though, I often find myself emptying the entire freezer looking for the one tray of chicken breasts I’m sure is somewhere underneath the boxes of frozen fish and 17 packages of bacon. (There’s no question about Matt’s priorities–and yes, I actually counted 17 packages).

In his desire to improve his bacon stockpile, Matt has been campaigning to upgrade the freezer for some time. I’ve been holding out. However, when 100+ pounds of venison came into our lives at the beginning of November, I relented.

We could get a bigger freezer. But I was adamant it had to be upright. I was not going to spend more time mining through an even bigger chest freezer.

Just before Christmas, our freezer arrived. Matt retrieved our venison from his father’s freezers–yup, plural. (The propensity to stockpile frozen food is genetic). And we loaded up the new freezer.

Upright freezer

The venison got a shelf, the whole bottom drawer and a few of the door shelves as well. Deer burgers anyone?

Venison in our new freezer

Despite being one-third filled with venison, there’s still lots more room. This freezer is huge. Cubic footage was our biggest criteria in choosing the new freezer. To help keep us organized, I purchased some bins from the dollar store. We have one for chicken, wieners (sausages and hotdogs), vegetables, breads, seafood, and, of course, one just for bacon.

Bacon in the freezer storage bin

We’re calling this our Christmas gift to each other. (Isn’t being a grown-up so cool? Forget about video games or gadgets. We get appliances for Christmas.) It’s not as big as the couch from our first year and definitely not close to the fireplace from last year, but the new freezer is absolutely an upgrade from our old one.

What did you get for Christmas this year? Do you have a freezer? Is yours upright or chest? Any freezer organization tips to share? Do you have venison in your freezer? Any venison recipes to share? We’re going to be eating it for awhile.

Hello. Happy New Year.

The start of the year is always special for us because it marks the anniversary of when we found the farm.

Four years ago today, we submitted our offer on the farm. Our search had lasted a year and a half. We’d seen lots of farms and a few that we actually liked.

With any farm that we thought might have potential, my usual routine was to return home and work up a floorplan of how I would reconfigure the house to make it my dream home.

The house was usually the least important factor when we were looking at a farm. Location, quality of property, whether there was a barn. Those mattered to us. The house, I figured I could work on that.

My floorplans were not to scale and usually more dream than reality, but they were a regular part of my process.

Except on this farm.

I never drew a floorplan. It wasn’t that the house was perfect. Lots of things were missing: master suite, garage, front porch. And there was a big thing that I wished was missing: it had an indoor pool, and there was no way I was keeping that.

Matt in the indoor pool

I definitely had the floorplan in my head.

However, I never sat down at my computer and mocked it up.

But now I have. In fact, I’ve mocked up three different plans.

I’m a big believer that living in a space helps me make the best decisions about how to renovate it. My vision for this house has changed over the past four years.

Before we get to the vision, let’s start with the reality. Here’s the main floor as it exists today (in fact, pretty much as it existed when we saw it four years ago).

Current floorplan