Turning Our Dreams Into Reality
Today’s the day – settlement! But first, a bit about how we got here…
In July 2009 I was looking for a room to rent for my last semester of nursing school in Baltimore City. It’s pretty typical to find roommates via Craigslist and I found a posting for a room just a few blocks from my sister in Canton (a bar district along the water). The guy who owned the house was skeptical of having a female roommate but hesitantly agreed to let me rent a room from him in his 2 bedroom house on a month-to-month lease. Long story short, before you could say “Craigslist Killer” we were a couple.
We had both grown up in rural areas and knew that ultimately we were not city people. We were already spending as much free time as we could (which mind you, wasn’t much) at his family’s property in West Virginia in the mountains, camping in Codorus, PA, and taking bushcraft classes. Although we knew we ultimately wanted a house in the country, we had trouble finding a house we both loved. We settled on a lake house in New Market, Maryland in September 2015 with the hopes of one day finding a little farmhouse for us to rehab and make our own.
The weekend before Thanksgiving 2016, just over a year in our new house and 2 months after getting married, Chris received a Zillow notification about a new property in Smithsburg, Maryland that had come on the market. A house from around 1900 on 13 acres with mountain views. We had never heard of Smithsburg but decided to drive up and check it out, it being only an hour or so away from us. We got to the property a bit early and decided to grab a meal at the Smithsburg Market. We googled the town and schools and with the (high school) waitress’s glowing review of the area we were sold. We finished our homemade fried chicken lunch and headed off to the property. Once inside, we immediately fell in love and with very little discussion gave a verbal offer to the owners before rushing off to secure financing. On Thanksgiving Day with our extended family in the next room sitting down to eat dinner we found out our offer was accepted!
That brings us to today – March 3rd – settlement day. It has been a tedious few months with inspections, setbacks, and financial documents galore but our persistence paid off. We met at the house this morning to sign the paperwork and gave the owner, a sweet 93 year old woman, some daffodils we picked before the snow came down overnight; her gratitude was tangible.
This blog will be about our journey of rehabbing our farmhouse into our dream home, living a more sustainable lifestyle, and all things homestead. I hope you enjoy taking this journey with us!
