Trading in a Nice House in a Subdivision for an Old Farmhouse on Forty Acres

-Nathan Brummel

We lived in a subdivision.

One neighbor yelled at the kids if they climbed a tree that was barely on their property. Another neighbor, a farmer, who owned a wooded lot behind his field, yelled at our children for having the audacity to play in the woods next to their yard. Another neighbor played music so loud in his garage that we could feel the thump of the chords on our chests while we sat in our living room. Even though the windows were closed, we could feel the rock music that he played every night as he swilled beer. It wasn’t rare for us to hear the man fighting with his wife.

For some crazy reason I decided that I wanted to move to the country. I came up with the hair-brained scheme of trading our nice house in a subdivision for a homestead in the country. We would trade a fancy house for an old farmhouse. My wife loved our house in the subdivision. But she felt that I had let her have a nice house in a subdivision for many years, so she was willing to give me a chance to enjoy the country.

I grew up in a small town. I had always wanted to live in the country. I also wanted to have some hunting property. It was hard to find a place to hunt deer.

We began searching for a homestead. We found a manufactured home on 20 acres. It came with a nice outbuilding. But it was small. There were not very many properties that had more than five acres on the market. It was the end of the Covid-19 scare. One seller didn’t want us to come into her house lest we corrupt the home with our germs.

It took time to identify a potential homestead. We learned about a farmhouse that had been built in 1915. The house was old. The benefit was that the house was on 40 acres with multiple outbuildings. Our first visit to the property was a bit unsettling. The property was a little farther to the east than where we wanted to live. Then we noticed that there was a rundown house to the southwest of the property. A little more than a mile away there were several properties with mobile homes. One property was a total disaster. The home reminded me of a red-neck joke: “What is a redneck? A person who has a house that is mobile and four cars that are not.”

We stepped out of our vehicle at the homestead. The entire property was unkempt. Fence rows had been taken over by brush. The old wooden barn had no paint. There were no sidewalks–so it was a mess walking around the property after it rained. After it rained or the snow melted, water stood by the back door. The inside of the house was rough. While the upper story of the house was okay, the main floor needed serious work. The entire kitchen had to go. We would have to design an entirely new setup for a proper kitchen. The only bathroom was no good.

Outside the old wooden barn lacked paint or stain. The realtor showed us an old painting from around the 1920s that showed the barn as light green. The property had been set up for cows, but the fences were in disrepair. Chickens had lived in one of the pole barns. A decade before a previous owner had taken care of racehorses for a racecourse in Illinois. Next to the old barn there was a mess; an old wooden structure had come down in a storm and no one had ever cleaned it up. I was interested in a small outbuilding that sat next to the house; I supposed that I could convert it into my study.

The realtor told us that the person who lived across the road in the house that was falling apart was a great guy. He was a retired electrician.

We decided that this homestead was the perfect property for us. We could get a mortgage to buy the farm property without having to sell our present home immediately. This would give us plenty of time to make the home livable. We made an offer. The owner had just held an auction and sold his tractor and many other items on the property. Since he had made enough money at the auction, he became willing to accept an offer that was below his asking price. We became the happy owners of a run down homestead.