Even though I was raised in the city and my wife grew up in the burbs, we always had this fantasy of retiring to the country. I think my wife was seduced by Martha Stewart and movies like “The Egg and I”. She thought it would be great to buy a piece of property with an old farmhouse, fix it up and decorate it in today's idea of country style, with all the modern conveniences of course. I've always been a gardener, so I liked the idea of having unlimited gardening space. I also liked the idea of wandering across my own fields when the spirit moved me instead of walking a path laid out by someone else. I don't think we ever seriously believed we would move to the country. We just dreamed about it while we looked at country decorating magazines, read books like “Five Acres and Independence” and visited places like Malabar Farm, which Louis Bromfield wrote about in “Pleasant Valley”.
Although we pretty much considered retiring to the country to be a warm and cozy dream, as I look back I realize that we had been working toward that move from early in our marriage. From the time in the early sixties when we got our hands on the inaugural copy of “The Mother Earth News” we talked often about “getting back to the land” and tried to be more self-sufficient. During most of the sixties and early seventies we grew a lot of our own vegetables, filling the pantry with canned, frozen and dried goodies from the garden. We had some pretty big gardens during much of that time, but I still dreamed about having enough space to plant corn or put in a proper bed of asparagus. When I had about four years to go before my first retirement, my wife's brother, who was living in an old farmhouse on 150 acres in southeastern Ohio, offered to sell us his place for $60,000. We knew we could afford that, but the mineral rights for all of the farms in that area had been sold during the depression and a coal company was strip mining a farm half a mile from my brother-in-law's place, so we were reluctant to buy land in that area. Also, we didn't want to buy a place and then rent it out for four years before we could live in it. So we decided to pass.
We kept dreaming about retiring beyond the sidewalks, though, and as we neared retirement age we decided that we had to live out our dream and trade our suburban house for a place in the country. We thought we were probably too old to try homesteading by that time, but the idea of living in the country had appealed to us for so long that we felt that we just had to give it a try.
Three years passed before we were in a position to act on our decision. During that time we realized that we weren't sure how to turn our dream into reality. In the end we just read a lot of books written by folks who had actually made the move to the country and talked a lot about the place we would buy and how we would fix it up and live the good life. When I had only a year and a half to go until I could retire we started actively looking. Our initial plan was to look for a place in Ohio where the Bromfields had had such a pleasant experience. The first thing we discovered was that Ohio land prices had gone up considerably since my wife's brother had tried to sell us his place. We were looking for 100 acres and it seemed as though that was not going to be affordable. We looked for land in other states too but couldn't find anything that would work for us. When I reached the point where retirement was only about six months away my company offered a buyout package that I could not refuse. So my wife and I decided that, ready or not, it was time to make the move. I took the early retirement buyout and, after a couple of months to spruce up the house we had lived in for almost twenty years, we put our home in the burbs on the market.
During the time our suburban house was up for sale, we decided that we should try to find a place close to our kids rather than moving out of state. We wanted to be out far enough that we really were in the country and not just on the edge of the burbs, but we also wanted to be within an hour's drive of our kids. It didn't take much searching for us to realize that land in our preferred area was too expensive to allow us to afford the hundred acres that we wanted to buy. We agreed that we would settle for less land if the house and property had the features we wanted.
When the house in the burbs had been on the market for about three months, my wife found an ad for an open house at a country place that sounded just right to her. It was in the next county from the one we lived in and the price was in our range. So we got directions from the realtor and headed out to the country for a look. The drive out to the property almost sold us before we had even seen the house. We drove on progressively smaller, hillier and windier roads until we turned off a two-lane paved road onto what looked like someone's private ranch road. I was sure that my wife had gotten the directions wrong because the track was so narrow that the bushes lining the sides scraped our truck as we drove. After pushing on for about a mile and a half we came to an even narrower dirt driveway with a “For Sale” sign out front. We knew there was supposed to be a house on the property, but we couldn't see it from the top of the drive because it sat back five hundred feet from the road, with a low hill between the road and the house.
When we got to the house there were several pickups parked in front. The house itself was kind of a disappointment at first. We had had this dream of buying an “If Walls Could Talk” place. We pictured an old farm or ranch house with a barn, smokehouse and all the buildings you typically find on a working farm or ranch from the early part of the last century. The house we were looking at wasn't quite like that. It was a new limestone and cedar story and a half that sat in the middle of a coastal Bermuda hay field with no outbuildings in sight. It was on a pretty piece of property though. There was a sometime creek down one side of the property and another across the back. Most of the trees on the property were along those creeks. Although the house only had ten acres of land with it, and only 350 feet of frontage on the road, the property line ran a quarter of a mile from the road to the back creek. A little over half of the property was hay fields and the rest was wooded. The house was one of several similar houses on the road. It turned out that a small builder had bought about 150 acres, divided it up into tracts of 10 to 30 acres each and then built custom limestone and cedar houses on them. Although most of the houses were built under contract to the prospective owner, the one we looked at was a spec house.
My wife was ready to buy the house on the spot, but there was the little matter of selling our current home in the suburbs first. Besides, I don't like to rush into anything and I was disappointed in the size of the property and the fact that it had deed restrictions. We talked to the builder at length, however, and discovered that the restrictions weren't onerous. Our chat with the builder made us realize that we would definitely have to sell our current house before buying because he wasn't interested in a contingency deal. We also discovered that most of the 150 acres had been sold. After thinking things over for , oh like a minute, we decided to buy an option on another ten acres a quarter mile down the road, just in case the spec house was gone and we didn't find anything more to our liking by the time the house we were living in was sold. It was really the spec house that interested us though. We talked about it all the way home. My wife was convinced it was our dream house, but I wasn't so sure.
After nearly a month we finally got a firm offer on our suburban place so we called the builder and found out that the spec house hadn't been sold yet. We told him that we were about to close on the sale of our existing home and that we wanted to buy the spec house. After some negotiation we cut a deal to put some money down on the country place in order to hold it, but the builder wouldn't close the deal until we had completed the sale of our existing house. That was a problem because we had to turn over the keys to the suburban house at closing, which meant that we had to have all of our stuff out by that time. We managed to convince the builder to let us move our stuff into the spec house before we actually closed on it, but he continued to show it to prospective buyers right up until we signed on the dotted line. That made me pretty nervous but everything worked out OK and we were soon the proud owners of a home in the country. Then the real fun began ...
