I will get into the reasons behind our decision to build a homestead in another post; this post is more of a reflection of the events leading up to our decision, and a reminder to myself of just how far we’ve come. The single most important step to building a homestead is planning a homestead. These first few posts will be interesting as I remember the details that we’ve encountered. I apologize if they’re a bit chaotic and unorganized until I catch up to our present time, but that’s just the way my mind works.
About four years ago I was drowning in life-figuratively, of course. I had a great job that I enjoyed, and I loved my family dearly, but I had no direction. I felt like I was just going through the motions with no real purpose. I have battled with depression on and off for as long as I can remember, but this felt different. I remember feeling that there must be a reason for me to be on this Earth, but I couldn’t quite figure it out. I certainly didn’t feel that we were meant to live out our existence in our average little home on a busy street just “making it through” each day with no real direction or goals in sight, but that’s where we were.
Due to my ill-advised spending habits of my youth, I was up to my eyeballs in debt. I bought our house in 2009, and even though I got it for a good price, the mortgage was still the bulk of my income. On top of that, I had student loans, an auto loan for my truck that I bought in 2007, and a credit card balance of over $10,000. Not only was I unhappy with our current situation, but I was in no place to do anything about it.
This is about the time when my girlfriend Bre changed my life. She was, and continues to be, ever supporting with anything that I felt was necessary or important. Whether it was important in that it brought me happiness, or that I felt that it was in our best interest – she stood by me. At this point in time, she knew that I was unhappy. I believe that my constant complaining of being in debt or displeasure of our residential situation had something to do with that, but needless to say – she knew. Because she knew that I was unhappy, she took measures to fix it.
We had lengthy discussions to try to understand my unhappiness. I think what it boiled down to the most was that I felt as though I was not supporting my family enough. I felt like I couldn’t provide them with the things that they needed and deserved. We have two dogs now – Koda is a six year old Alaskan Malamute/White Shepard mix and Kashi is a three year old Border Collie/Terrier mix. At the time we only had Koda. I felt that I wasn’t being a good parent to Koda because I couldn’t provide her with a big yard to run and play in. I felt that I wasn’t providing for Bre because this wasn’t where I envisioned us living and raising a family. I didn’t want to have children and have them grow up in this environment. When I bought this house, it was supposed to be temporary. The plan was to fix it up and sell it as quick as I could, but here I was now several years into living here and I had no way out.
In our discussions, Bre very plainly asked me, “What do you want?” It took that for me to understand exactly why I was unhappy. Instead of me just focusing on the negatives and thinking of all the things that made me unhappy, I had to actually think of what I wanted, or what would make me happy. Envisioning that was necessary for me to come up with a goal. Very simply, I wanted a homestead. I wanted to raise our children in an environment where they can play outside and explore our land instead of a tiny backyard. I wanted a place where Koda could run to her heart’s content. I wanted a place where I could farm and grow crops to provide for my family. Now that I knew what would make me happy, we had to figure out how to get there.