Friday was a good day. I got email from the County Planning Department on Friday. This is a good thing since they approved the siting of our new house. This is a long termed goal. One of two major goals reached on Friday. The second was the opening of our roadside produce stand. More on these two a bit later. As is my custom, whenever we make significant progress on the Farm I like to reminisce a bit. Usually I go back to the beginning and try to write a synopsis of our journey so far.
A long time ago . . . Late Summer of 2013, Ann and I took a long driving trip to Las Vegas to get re-married. I won't go into the particulars, but if you want to know what happened look to the right of this and you'll see the two of us getting married by Elvis. Ann and I have always been goal oriented, this trip was to celebrate all of the goals we had finished, but also to find some new ones. Our kids were all grown. We had been married twenty years. It was a good time to try and come up with some new directions we wanted to try together.
Long story very short, we decided to open a wedding venue. Then we decided how to get this done by breaking the big idea in half, and then these halves into halves, etc; . . . We talked for four days, trying to come up with some plausible plan to get a two million dollar wedding venue built in ten years. This was a lofty goal because we were literally starting off with zero cash. We decided that the best sort of wedding venue would be a farm and so we set goals and plans to buy and build a farm themed wedding venue in ten years time. As of today we are nearing six years since we set the goal.
But the road has been long and rough at times. We did college, cancer, and ended two careers during this time, along with finding the property, clearing it, building a dog breeding business, and so much more.
We found a piece of highly distressed property and had to find some way to buy it. The entire story of this is the content of this BLOG so I won't get more into this. Suffice it to say, we got the property in April 2015 and have worked very hard to make something of it. We still need to build a house, but we have the money and the land so it looks good that we shall have our house sometime in the next year. The wedding goal is still a ways off, but once the house is built the path to the weddings seems fairly clear. We are definitely headed in the direction we chose so many years ago. Whether we make it to the same end, or on time, is impossible to tell. But today we made definite progress.
 |
| Day one of our produce stand was today. |
- Today we opened the Farm Stand, the first iteration of the bigger "Farm Store" goal which is half of the first half of the ten year goal. This isn't to say that we are one-quarter of the way there, but things are looking good. We opened with about twelve pints of strawberries, fifteen hanging pots, dozens of strawberry starts, and a few potted Hostas. As of five in the afternoon we haven't sold a thing, but the goal includes the possibility that things might start off a bit slowly. Our philosophy in this is to build something worth seeing and then wait for people to see it. So we are prepared to wait it out.
- Today the County, which so far had been difficult to figure out, accepted our home site and so our building permit is passed the biggest hurdle. We already have the water and septic figured out. The planning is all but done. What's left is buying the wood and hammering it together. With any luck we'll be building in Summer
I'll leave this all for now and go happily wandering on my Farm in the early Summer sunshine. We ended the day riding our e-bikes on one of the prettiest bike trials in Oregon (and this is saying something bigger than it sounds). And it seems (for now) that our crops are growing, the chickens and ducks are happily productive, and the dogs are ready to so back into breeding just as soon as the house is built. The past few years have been difficult, but this was a good week.
No comments:
Post a Comment