It has always been my habit of recounting the history of Creekside Farm every time we hit a new milestone. Today they approved the permits for building our farmhouse. This approval came at a tremendous cost, monetarily, physically, and emotionally. Every step we've taken has been a part of a much larger plan, also part of the gamble as well.
The whole project has been a gamble from the very beginning, one which we entered into with eyes wide open. I wrote the story about how all this began in October of 2015, about two years after we actually began the project, about the time we actually gave a name to the property which would become our farm. Anyone wanting to read this account can find it in the archive menu to the right of this article. What happened was an extraordinary chain of events.
We found the property by accident, then tracked down a woman who could lay claim to it, who died soon after, leaving a brother behind to take our payments. We bought quite a few hound dogs and went headlong into the breeding business, all in order to find some money to move the project forward. We sold our house in North Plains to get the money to build too. The money we got, along with an inheritance and hound dog profits, has brought us this far. Things started off easily enough, mostly because it was all a big dream. But things did not always go as planned.
I was in my third year at Pacific University, headed for law school, when we found the property. We found the lady who could help reclaim the property from tax foreclosure soon after that. We began cleaning the place up as our dogs began producing enough money to pay for tractor rentals and back tax bills. In December I got word that my sore throat was a cancerous thing and our dreams of Creekside Farm kept me going through the pain and loss of my law school dreams. We spent a bunch of money cleaning the place up so that we could actually see the ground below our feet. School, and a lack of sufficient funds, slowed the project, but we did what we could in the early running.
When we first approached the County Land Use and Development desk we had no idea of how to go about securing permissions to build. They seemed helpful enough and pointed out the first step to take. The Farm (we were growing food by then, so it was a farm) was included in the FEMA 100 year flood plain boundary and needed some special attention. We got a flood plain engineer and got going.
We had initially planned to borrow the money to build using conventional bank financing, but this fell through despite massive home equity and long job histories. Rather than get stopped we decided to build a tiny home, sell the house, and use the proceeds to build in October of 2015. I had recently graduated from the University, built the first tiny home, raised two more litters of puppies, moved us to the Farm, built a second tiny home, and sold the house, all in the span of nine months following the throat surgery. Ann's parents had left her a tidy sum at about the same time, so project money was no longer the problem. The problem became finding the way to get a permit to build.
With cash in hand to buy permits and build a house we rejoined the permit process with the County. The flood plain thing turned out to be a major holdup. Siting the house proved very tricky because we could only build a house if we could prove that our home would be sited above the flood plain boundary. We had some proof that led us to believe this wouldn't be a problem, but the County insisted on professionally stamped paperwork proving our assertions. It took nearly a year to get the County to approve the home site and allow us to proceed to the next step: hiring an architect to make professionally stamped drawings of a design I had already drawn. The Architect did some good work and we moved on to getting a structural engineer to once more provide professionally engineered stamped drawings to prove that the house we had drawn up would not fall or blow over. All of this drawing was expensive and time consuming. We spent the months clearing the land and making new fields to plant. Our cash was beginning to dwindle a bit by the time we finally got all of the paperwork together. It was early Spring of 2019 when we finally made our application.
The application immediately became a problem. The flood plain people still had misgivings which were unexpressed and many other things happened to slow the process. There is no need to worry over these things here, just mention them as the most stressful portion of the project to date. The process was nearing completion when a large tree fell on me and ruined the Summer. Fortunately for us, the end product of the permit process waited until I was back on my feet and ready to build. Today we have the go ahead. We know there are still many hurdles to jump, fires to put out or start, and challenges yet un-noticed. But as of today we are moving forward once more.
Today we raked about one ton of gravel from one of the last genuinely trashy places left to clean up and this week we built a new hoop house shelter to house our second Summer Supper party. In addition to all of this we are picking up two move females to continue our breeding program on Friday and one of our girl hounds is having an unexpected litter of puppies in the first days of October. Needless to say it, things are wildly busy, but we like it that way.
As of today we still have the money to build, but not much more than that. The plan we began in 2013, the gamble we entered into in 2015, and all of the ups and downs since the beginning, have all brought us to this place and this time. The next few months will either be wildly busy as we begin to build, or merely fairly busy if the weather doesn't cooperate with building plans. No matter which, we look forward to the experience.
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