August 23rd, 2022 Our Homestead Farm is an Undeniable Fact.

Today we crossed the finish line of a race we have run, non-stop, for nine years. 

The race we finished today has been in progress since April of 2015, when we found the property which became our homestead farm. We have a longer termed goal set which is broken into three major parts. Our first goal was always to build a house (we finished this today and this is the main message of this post). Our second goal is to build a farming business and we've come a long way on this front. The third part of our bigger plan is the hospitality phase, we are looking toward starting working toward this goal beginning today. The path which took us to this place has been a long one and we have passed by quite a few milestones along the way. Some of these milestones were significant and were found wherever a major goal had to be achieved. These were usually make or break points in our current project and the days where we moved forward in a meaningful way.

Deciding to start our Farm project happened in 2013, but I didn't write about it until I began blogging in October, 2015. The timeline of this journaling project jumped around a bit at first. We found the property in April of 2015 and this BLOG didn't begin until October of 2015.  Here's where we started.

The Creekside Farm project was very LARGE at the onset, but seemed to grow as time passed. The post linked above this paragraph tells of how we decided to buy a farm, began to clear the place, and how we found a way to buy control of the property. The story of everything is contained in the archives of this blog, but since this post is entirely about finishing Phase One of our larger project, I'll try to tell this story as concisely as I can. Where you see red in the list below, you'll find a major goal achievement nested into the larger Phase One goal. This is the story of our Farmhouse. 

• We found the Farm property, by accident, in January 2015.
• We found a woman to buy the land from in April 2015.
• In late September of 2015 we bought the land in an extraordinary way. 
• By March 2017 we had built a tiny home and moved it to the property.
• We called the land Camp Creekside because it was had a cabin and we were producing no food. 
• Our temporary electricity permit came in April.
• This allowed us to have water in July.
• We moved the Tiny Home Cabin in October and tilled the first garden plot.
• In 2018 we began producing food on the now renamed Creekside Farm.
• 
  After selling our house in August we had more than enough cash to begin building and started the permit process.
• I built our new septic system around this point in time.
• We finished clearing the trash off of the place in October.
• 2019 was a tough year.
• The permit process dragged on nearly the whole year long.
• We finally got permits in September.
• We broke ground on the new Farmhouse in October.
• In November we had actually poured a foundation for the new Farmhouse.
  
• 2020 was a year of hard work and not many growing things.
  
  
• We began building on top of  the new foundation in January.
• Plumbing was roughed in in March.
• By October we had a roof on the house and were doing electrical rough in.
• In 2021 we worked every day to convert cash into house. 
• Prices began to rise immediately in 2021, most building materials doubled in cost.
• We moved into a very comfortable Farmhouse in December.
• The Last Nail was driven into the new Farmhouse in March of 2022
• It took until today to get all of our permits signed off.

All together, from the January 2015 until today, we spent our lives completely committed to building our Farm-house. We also spent considerable time building a Farm for the house to sit on. This has been a dream since August of 2013. So nine years of dedicated effort has finally come to fruition. 

Or new farmstead home is still in trouble in many ways. We changed our farming practices a few times, this year we found something that works. We are self sufficient, but there isn't enough cash to build the rest of our initial dream yet, but the dream has changed many times. We still have to find the money to pay off the Contract we entered into at the onset of this, and this has developed more than a few additional troubles since the beginning so we have work to do. While our project still is not certain to find the ending we began at the beginning, we sure have made it quite far.

We started the project with no cash and no real plan. We found ourselves on land unsuitable for farming and without any place to lay our heads. We were as surprised as anyone when we actually got control of the land. We learned how to build fires and grow food. And, after all this time and effort, we have arrived at the end of our first major goal: We built a house!