16 Acre Fixer Upper

We lived in a new build when we got married in a subdivision that became the best place to raise our first born son. We developed friendships with our neighbors and we all had kids around the same age so our subdivision was the “happening” place to live for several years. Then one by one, all our neighbors moved off and we suddenly found ourselves longing for land of our own. We had been looking for a while, but GOOD land was so hard to find. My husband took me all over our county looking at lots he thought were perfect but they were never perfect for me. I just didn’t get the feeling that “this is our forever home” at any of the places we looked. Then this huge amount of land got put up for auction and was going to be sold in sections. My husband decided he didn’t want me to come with him to this auction because he knew I probably would have held him back from being the highest bidder. But being the over achiever that he is, he won one of the lots for sale! We ended up with a 16 acre fixer upper! Why was it a fixer upper? Well, there was a small house FULL to the brim of garage, a 100 year old barn just waiting for the right fly to land on it to cave in, and about 300 tires, yes, tires, like, from a car, in the yard behind the house next to a storage shed that was also FULL of spare tires! What in the world did my husband get us into?? When he brought me to our new found land that was planned to be our forever homestead, I almost fainted. There was SO MUCH WORK to do! Well, with a whole lot of determination, he got to work! I don’t think there was a day that went by that he wasn’t at our land cutting down a tree or picking up trash. We got really lucky once we got the land and sold our house fast and rented out a house just 2 miles down the road from our land. So we could ride the ranger over there anytime we wanted. It wasn’t safe for an actual car to drive up to the place because of all the glass in the yard. We found out the old man that lived in the house 5 years prior to us was a hoarder, he didn’t believe in electricity, got his water from wells, we still have one of them, and used the bathroom in a portable toilet he had in the barn. BUT as bad as the land was, we really saw the potential in it. There were about 5 acres we cleared completely out and about 10 acres of woods behind us. The woods even had trash in it! It was awful. We hired someone to come tear down the barn and the house. They had to bury it close to the road. We spent the next year prepping the land to get ready to build on. It was a huge job, but in the end it was so worth it. And in the meantime, we decided to spend most of our weekends exploring the 10 acres of woods we had. We discovered a creek that led to 2 different small waterfalls on our property and one other one that belonged to our neighbor. My husband decided to create some riding trails for our ATVs in the woods to make it more accessible to explore too! Our land then because our “happening place to be”!