Bit of Backstory, eh?

 I grew up like most everyone my age. Being almost 38 years old, I spent most of my time outside, playing with the neighborhood kids. We rode our bikes further than our parents ever imagined that we could. We hopped fences to play with dogs in backyards we didn't know, and we found wild animals and tried very hard to convince our parents to let us keep them as pets. Growing up, my mother, who was also an animal lover, did agree to quite a few things and I had a lot of animals as a kid and my dream when I grew up was to own a zoo. 

However, like most people, real life got in the way. Becoming a zookeeper was too many years in school and the school was too expensive. Not to mention, I met my husband not long after I graduated high school, and college just wasn't as important as it should have been. Fast forward a few years and owning animals took a backseat to having babies and writing novels. By the time I was twenty-five years old, my dream of owning a zoo was no longer even on my mind and what I really wanted was a child, living somewhere grand like NYC, in a penthouse, just writing novels for a living. Well, by the time I hit thirty-five and had some kids, I realized that living in a city like New York with children, would definitely cause me more stress than I was already experiencing, in just the smaller city that we already lived in. 

By the time we got to the year 2020, I realized just how serious things were getting and how unhinged things and people became in the city. My kid's school system became worse by the year, our neighborhood got worse, the city became more dangerous every year. But I kept telling myself that it was just my anxiety and that everyone felt like that, and I should just overlook it. For years, I told myself that it was just my imagination and that nothing was that bad.  I tried everything to take my mind off of how bad things were getting, until the last year. My eyes opened to things that I had been trying to keep them closed to. 

I paid more attention to the food industry and how the animals were treated. Not to mention what was actually going into the meat or what they were telling us was meat. I started looking more into the school system and what was being allowed and tolerated, also what wasn't being taught and what was being taught. I looked at the city we lived in as a whole. When my children couldn't play outside at 11 and 13 years old because we heard gun shots at all hours of the day and night, and when there were adults walking down the street with backpacks, overdosing in the middle of the road just houses down from where we lived, I knew I had to do something. 

My children were unhappy with their schools and their lives in that city. I was unhappy with our day to day lives because nothing was safe, and my husband was unhappy that everyone was unhappy. So, I started looking at ways we could leave. Our house needed repairs. Not just small repairs, but repairs that would cost tens of thousands before we could sell it to get a profit. My husband truly believed we were stuck, but I refused to believe that. I started looking at land in Tennessee. Living in Alabama, it wasn't that long of a drive if we found some, so I had hope. 

What I didn't realize is that in order to get a loan for land, your credit score needed to be almost perfect, or you needed major collateral. Yet, another thing standing in our way. In the last several years, major changes had happened in our family causing our finances to change and our credit to drop exponentially. But I watched my kids get more and more depressed as the days go on and I couldn't handle it. So, I kept looking. After a couple of months of secretly looking, and then two months of my husband aware that I was looking, we found a few properties that were owner financed properties. I thought to myself, how perfect that is. It gives us land to work on while we figure out what to do about the house! 

We all packed in the car and drove to the first property. It was completely wooded, on a steep slope that went straight down and back up. It would have been perfect for sledding in the snow if the trees were gone, but unless we had thousands upon thousands, the land would have been useless. On our way back home, we found another few tracts of land that were owner financed. So, we made a little detour and decided to check it out. It was perfect. Some of it wooded, some of it cleared. Close to a road, but you use an easement to get to it, so no major traffic. 

We discussed it over that weekend and my husband was still on the fence. "How will we come up with the down payment? How will we make the monthly payment with all these bills?" he would say. And honestly, I didn't know that. I didn't have an answer for it. But I did know that it felt right, and this was the land we needed. Big purchases are always something we discuss beforehand, but this time, I emailed the realtor and told him we wanted the land and signed the deed paperwork while my husband was at work. The best part was, I had two weeks to come up with a down payment, so we could figure that part out later. To my surprise, my husband wasn't angry. 

We made a plan and discussed it with the kids that we'd move the next summer. (We bought the land in July) That gave us not quite a year to prepare the land for a home, sell our home, and be ready for a homestead. Sounds perfect, right? A couple weeks into school and my daughter all but refused to go. She was sick with anxiety and worry. The school had gotten repeated threats and threats over social media had been rampant. My son, who usually didn't let things bother him, had been so sick about going to school, that he had used all the excuses he could come up with not to go. 

So, my husband and I sat down and talked again. We changed the moving date up to Christmas break. We thought that would ease the kids minds a little and help them realize that their current situation wouldn't last long. A few more days go by, and the social media threats against the school got worse and we kept the kids home for a few days, for their peace of mind, and ours. Finally, after a long weekend, I contacted someone who buys houses, "As Is" thinking that it wouldn't work, and that it was mainly just a scam. He came out and looked at the house and offered me more than we owed on it. Frankly, I was flabbergasted. Our house, which had been our home for thirteen years and that we loved, had more things wrong with it than right, by this point. 

Once he left and sent the contract over, the closing date on our house was in thirty days. This was it. We had the land in Tennessee, that nothing had been done to. It was undeveloped, so there were no power poles, no septic system, no well dug. The grass hadn't even been trimmed. And now, we had a closing date and had to move out of our home in thirty days. Things had progressed much faster than anticipated. And while we were all excited, thankful and blessed to have this opportunity, I immediately felt the anxiety rushing in. 

What would we live in? We didn't want another giant mortgage bill and even if we had, our credit score would never allow it. We didn't want to get an apartment, because then all of our finances would go to that and leave nothing extra to fix up the property. We knew how much money we were getting back from the closing of our home, so we knew what we had to work with. So, my husband and I and our two kids sat down and had some deep discussion. 

We decided that for a short amount of time, we would buy a camper, live in it, while we fixed up the land, build fences, pay off some debt and build credit, that way we wouldn't have a mortgage payment. We would have extra money to spend on things we wanted, versus what we needed. And we weren't scrambling to find a home builder or loan company that would be willing to give us a loan in that short amount of time. 

We took the kids, we picked out an almost new, 30-foot camper that had everything we'd need, minus a washer and dryer, and put a down payment on it to hold it. The closing date came on September 19th, and on the 19th, we picked up our camper, and drove straight to Savannah, TN with our dogs and our chickens. 

We've been here a month, and I can honestly say that it's the most at home I've ever felt. We've had our share of culture shocks because living in the city and living in the middle of nowhere is very different. We don't live in the city of Savannah. We live in the county. Luckily, we have neighbors who are the absolute greatest to one side, and I haven't met anyone in Savannah who isn't nice, neighborly, and helpful. Completely different than where we left. But we had to make some changes for sure. I'll get into those in the next post! But, if you've been thinking of leaving the city and starting a homestead, or just leaving the city in general... I highly suggest it. I've been less stressed, less sick, and my overall happiness has increased, and I've seen that in all of my family members! 

But follow along, and I'll give updates and share how it's going. I've learned a lot in the last month about RV life, country life, bugs, what to do when you find bones on your property, how much horse poop your dog can eat before he gets sick, and how to dispose of your RV black tank, via a poop suitcase! It's all vital information!