Renovations | Our NEW HOMESTEAD!

photos by Wild Mulberry Photography

So we did it, we closed on our homestead!

I am still in the ‘pinch me’ phase as I get to share this exciting business and personal news with you! We can’t wait to see where this journey takes us!

It has been a dream of ours since before we said ‘I do’ to start a homestead together. Long drives back from Iowa State chatting about each and every farmstead we passed... the barns, the house, the land, the gardens, we talked about it all. When we said ‘I do’ we had refined the vision of what we wanted for our lives. A simple piece of land to grow into, finding that middle of nowhere feeling,  to build a ‘home’ with our own hands, to someday raise a family in a simpler place and to settle in a place where we could point our rocking chairs towards the west; any Tim McGraw fans out there?!

It’s been a journey to get to this day... so here’s a little background...

We bought our first home on a quiet street in the town of Evansville just before we got married. We knew it wasn’t a  forever home, but we also didn’t realize how quickly our hearts would yearn for our ‘home’, the one we’ve dreaming of and talking about since our relationship budded on those long drives. The following spring we put up fences on my parent’s land and brought a couple calves home because I couldn’t wait any longer.... Hours and hours and blood, sweat and tears (literally) later we knew we still wanted to pursue this dream of raising meat. We knew someday we would have our own homestead and we would be starting this grueling and yet exciting process of building it all from scratch all over again.

We sold that little home in Evansville last fall to fully pursue this dream. Those two short years in our first house taught us a lot about us as a couple as we worked on projects to improve it and prompted us to take the leap of faith even though we didn’t know where we would be going.

After months of searching we started to feel a bit overwhelmed by the market and lack of options. We tried an nontraditional route and contacted a farmer directly about purchasing an abandoned farm but still didn’t come up with anything. Thankfully Matt, bless him, has a desire to look at everything that hits the market; I however am the filter queen. I wasn’t interested in finding ‘the perfect place’ only to find out it sits on 2 acres (enough for chickens, not cattle) or blows the budget out of the water.  When Matt saw our now homestead I immediately shot it down... our banker would laugh, what would we ever do with the multiple homes that came with this property, it just ‘wasn’t realistic’. However, God and Matt had a different idea…

Four months later, after Matt bringing up the property again and again (bless him) and realizing that my parent’s were interested in downsizing to one of the other homes on the property I was convinced we could make this property practical. We finally booked a showing and walked the property for the first time in the snow. We fell in love; this place felt like home. Tucked in a valley (hurray middle of nowhere feeling), with a white farmhouse and near our target spot of New Glarus; we couldn’t have asked for much more.

It was a very long process of finalizing details and I will save you the long story. The short story is it took us just shy of 6 months after visiting this property to finally get us to closing day.

photos from our first showing

We have HUGE plans for this place, it has been rather un-kept for a long time and needs our loving touch. The barn fell down and has since been buried and there is no fencing; so building a place for our cattle to call home is first priority. There is space for a studio and I already anticipate the first client meeting I get to have in the space. Flower gardens are on the horizon and I am anxious to use the blooms in my floral designs!

While there is quite the laundry list of ‘to-do’s’ we can’t wait to get started building our home together in this sweet little valley. This dream has carried the name of our businesses, now we are blessed to wake up here.. on the homestead.

We never got the cute 'family photo' on the front steps, perhaps later after we get the pile of old carpet off our front stoop!

FOLLOW US on Instagram @brit.homestead to keep up with what is happening! More relevant blog posts to come!