Selling and Moving Away From Our Beloved Homestead Wasn’t Easy

A year ago this podcast disappeared. We announced we were moving,

selling our homestead in CT, and headed to a new farm in PA. We said that you would be getting updates from us as we went on this journey to our new home in the state of PA.

Then silence.

In our official Season 2 of Homesteady, we start to fill you in on what happened, where we went, and what is going to happen going forward.

In this first episode, brought to you by the Homesteady Pioneers (BECOME ONE HERE) we talk about selling Squash Hollow Farm, our farm in CT and Moving to PA.

The truth is we have been talking about doing this for years. K’s Dad has been trying to get us to move to PA for the last decade.

K grew up on the 100 acre family farm, and her dad wanted us to take it over.

K loved the land, the location, and was excited about the idea of being close to her family again. I was the hold out.

My entire life was spent in CT. My friends, family, all my roots were there. The older a tree gets the HARDER it is to uproot it.

Every year K’s dad would pitch us the idea to move back home, and farm off the family farm. And every year I had an easy out. My business, my clients, the means of feeding my family, all of that was located in CT. Honestly it was too scary to shake that up.

The idea of building a new business in a new place, searching for new clients, with a ever growing family to feed, that was too scary for me.

But over the last few years something was slowly changing… As Homesteady grew, K and I started pushing towards making it our full time work and means of income. My business went from a local client based operation, to an internet business that allowed us to earn a living anywhere.

Last winter K and I decided it was time to try to jump into doing Homesteady full time.  This meant we were now making all our money off our online show, and no longer did it matter where we lived, as long as we could homestead and produce our show.

We started discussing the idea of moving to a new place with a lower cost of living than Connecticut, and where we could own a larger farm.

About that time K’s Dad made his annual pitch to take over the family farm. Suddenly it all made sense. Taking over the family farm in PA would be the perfect move. Still, it was scary, and I needed a nudge.

So I called the guy I always call when making big decisions… Accountant Mike.

After a long discussion of goals, what we wanted in life, and looking at the hard logic of it all, it became clearer. PA was the right move for us. 10 Years of saying no, it was time to say yes to taking over the family farm.

Before we could move to PA we needed to sell our farm in CT. Selling a farm is not easy, but we were able to get the offer we wanted in just 10 days. HOW?

STEP 1 – CLEAN YOUR PROPERTY UP

The first thing we did to our farm to sell it was to CLEAN IT!

As a homesteader, we save a lot of random things that we think we could use to build infrastructure. These random things included random old metal bunk beds, lots of plastic barrels, pallets, pallets and more pallets….

These junk piles make your property look less valuable to a potential customer, and should be removed.

SETP 2 – FIX WHAT’S BROKE

You don’t want potential buyers to see glaring issues. So walk your property, see what is broken, cracked, etc, and fix it. This does NOT mean remodel your farm, just find cracks in drywall, broken windows, or unfinished projects and make finish and fix them!

STEP 3 – STAGE YOUR PLACE TO SELL

Once the property is clean and fixed up, you want it to look like a place anyone could see themselves living in. This means removing your personality from your home and property, and make it a more blank pallet. We took down bunk beds, family photos, and even changed the sheets on beds to bright white sheets. The goal was to make the home look bright, white and warm, and the property big, beautiful and clean.

STEP 4 – TAKE BEAUTIFUL PICTURES (and Marketing Materials)

When your property is all staged and ready to be seen, help more people see it online with beautiful pictures. This does NOT mean snap a couple quick pics on your phone. We bought a lighting kit ($90 kit like THIS one) and used a wide angle lens – ( LIKE THIS ONE ) on our canon camera to get the best looking photos.

Good lighting and a wide angle lens makes your rooms look large, bright and beautiful.

Then we put these in a brochure with our story and history of the property.

Once the house was sold it was time to start packing up. This was NO small feat, with all the animals, farm equipment, feed, etc.

But the hardest part of it all was saying goodbye to the homestead we loved so much…

After spending years building a beautiful little homestead from the ground up, we were leaving Squash Hollow Farm forever. While we were excited to go to our new home, leaving the place with so many memories, a home we brought 3 little babies home to, was very hard to do.

Selling and Moving was just the beginning, stay tuned to a future episode of the Homesteady Podcast, which will talk about Day 1 in PA, and living in a tiny home for 9 months.