Nate and I sat side by side on our couch, drinking coffee, scrolling through available properties in Vermont on Nate’s laptop, me leaning over my baby bump to peer at the acreage listed on the screen, an exercise we’d performed for nearly two years (minus the baby bump, obviously). After scanning everything that fit our parameters on this fall day in 2015, Nate opened up a new tab, saying he’d saved one for last. It was a property in a town we’d never heard of before, in a part of the state we’d never been to, with more land and house than we’d thought we could afford. Didn’t hurt that the home was gorgeous and the barn perfectly rendered. I was smitten. We had to go see it.
As we’d learned in our year and a half of searching, there weren’t many places that met our criteria for a move-in-ready home and outbuilding(s), with over twenty acres of forested land, in a good school district, on a main road, not too far from a medium/large city, for under $400,000. Not that we were picky or anything . . .
Every few months, Nate and I would pop up to Vermont to tour properties with our long-suffering real estate agent. This search was a lot more laborious and tactile than our city house hunt because there are no open houses for rural homes; there’s a much smaller inventory; and there are a multitude of factors to consider that don’t exist in urban and suburban neighborhoods: the septic system, the well (yes, like one you get water from), the quality of the forest (since forests are a commodity), the driveway, the road, the siting of the home and outbuildings relative to the rest of the land, the presence/absence of neighbors, the acreage, the surrounding community, the distance to the grocery store—all this before ever stepping foot inside a house. Nate and I wanted to buy a property that we loved, that we could envision ourselves living on for decades to come, and perhaps for the rest of our lives. And we didn’t want to overpay. And we didn’t want to build new, since it’s nearly impossible to recoup the expense of building on account of the site work that’s required in a rural setting—digging a septic system and a well, putting in a driveway—plus the cost of the raw land to begin with. Given all this, and in spite of my advanced pregnancy, we had to go see this property.
“The map says there’s a road here and that we’re supposed to turn left on it,” I relayed to Nate, not very convincingly, as he nosed the car toward what you might charitably call a footpath through pole after pole of trees. This thing was less of a road than most hiking trails I’d been on. We were driving, in that nineteen-year-old minivan, through the apparent Bermuda Triangle of rural central Vermont. It was 5 p.m. in late October 2015 and I was a full eight months pregnant. It was also raining, the sun was setting, and our gas gauge was flirting with empty, although in that car it was always hard to tell since the gauge had stopped working properly sometime after we clocked 200,000 miles. Usually you had less gas than it appeared.
We hadn’t passed a house in at least fifteen minutes, we had no cell reception, and our GPS would’ve been more useful if we’d asked it to recite the Declaration of Independence. We came to a gravel road that was slightly larger and more prominent looking than the road we’d been on, so we decided to follow it downhill because that seemed more promising, not to mention more navigable, than going uphill. Just as I was about to get out and hike back to a farmhouse we’d seen off in the distance (over a mountain that was more of a small hill, really), we turned onto a genuine street—denoted by the fact that it was paved—and into a gas station with a deer carcass hanging in front of the Porta Potty that served as their “restroom for customers only.” Aside from the terror-mingled-with-frustration we’d felt when circling for a third time onto Woodchuck Hollow Road, which was decidedly not paved—and, let’s be honest, “road” was a generous descriptor—Nate and I were giddy. We’d just toured what I was pretty certain was our future homestead.
Back in spring 2014, we also thought we’d found our future homestead. We visited that property no less than three times with our real estate agent, the final trip with the seller and his agent as well. Our erstwhile dream home sat on sixty-nine acres of forested southern Vermont landscape with streams bisecting the woods and a pristine view of the green mountains. The home, designed by a renowned architect, was energy efficient and meticulously laid out. Efficiency appeals to Nate and me at our very core, so we were enthralled with the thoughtful footprint and modern design of the house. There was just one teeny, tiny hiccup: the interior was unfinished. And by “unfinished,” I mean the floors, walls, and ceilings were clad in nothing more than plywood. Naked beams arched across the living room’s cathedral ceiling (not in a trendy way), and the bathrooms had rudimentary plumbing: exposed pipes, toilets, and not much else. We spied an opportunity to finish the interior according to our tastes, with the benefit of having the expensive (and boring) site work of well, septic, foundation, roof, exterior, insulation, driveway, plumbing, and electrical already done.
Since we’d have to sink thousands into finish work, we were willing to pay only a very specific price that was pretty far south of the asking price. Securing a conventional mortgage on an unfinished house is nearly impossible, and we didn’t want a construction loan because it’d hamstring us from doing the work ourselves. We made an all-cash offer, which was yet another benefit of our frugality. The seller, however, saw the house as it should be: a finished, energy-efficient Architectural Digest cover story. It was very much an emperor’s-new-clothes scenario. In the end, we walked away. Nate and I are dreamers, but we’re anchored by intense practicality. We’d offered the maximum price we were ready to write a check for, and when that was turned down, we decided this house was not for us. Our real estate agent was shocked we wouldn’t stretch our budget or consider owner-financing or a construction loan, but our conviction was ironclad that we didn’t want to saddle ourselves with a homestead we couldn’t afford. There was no point in overspending on our dream of pursuing a simple, inexpensive life.
After this first heartbreak, we kept right on searching. We’d looked at real estate long enough to know there’s never just one right home. It’s easy to get swept up in the drama of betrothing yourself to a house, imagining where you’ll put your couch and which wall you’ll track your child’s height on, but buying a home is as much a financial undertaking as an emotional one. In addition to in-person jaunts up to Vermont, Nate and I educated ourselves on the nuances of rural properties. Nate learned how to locate property boundaries in online maps, how to assess where power lines run (sometimes right next to the house), about different types of septic and well systems, how to determine the maturity of a forest, and more. Some of the places we considered were less than conventional, like the former commune lacking a kitchen, a half log cabin/half house that the owner had added on to, and a hunting camp with linoleum on the walls. We’d also seen quite a few attractive listings we’d seriously considered, but ultimately disqualified for various reasons: you could see the neighbors’ house (we wanted to be remote), there wasn’t enough acreage, there were no outbuildings, one home had a two-mile-long winding driveway leading to a house perched at the apex of a mountain (good for views but not for much of anything else), or, as happened in several instances, the surrounding town and school district weren’t vibrant.
Given our year and a half of research, this newfound dream homestead seemed almost too good on paper, which made us fairly certain there’d be some hidden flaw. Probably it didn’t have indoor plumbing or was missing half its roof or was inhabited by a family of black bears. Nevertheless, we decided to drive north for one final pre-baby homestead hunting trip, which was as much babymoon vacation as legitimate house hunt because there’s no way you find your dream homestead when you’re eight months pregnant with your first child, right?!
It was a chilly, clear late October day and the sky was a cloudless, brilliant, almost otherworldly blue. Most of the trees had already completed their annual shed in preparation for winter, but enough tardy leaves remained to reward us with a slam of vermillion or saffron or amber every few yards. As we walked up to the house, a few of those late leaves swirled around, crunching beneath our citified feet, which were so accustomed to the confinement of concrete and not the soft give of earth. The house was even better than the pictures: fairly new construction, wide expanses of open floor plan, four bedrooms, three bathrooms, custom woodwork and wood floors throughout, windows on every wall, new insulation, and no obvious faults. The real estate agent who showed us the home clearly doubted our intentions and abilities as homestead-buyers, seeing as we were so pregnant, so urban, and so young. Nate and I stayed overnight at a nearby Airbnb and came back the next day to hike the land by ourselves, which was a ritual we’d performed with every other potential homestead that’d passed our initial inspection. We needed to feel the woods surrounding a home and be present in them on our own, since we were making this move as much for the land as for the house. This property was a sixty-six-acre parcel of forest, apple trees, gardens, streams, fields, and a pond. The owners were prolific vegetable gardeners and we could see the outline of their labors in the lower field below the house. Bed after bed of now-dormant gardens awaited new tending. On that much land, with that much raw potential, the possibilities were almost overwhelming.
There was a trail next to the house leading into the woods, which was a dense mix of firs and hardwoods, and we set out on it. We hiked uphill, crossing a stream, to what we calculated was the top corner of the land. I jumped up on a stump to look around. I could see acres of trees in every direction with deep autumnal hues and stark branches interrupted by the sublime green of pines. It was as beautiful as any hike in any national park. To think we could own this land—own these woods—was almost incomprehensible in its wonder. Hand in hand we walked back down to the house and went on a circuit through the two-acre clearing surrounding the house and barn, more city park than lawn. We found a grove of apple trees close to the house, neglected and unharvested for the season as the owners had already moved away. Nate picked two apples and we walked up to the wide, wooden-plank back porch. Sitting on that porch, with warm afternoon sun streaming down on us, eating apples from trees not fifty feet away, I started crying because I knew. This was it. This was our home. We hadn’t intended to find it the month before our daughter was due. Common sense was screaming not to do it, not to make such a major decision on top of a major life change. But there was no helping it. We were hopelessly in love with this property. And the clincher? It had high-speed fiber Internet. Internet access is not a given with rural properties and this one had the crown jewel of fiber, which had been run to the house at no small expense by the previous owners and came courtesy of a nonprofit municipal collective dedicated to bringing broadband connectivity to rural central Vermont.
The next month, Nate and I alternated between conducting due diligence research on the property and a frenetic cleaning, organizing, and reorganizing of our home in preparation for our baby. We’d long since set up our entirely secondhand nursery because I had intense paranoia about the baby arriving early and us not being ready. I made Nate install the car seat when I was five months pregnant. My motto was that no one has ever regretted being overprepared for a baby. Despite our emotional attachment to this homestead, we weren’t about to dive into making an offer without first running it through our own personal vetting process. Realtors can tell you only so much about a place and in the end, you’re the one who has to live with the decision. Nate and I divvied up the tasks of researching both the property and the surrounding area.
We were, in the simplest terms, trying to figure out if there was a smoking gun, something sinister and wrong with this seemingly perfect property. The undertaking we were considering was substantial and amounted to a lot more than just buying a home. Some factors, such as the health of the septic system and the well, wouldn’t be revealed to us until the home inspection. But there were quite a few other variables we could research on our own. There were three reasons prompting our month of exhaustive independent research:
Adding gravity to this research was the fact that our family was on the precipice of expansion and we needed to figure out if this was a place where a child could thrive. Thankfully, our years of vetting Vermont properties came in handy; we thought we knew what questions to ask. I got on the phone with the local school district, the elementary school, and the public library in an effort to suss out what types of activities were provided and how people felt about their local institutions. I asked about class sizes, arts and music, cultural events, diversity, the curriculum, and everything else I could possibly think of to ask a prospective school. To the extent possible, I wanted to know who our neighbors would be and what opportunities our child would have in this bucolic rural town. I googled doctors, dentists, pediatricians, grocery stores, and every other service I could imagine us needing to avail ourselves of. I mapped the driving distances to the nearest hospital, the nearest preschool, and more.
Meanwhile Nate hunted down foresters, lawyers who’d previously litigated on the property, and the owner once previous to the sellers. If at all possible, speaking with a previous owner of a home, but not the person trying to sell it to you, is a fabulous way to garner high-quality, unbiased, unvarnished advice. Nate’s research was aimed at learning more about the sixty-six acres of land we wanted to own: what jurisdictions governed the property, how stable the forest was, and if there was anything that threw the property into an unfavorable legal light since a number of land parcels had been combined in order to create the now singly owned acreage. Our intense research turned up nothing nefarious, so we decided to move forward. It was November 23 and our due date was November 25.
We debated waiting until after the baby was born and until after the new year, perhaps, but we couldn’t. The sellers had just lowered the price again and we didn’t want to risk waiting. I lay on our couch with a pillow underneath my knees, hugging my bump of a baby about to be born, my feet in Nate’s lap, and we deliberated. What it finally came down to after hours of research, phone calls, and Internet stalking was this question: “How would you feel if someone else bought it tomorrow?” I started crying and that settled it. We made an offer on a house, a barn, and sixty-six acres of wild, wild woods located in a deeply rural town of barely four hundred residents, the week our baby was due to join us. Because what else could we do? We’d planned, prepared, researched, and saved hundreds of thousands of dollars. This was our moment to strategically strike. There’s no gain in indecision. In never taking a risk. In constantly wondering what your life would be like if you did what your heart calls you to do. Never acting on a dream is almost as bad as not having a dream in the first place.
That all sounds well and good, doesn’t it? But in truth, I was terrified. Ter-ri-fied. I was about to give birth and was signing myself up for God knows what in God knows where middle of nowhere freaking deer-covered woodlands where I knew not a single soul. The closest neighbors were half a mile away. As fate would have it, I had precious little time to panic because I went into labor.