The Next Chapter

I am going to start with a disclaimer. This post is going to be all over the place. I try not to be a controversial person, and getting ideas out of my mind and across to others can often be a challenge. This post might touch on things that can be controversial but I am not here to convince anyone of anything. The manner of this is more in the style that if my kids and grandkids, and even great grandkids ever get ahold of this someday, it will explain to them why Kristin and I made the decisions that we did.

Why are the simplest of things, always the hardest? The other night I had an interesting conversation with Eli. She was asking if we eat well, why do we still have to sometimes take vitamins to help mitigate nutrient deficiency. It brought us to a much simpler conversation of what actually is eating well. I am not a nutritionist or dietitian but rather the idea of not eating just bread or noodles, but instead balancing everything out with proteins, fruits, and veggies. Oftentimes, the easiest things to eat are the least healthiest and getting ourselves to eat the proper balance and in my case amount, is so hard. This isn’t the only idea along these lines. It would be the same with things like why is getting up early to workout in the morning so much harder than sleeping in. Reading a book at night instead of turning on the TV. I could go on and on but I think we get the idea. 

Kristin and I have kind of run into this type of thing while we were “chasing our dreams.” I am a big dreamer. It is why I am listed in Kristin’s phone as “dreamer”. I have big aspirations and high hopes for so many things. Not saying there is anything wrong with this, but this mentality kind of took us down an interesting path these last few years. We have been looking for a piece of land for a long time. Something that we could have a homestead, horses, raise animals, and possibly even hunt on. A place where we could build our “dream home”. And this just never really panned out for us, after having looked at many different options.

Another thing that has changed greatly over the last 5 years is our spiritual journey. I could write a whole post on this. I will save that for another day. I will try to keep this short but it plays a big part in this transition. I will just say that we are both cradle Catholics. I am only going to speak for myself here but I had pretty much fallen away from the faith, and then when I met Kristin it was my long journey of returning and learning more about it. The most recent part of this journey started during the mess of 2020 as I had started to dig for truth in all the madness. Right before we moved out to this area, we discovered the Traditional Latin Mass. Again, this could be a whole post and maybe I will tell the full story someday but not right now. In the diocese we moved to, this isn’t the easiest thing to find. However, in our search we found a place that feels a lot like a sanctuary. A small monastery that is a bit of a drive for an early morning Mass, but we do it regularly. Ideally, we wanted to be as close to it as possible. 

All of this almost came together. We found a small piece of land that was near walking distance to Mass. We then designed our “dream house” that was a 6 bedroom 3.5 bathroom barndominium. It had a jack and jill bath for the kids, a huge play area, a room for my office, and I even convinced Kristin that one room was going to be a gear room. It had a large heated shop. The kind of house you think you need when you have a large family. We had it all drawn up and priced out. The plan was to have the building put up and framed in, put in the HVAC, and rough in all the basic plumbing and some electrical. Live in whatever we could afford to finish right away, and then over the next few years finish the rest. Our mortgage would have stayed about the same with this planning. When I went to sign the purchase agreement, the company I had to go to do this was close enough to the monastery that I thought if I was going to drive all that way for, I would catch daily Mass first.  When I went to Mass I remember praying, please don’t let me do anything stupid. I signed the agreement on the land and put down earnest money. We even told our families the exciting news and plans while visiting them for Christmas get-togethers. And then it all fell apart for a collection of reasons. Right now though, it feels like an answer to my prayers. 

During the time when all of this was unravelling we took our kids on a walk down to a creek not too far from our house. While the kids were throwing rocks into the creek, a conversation between Kristin and I started that would drastically change our approach. We threw out two different options. Option 1 was have larger mortgage in order to have a the bigger acreage and all that goes along with it (horses, animals, etc) or the new option of downsizing our house and lot to something that would drastically reduce our mortgage but in return open up new possibilities of going on more often and larger adventures as a family. We had played around with this idea before but it never really came to fruition. Both Kristin and I thought that the second option sounded more appealing. We gave the kids the same options at dinner and it was a unanimous decision for the second. For Christmas this past year we all got new sleeping bags and since then we have gone on a few small trips as a family to test this theory a bit. With all of these trips going really well, we started to feel like we were on the right track. 

One of the things that caused me, I won’t speak for the others on this one, to see things differently was following the Epic Family Road Trip channel on YouTube. Their story resonated with me quite a bit and helped give me a new perspective. At this time we played around with the idea of doing exactly the opposite of the 6 bed home and building a shop with a small living quarters to live in, taking our mortgage down to near nothing. We had to humbly walk away from the small acreage we had under contract, which thankfully the seller was very gracious to us in this process and we began looking for a small lot close to the monastery. It is kind of funny but a spot we had ruled out before because it didn’t fit the old mold, that we drove past on the way to Mass seemed to fit the new plan perfectly. I took a slower approach to these lots than I did with the last spot. When looking into the neighborhood though we discovered it had a covenant in which while we lived in the small shop we wanted to build, we would have no issues but the minute we built a house next to it, the shop would be in a grey area. So a happy medium began to take shape. We designed what we are calling the cottage (simple 3 bedroom 1.5 bath) and on agreeing to a price with the seller of the lots, and getting quotes for ground work, building and framing, and HVAC we decided to put our house on the market. 

When all this was going on my small consulting business blessed us with a little growth spurt. However the impact it had on me was not all great. I was working hard to keep up and while doing that my health had slipped to a new low because the nature of my work is not real physical. I credit Kristin with helping me at least keep my eating decent so that larger issues didn’t present themselves. To say I was guilty of chasing a dollar would be a fair thing to say. But going through this helped me to get my priorities in order, and helped shape what we want to do in life. Reinforcing the new plan that had come together and wanting to do as much as we can as a family which helps make me more active again. I adjusted within my business and found some contractors to assist me with the new workload to go along with everything else we were doing. 

Then came the journey of selling the house we currently live in. We had the walls painted, cleaned up what we needed to, and did some minor fixes. We had a cleaning and staging process that we completed for all the showings. This was not super easy with a house full of kids. After a couple of months on the market it didn’t feel like we were going to sell it with enough time to build this year. So we found a different way to finance the lots, and accepted we would work on paying it off until we could try and sell our house next year. And then we got multiple offers on our house in the same day. After agreeing on one, actually with friends in the area that ironically have a really nice acreage outside of town and were looking to move into the city. 

The last part of this goes along with the beginning and I am going to try and stay broad. How many things accepted as normal today are really entrapments? Quick examples here. School, house, car to debt. Crappy food to health issues. Career to time. I have been pondering this a lot more lately and what real fixes to these issues actually look like. Which brings this post full circle. Why is it that “simple things” like attending daily Mass, buying locally produced food or even trying to produce some of your own actually real (healthy) food so hard and being lost by so many? I am a bit ashamed to say this last part, but recently we have lost some of our harvested food to freezer burn and it gave me a knot in my stomach. We have made some good meals from what we harvest but do we really utilize the most of it and even what we purchase to eat as well? Most of what we are doing is meant to be more of a fun challenge and not too serious of a chase for freedom from these systemic issues. But how cool would it be, if my great grandkids read this someday and thought “this is where it all started”. That is what this next chapter is all about. Coming soon. We are going to try and build as clean (non-toxic and healthier) house as we can on a budget that frees up resources for us to do more as a family. Then from there aim to grow in self reliance for ourselves and hopefully generations to follow. 

Our new lot