How life has changed….

This past weekend I was musing over how life has changed for us in the past three months so I thought I would share some of my thinking with you 🙂 PLEASE PLEASE do not take any of my ramblings as grumblings. Richard & I have been extremely blessed & know we are exactly where we are supposed to be, doing what we are supposed to be doing. Hopefully though, for those of you who are thinking of living the homesteading life or for others of you are having to revisit some of your “priorities” & even those of you are unemployed or facing unemployment somewhere here in the future, what Richard & I are living right now will be of help to you.

Let’s go back in time a little. Three months ago we were in the process of closing up a very successful business, planning to move & looking to the future. Yes we lived the country life in Montana but in all honesty we came & went as we pleased & didn’t think too hard about where the next dollar was coming from. Now we didn’t live frivolously, we butchered our own meat, milked the cow, didn’t go on exotic vacations (what are they?! LOL), didn’t eat out all the time, certainly never wore designer clothes so to some of you that may constitute homesteading. Wrong! There is so much more to this life & quite honestly we are still a long ways off!

Our desire when closing up the business & selling the farm in MT was that we would be completely debt free & the business would pay for a new truck & trailer for us to move all the animals. Thanks to all you addicted stampers that’s exactly what it did & the farm sold for a good price enabling us to pay cash for this one 🙂

SO we made the big move & paid all our bills but that was it. That was the end of a regular income. No longer could we just buy what we wanted, it was time to make do & do alot more things at home. I think the first change was making bread. This family can go through quite a few loaves of bread in a week. We bought about 6 loaves before the bread machine came out again after a while in retirement & have not bought a loaf since. Of course our homemade bread is far healthier for you than the stuff in the stores not to mention that it tastes better BUT it’s an extra thing that needs to be done in the day.

I swear we have done more laundry here than we ever did in Montana and that might be a total illusion as we have not used a dryer since we came here. Yes we have one but electricity costs money & money does not grow on trees as you well know. Now of course if it is pelting with rain one day & I simply HAVE to do a load of laundry then of course I will use the dryer but for now we are hanging everything out on the line. I LOVE hanging out laundry – it comes in smelling fresh & it’s good to be outside but it takes time. As an aside I know many of you live in areas where you are not allowed to hang out your laundry – that IMO is a crime. NO one should be able to dictate HOW you dry your clothes – totally ridiculous.

Heat… This house has baseboard heat but the previous owner never used it & we have no plans to use it either at this point as there is a very good wood stove in the center of the house which heats the whole place. This year is a little rough as we have to put up dry wood for this year & wet wood to dry for next year so that we are always a year ahead. Richard found a cord of wood for $75 which is pretty reasonable but then we asked ourselves, what else could we do with that $75? Is buying wood wise when we have 20 acres of woods here from which to get trees. You already know the answer! We started looking for fallen wood plus dead standing trees that could be cut down. I suspect we’ll be doing that job on & off all winter along with the fencing. NOW we may be living the homestead life but it doesn’t mean that we have to do everything the hard way as some do. We have a chainsaw & we have a log splitter that we bought in MT so yes cutting wood takes time but it is certainly not so hard on the back when using the correct tools for the job. So what’s it costing us? Time & a small amount of gas for the machinery. BUT what are we gaining? Exercise, fresh air, time with our kids & the ability to show them these skills along with being an example to them of how to work hard.

We still go places & have fun (for us a seasonal pass to Silver Dollar City was not an option – it was a MUST 🙂 )but now instead of thinking about which great restaurant we are going to eat at, we are thinking – what food do we want to make to take along with us. Eating out can be expensive with a large family so you can really save a lot & once again be much healthier BUT it takes time.

Fresh milk, yogurt, cheese, eggs etc are such a blessing. How many of you know how much you spend on dairy & egg products each week? For the first few weeks of living here we had to purchase these & it really added to our grocery bill. The timing of Lady Longlashes calf was absolutely perfect. I had kept Caleb on formula for longer than I had the others as I was hoping that I could switch him straight over to raw milk. The formula ran out about 2 days before she calved & I used up the last of the store milk. Caleb LOVES his milk so if we were having to buy milk in now that would be a burden. We are SO blessed to have Lady’s milk but once again it takes time to go fetch her, bring her up & milk her. Yesterday she was down near the tree line, she saw us coming & promptly walked to the bottom of the property! BUT it was good exercise, the sun was shining so should I have complained! Nope!

So what’s with this “Time” thing? We all know we only have one life to live & one chance to be a good influence on our kids & folks around us. I don’t know about you but I fail pretty frequently but that’s OK. It’s the staying down in failure mode that’s the problem, if you get up & try again that’s the right attitude. Life today can be SO rushed that many folks are not enjoying it & are always saying that they’ll do this when they retire or do this when things ease up. Guess what? That may never happen. Time for Richard & me is free, it’s not costing us anything – in fact everything we do ourselves saves us money. Yes we are busy but we are not rushed. We enjoy breakfast, we homeschool the kids, we feed animals, we build fence (& muscles!), we eat a leisurely lunch & then work some more before coming in for the day. Do we get frustrated sometimes? Oh yes but that’s only because we want everything that needs to be done here done NOW! When we look at things realistically we know it is going to take at least a couple years to get all the fencing done – maybe longer so we might as well relax.

So at whatever stage you are in life – be encouraged. Get out of debt ASAP – you’ll never regret it & make the decision that you will always pay cash (debit card) for everything. It won’t be easy but the more you resist the temptation to buy now, pay later the easier it will become. This country (& many others) have so conditioned folks to finance everything that it sometimes really stinks to have to pay cash. A couple weeks ago we came to the decision that we would have to buy a tractor & an auger. This ground is SO rocky there is no way Richard can dig all the fence posts that we need dug. Not economical to hire an auger as we have so much to do SO we looked at our bank balance & determined what we had left in it & that was we went shopping with. We had looked on Ebay & Craigslist etc but found nothing so it was time to go to the tractor dealers. All of them said that they could hook us up with some great financing & boy, was it tempting. We needed a tractor that was man enough to do the job required & a new one with all the bells & whistles would have been wonderful. After visiting all the dealers we came back to the first one. Richard went into the shop & told them, “This is what I have to spend – I need this old tractor, an auger & a brush hog for this amount.” We have some “not so good” grasses out in the pastures that need to be cut down before they choke out all the good grasses. Used augers are nearly impossible to find & normally they are worn out & used brush hogs are rare for the same reason so they had to be purchased new. The guy looked at Richard & said, “Do you really expect me to believe that this is all the money you have?” Richard was like, “Well I have a couple hundred bucks in another account but I need it to feed my family so yes this is all I have!” The guy came down in price & we got a great deal. They delivered this old beauty the next day.

Here’s the Auger – we bought a 12″ one as the posts we are using are 6-8″ wide so this gives Richard room enough to tamp the earth down around the post, therefore making it very firm.

It is a 1971 Ford 4000 – 50hp. We hooked it up the next day & started digging the first hole when guess what?! Something snapped! AAGH! Oh yes we were frustrated and it’s not as if we didn’t have anything else to do. We called up the dealer & they ordered the part, selling it to us at cost so it came in on Monday – not expensive. Today we got our first hole dug! Yeah! The gate is now on it’s new gate post.

Life is good – we are blessed – we are living a very privileged life & wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

Take care y’all & create some time today.

Liz