It looks promising, but we’re embroiled in negotiations. I’ll post when we have things settled on.

The offer has been made.  It’s good until Monday.  We’ll see what we hear by then.  I expect a counteroffer.

I believe we will be making our offer tomorrow.  More news after that.

Looked at 5 farms with the agent today.

Farm # 1:  Promising, but the lock box was not on the house, so we couldn’t get in. (The house looked like it needed some work from the outside.)  30 acres, 16 tillable, 14 woods with a creek going through it.  There is an old barn and there were about half a dozen pigs living there.  And 2 dogs.  And at least 2 cats.

Farm #2:  Only 4 acres were cleared and the rest of the 12 was impenetrable thicket.  The house was ok.  4 tillable acres is not.

Farm #3: Former dairy farm with 11 acres.  The house was pretty nice, an older farm house.  The humongous dairy barns were taking up a lot of the land and it was way more barn than I could ever imagine needing.

Farm #4:  38 acres of land with a 1903 farmhouse.  High ceilings, wraparound porch, inside the house was in good shape.  It has an old barn which is fairly tired, a new pole barn (just finished in August), and a really new detached garage that will fit three cars at least.  I really liked this one.

Farm # 5:  11 acre horse farm.  Pretty nice old farmhouse with some weird aspects (like no doors anywhere inside.. not even on the bathrooms?)  with a newer horse barn & big pasture.

We’ll go farm shopping again next week.  Stay tuned.

We accepted an offer on our house this weekend. It’s a relief, but also stressful because now we HAVE to find a new place.

We’ll be looking at farms on Thursday.  We have categorized the listings available right now by location and will be looking at them in some order approximating nearest to furthest.  Naturally we can get more land if we live farther away.  After all we’ve done to our current house we feel prepared to do some serious renovating if needed.

Last night I said, “As soon as your parents sell their house, I’m ready to put ours on the market.”

Mr. B. seemed a bit taken aback, but not completely surprised. We’ve been driving around looking at farms for sale for some time now, and it seems like we’ve been planning to move “within a year” for a while now as well. The softening housing market right now doesn’t make this a great time to sell, but we’ve sure seen a lot of farms for sale lately that look like they are worth closer investigation.

Getting this place ready to sell will take some work. The garden is large and due to Baby B. is not in perfect order right now. The house is 100+ years old, and while we’ve already done many things to improve it, we’d probably like to do a few more.

Of course, the “large” garden is relative. Once we take the plunge and move to a farm, this one will seem small. I’m excited about that.