Gardener to Hobby Farmer

I like to build and create. I find it hard to believe your Realtor didn't think you should put time or money into the yard. Curb appeal is really important when you are selling. We do plan to eventually sell the place we have right now. The house is just two small. We're a family of seven living in a two bedroom. Simple math should make the problem easy to understand. I figure positioning this place as a small hobby farm makes it worth probably $15,000 more than it would if we just cut it all as lawn. That's an awful lot of money to leave laying on the table. Besides that we produce a significant amount of our own better quality food.

After the first place we sold, we then bought a 20 acre farm. All we did was clean up the yard and barnyard and the gardens,(and man did it need it!!) and sold it one year later for $20,000. more than we paid for it. Then we moved up to a 40 acre place and stayed there for about 4 years. It was a beautiful farm that had also been let go. We replanted the gardens and refenced and cleaned the rest of the property. We paid $175,000. and then we sold 20 acres of it for $42,000. And then sold the other 20 with the improvments for $215,000. We have made money on each place that way. Nothing expensive, just elbow grease and curb appeal. Now we have 67.5 acres and we are building living quarters in a new barn. Kids are gone, so it is just the two of us and our critters. But we have always grown food and raised critters. I've always thought I was born a couple generations late...and we have long since gone from hobby farm to just a way of life. We haven't sold much in the past except horses. But this new place is perfect to grow things, so we may decide to plant a berry patch or something else we can market in our retirement years. When we decide this place is too big for us I really think we'll find a smaller property and we will build another barn and make it into a home again. This is the least expensive and most adaptable building you can work with. And it is just plain fun to "think inside the box" when it comes to designing whatever you want, in basically an open span building. The landscaping for this place hasn't happened yet, but I plan to keep it old fashioned with a homestead feel. Lots of fruit trees and old cottage type flowers.