Flip-flopping or Why I Want to Live in a Barn

Note the new timeline on the right hand side of your screen - see what's been happening on the land and what we are doing to prepare for our new life.


Soon after we bought our land, JD found this blog while looking for info on post-and-beam barn construction. He thought I would like it, and he was right. I read this guys 3 years of posts in about 2 days, including one stretch until 2am.  It inspired me since they were doing much of what we are about to do.  I got some great ideas and it made me feel not quite so weird to see someone else thinking like me (JD is still coming around- :)  One thing, though, I had to laugh about while reading - he kept changing his mind!! If I skipped ahead a few posts, he was doing something different from what he had planned to and I would go back to see what had changed his mind. He was going to build with straw bales, then he didn't. They were going to live in the barn, but then he changed his mind and started on the cabin. They had planned to move to their land by a certain time and are still not living there. I thought this was strange when I read it. Then after a couple of months of doing our own planning, I realized that I had seen a glimpse of our future. That's reality! I see now that there is going to be a lot of mind changing.
Barn first or house first? Hook up to power or go off-the-grid right off-the-bat? City water, spring water, rain water? Straw bales or semi-conventional construction? Purchase posts or find reclaimed or cut our own? All of these (and more) we have flip-flopped on over the last few months.  I hope to blog about all of these decisions in the future.

Like Rob, the blogger, one of the biggest things we have changed our minds on a few times is what to build first. We thought for a little while that we could build a small house that we can add on to later.
Our prairie girls don't understand why we can't just build a claim shanty.  Instead we decided to go with a barn first for the following reasons:

• It will be cheaper and faster and will therefore enable us to live on the land sooner. Being there will allow us to get more work done with setting up the homestead as well as to get to know details of the the land- the sun path, wind, waterways, wildlife, neighbors, neighborhood- that can all help us make better decisions when it's time to build our permanent home. What if we realize that the home site we picked will be terrible for some reason? Time living there can reveal that to us.
• We don't have to spend time and money on details like molding and cabinetry because - hey, its just a barn! We can use reclaimed materials like counter tops and sinks and have cabinets and shelves made of scrap wood and I can think to myself- that's OK, its a barn!
• It will give us plenty of practice with building (and testing of some alternative building methods and materials) without experimenting on our permanent home. 
• I think it's just cool to live in a barn. He he he.
• Probably the most compelling reason for us to live in a barn is to (are you listening Dave Ramsey?) get out of debt- yes, free of even a mortgage. Living in our proposed barn will lower our living expenses significantly. If we build this relatively inexpensive structure to live in, we will have a large chunk of our income every month to throw at the relatively small land/barn loan (relatively small because of the ridiculous deal Daddy got on the land, plus our equity in our current house, plus the "primitive" conditions we are willing to live in.) God willing, we could be living mortgage free (admittedly, in a barn) in 5 years. FIVE YEARS!!!  Then, with no debt payments or even utility payments (more on that later, of course) and depending on how comfortable we are in the barn, we hope to build the house piece by piece. 

Crazy, huh?

The only downside of the live-in-a-barn plan, the way I see it (because I don't see living in a barn itself a downside) is that we are spending a little more on this barn than we need to spend on a barn, but when we move into our eventual house, we will have a really nice barn for value-adding to whatever we produce on the farm- maybe commercial kitchen, herbal preperations- plus living quarters for farm apprentices and/or visiting friends and family (right, guys?) We'll have lots of options.

So what do you think?  Wait... maybe you should see the plans for the barn before you tell us you think we're crazy.

Plans for the barn coming soon...