Ever seen a place & thought “Ain’t no way I’d live here”?

About a year ago I found myself in saying those exact words to my wife. So I did the only thing that made sense. I bought the place and made plans to move in.

At this point you may be thinking we are a bit crazy. Maybe even a little stupid. I’ll admit, at times, I feel the same way about myself. So why did we buy this place?

I’ve watched so many episodes of those first time homebuyer shows, where the couple walks into a great house with everything they wanted including price and they don’t buy it. When asked why, it’s because the paint color wasn’t what they wanted. I find myself screaming at the TV saying “JUST PAINT THE DANG WALLS”! What these people lack is a little vision.

When we got past the initial shock of how bad the mobile home looked, we were able to see how much potential it had. After fixing some water damage and replacing the broken windows, we would have a blank slate to do whatever we wanted with.

Here’s what it looked like the first time we saw it

At this point, you may be thinking that we are out of our minds. While this may be true, I believe we made a good decision buying this home. There’s no way we could have built half of what we got for the price we payed. To clue you in a bit, it actually cost us more to move it than to buy it.

Why did we do this?

Although the images above are older and we’ve made quite a bit of progress since they were taken, I wanted to show you what we willingly got ourselves into. But for what? We felt that Jenn needed to stay home and raise our son (at that time we only had Buddy). After praying about it and seeking the advice from our family and friends. We decided that Jenn was going to quit her job and stay home to raise Buddy. This posed a rather large financial problem.

All throughout our marriage, we’ve relied on both of our incomes. In fact, even with both of us working, we lived from paycheck to paycheck. Many of you can relate to this. Due to this, there was no possible way for us to stay in our current home (that we built in 2009) on just my income. If we were going to do it, we would have to make some BIG sacrifices. Selling our home was just the start. But you know what? It has been worth it!

One of the biggest reasons we decided for Jenn to stay home was Buddy’s severe life-threatening food allergies. As a father of a toddler with these allergies, there is nothing more frightening than sending your child off to be watched by someone else. We are so blessed that my mother was willing and able to keep him most days and we didn’t have to send him to a childcare facility.  Even so, we felt that Jenn needed to be his primary caretaker.

In addition to the allergy concerns, we do not want to place Buddy, and now Little Dude, into a traditional school system. By bringing Jenn home, we now have the ability to homeschool them. Not only do we believe that our boys can get a better education outside the traditional setting, but schools all over the nation are doing really stupid stuff and they don’t deserve the right to educate our children. Don’t believe me? Click this link to see the stupid things, school boards, teachers, and principals are doing.

There are many more reasons we’ve started on this journey and we are excited to see where it leads. For now we are going to listen to Gods prompting in our lives and do what we know is best for our boys. It may not be glamorous or exciting to others, but we are happy to be here.

If you would like to see some of the progress we’ve made on the homestead, take a look at our YouTube channel. Be sure to subscribe to the channel as well as sign up for email alerts here on our blog.