Country Club

I'm still alive - I promise!  It's been awhile (too long) and all of a sudden it's September???  We've had some cooler temps and rain recently and making it feel an awful lot like fall, even though that's still months away.  

Okay, without further ado, on to the fun things that I've been working on in the background.

Those of you who've stuck with me since way back know that my love of real estate gawking is decades in the making.  Bryan and I have spent years discussing and debating getting a separate place in the country, some acreage to putz around on and maybe enough wildlife for him to hunt, one of his favourite activities that he grew up doing and hasn't been able to since he moved to Texas.

We had met with a realtor a few years ago to look at a property about an hour away - long story short, it was a dump.  As in the sellers had dumped all of their trash on raw land and were selling it as is.  At that time, the realtor told us that if we were patient, the market would swing back in our favor.  It was a seller's market then (post-COVID) and it felt like everyone in Texas was looking to get out of the city.

Fast forward to this year and we started looking at land in earnest in the spring.  And we looked at all types of land.  We saw beautiful raw land close to a lake, land that had a trailer removed but all the garbage left behind, a big-time "fixer upper" that was really a "teardown and start from scratch."  I won't even go into the detail of the offers that we made and the shenanigans that we had to deal with.  In June, both Bryan and I had had enough and were fatigued from looking at places that photographed great but were completely different in person or price tags that were way higher than the comps in the area.  And I was really so tired of all the drama - luckily I had to deal with none of that in the purchase of our primary home.

We were ready to take a break from looking on the market during the summer, a typically slow time for property, when something popped up that hit the majority of our criteria right before the weekend.  We immediately went and saw it in person the next day and put an offer in two days later.

I'll spare you the details of the purchase / loan process - the least exciting part of this entire journey.  Fast forward to now and we are proud owners of our little bit of country, which has really been a dream in the making.

We have a little over 30 acres, completely fenced in, with open pasture in the front and wooded with a small creek in the back.  The seller had set up the property for hunting and built a small barndominium and a separate shop on it last year.  We bought it fully furnished and with some "farm" toys as well.  There are so many details to go into and that I'd love to tell you guys about but I feel like I've dillydallied enough and should let you all know about the main points.

Even though it's turn key and we moved right in, there are still plenty of projects to keep Bryan and I busy for the next few years.  I've got some ideas (surprise surprise) on how to improve the interior and Bryan's got some outside projects planned.  We've spent the first long weekend out there over Labor Day weekend and we're really looking forward to how this place will get used in the fall.

The place is not set up for horses right now (non-horse appropriate fencing), and I don't plan on moving Mae or Dalton out there anytime soon, since this isn't our primary residence and there won't be someone out there every day.  However as time passes and if things change, I'd love to have an enclosed pasture set up for them.  There will be so many more stories about this place in the future and can't wait to share them with you.