week 21: upgrading the legacy

this week on the little dream farm

This was one of those weeks that made me step back so many times and think, This is exactly why we wanted this life.

Last night while we hung out at a vineyard and tasting room just down the road from us, Chris was telling our friend Adam (they’ve been friends for 25 years and Adam is up from Florida spending the long weekend with us and seeing the farm for the first time) that he can remember back to when we were buying the farm and not really having much of an idea of what to expect since we’d never lived in the country or on a farm or been as close to farming as we are now.

For me, I had so many ideas of what I thought might be possible or for what I might like to try, but as for me, as it is for Chris…it’s turned out different. Better in some ways. Tougher in others. But definitely more like us overall.

Fun fact: David and Kate run an excavation company and also deliver wood, do maple sugaring, and have an ice cream truck. Kate used to come and ride horses on this farm when Jay and Linda lived here and Jay was the pastor who married David and Kate. When David lived here, they delivered wood for him, so they’re quite tied to this farm in a beautiful way!

So this week as the work trucks pulled up the driveway beginning first thing Monday morning, I had this feeling of nostalgia all week long that tickled my shoulders and sat like a flutter in my chest…like a wave of goosebumps that slowly make their way across your skin.

Here we are getting to create more of the legacy here on this farm.

My mind flashed back to Ed the old farmer who lived here from the time he was in his teens until he took his last breath in his 90s in the old farmhouse’s bedroom closet.

He’d spent almost his entire life here on this farm, married to his cousin, working this land, haying the fields, raising and milking dairy cows.

I’ve met a handful of people who knew Ed or know members of his extended family who are still alive or live in the surrounding region. I’m still trying to get a hold of some photos of this farm from back then.

We don’t know who comes before Ed…I’ve been given the contact for our village’s historian and am hoping to find some more info that way, but we certainly do know who came after.

Jay and Linda left their mark on this farm as they raised their family and gave themselves to this community—Jay as a pastor and Linda as a nurse who made house calls (and interestingly enough made house calls to Ed here on this farm)—and welcomed retired race horses and dozens of other horses who needed a new lease on life.

I’ve seen photos of the way the setup was on this farm when they had around 20 horses. Sometimes, I go out on the patio, face north looking to the back hills of the farm, close my eyes, and just picture the energy of this farm when there were horses all around. One of Jay’s favorite stallions is buried in the back hedgerow, and I find myself thinking about him often—like maybe he’s our protector here on this farm.

I think about the way that so many of the photos I take and where we watch the sun come up and go down and how we garden and the way we live here now is because of the decision Jay and Linda made to place the house here, like this, when they had it delivered following the hay fire that took the old farmhouse and the barn.

And then David came along and saw and felt the need or the desire to invest so heavily into keeping this farm going for many years to come.

Last summer I met the man who renovated and rebuilt the barns for David—his name is Rod. And he said to me, “You know, Sarah, nobody would have done what David did—most people would have just knocked those barns down and started over.”

But David saw something…maybe it’s what Ed saw…maybe what Jay and Linda saw…certainly it’s what we see.

And David didn’t stop at the barns. He added the run-in sheds that we now use for the donkeys. He put a roof on the house, installed wood flooring, redid the kitchen, added solar, planted trees, invested in the health of the pastures, developed gardens, and maybe most importantly, he farmed this land with his beloved Brown Swiss dairy cows.

I often think that this farm was appealing to us because of the way it was cared for before us. And we get to weave ourselves into the fabric of this farm…with each thing we choose to add or do, we’re now writing the history of the Little Dream Farm in our own way.

So yeah, this week after we had a ditch dug through the front yard to run more amperage from our farm’s main electrical service up to the house, we then had mini split a/c units and a heat pump installed in the house to give us better comfort and flexibility with the way we heat and cool the house.

In the warmer months, usually April to November, our electric bill sits right around $17 a month because of our one solar panel—that’s such a huge advantage (in the winter months it goes up because of less hours of daylight, generally more cloud cover, more lights on for longer with less daylight, and snow covering the panel).

This year, instead of running window units that never could quite cool the house the way we needed, we’ve invested in a more efficient way to cool (and heat) our little home, and we’ve both so impressed and really pleased with the work and the way the job turned out—it’s far better than we even expected.

Because we already had the excavator on site for the ditching project, we also invested in having a few loads of stone delivered to have the driveway resurfaced—something that really needed to be done several years ago but we just never made the move.

With every investment we make into the farm we ask ourselves, Is this a want or a need?, and we square that with whether or not it adds to the overall value of the farm.

When we bought the farm from David and I’d first come to look at the house, he had a sheet on the kitchen table that listed all the capital improvements he’d made to this farm through the years and their respective costs, so we know and understand exactly what it took for the farm to have been cared for in a way that was so appealing to us.

I remember saying to our realtor when I first walked this farm—you can tell the person who lives here really loves and loves caring for this farm.

I think about David a lot when I look at that big red barn of ours…something that has become such an iconic facet of our lives. I picture him contemplating the decision to make the investment to completely transform it into what you see today. Each time he made that choice he was saying yes—like Jay and Linda and Ed before them—to the legacy of this place.

So yeah, maybe it doesn’t seem like much, or it’s just a/c and just a driveway, but these were two big and rather expensive investments into this farm and it feels good to have made the choice to make them—to choose to spend our money in this way—to choose to continue to invest in this little farm and little dream we had so many years ago…a dream that those who came before us seemed to have, too.

---

The Work in Photographs…

I loved capturing photos and videos of the work being done this week. These will be fun to look back on one day and recall the way it felt to have TEN different work vehicles and trucks and machinery here on the farm in just one week—much of them all at the same time—and the buzz that was happening here on the farm while these things were getting done by such talented, professional, hard-working people.

We found old bricks, huge rocks, old water line pipes, and pottery in the ground while doing this work!

It's about to be our coooolest summer yet! 🤓

What a huge upgrade to have the driveway redone!

---

---