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Farm + Old House .....Anyone Else Live from Crises to Crises?

I thought about this thread over the weekend. On Friday, the rear tire of the tractor was flat and would not hold air for more than 10 seconds. After about 15 calls, I found someone who could come and look at it. The man who came was extremely nice and told me it wouldn’t be worth putting a tube in it- the tires are over 30 years old. (I was shocked when I figured that out.) Fortunately I have another tractor we can use to pull the spreader so we switched out the draw bar and parked the lame tractor to wait for the new tire. The pin for the draw bar wasn’t put in properly, and while going up the incline behind the indoor arena, the spreader fell off of the tractor. After much investigation, we discovered the problem w the pin for the draw bar and fixed that. Then we wrestled w the spreader to get it back on. Finally, I called my neighbor who came over w a floor Jack (I’m getting one) and got it one in about 10 minutes. My point to this is…I couldn’t believe the spreader didn’t roll back and take out the wall of the indoor.:tada:

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@Bicoastal, perhaps you could scrap out the aged, non-functioning farm equipment to gain cash and space. We loaded the decrepit semi flatbed trailer with the abandoned metal pieces/parts, farm equipment we had pulled out of an overgrown swale hole. Added in other broken, useless metal that had accumulated “behind the barn”. I kept a disc, it has some rusty edged discs, but does a fair job slicing dirt in the hayfield. Our dirt gets so hard that discing is helpful to open the soil to catch more water, get air into the dirt.

We got a fair amount of cash for the load and trailer. This left LOTS of space open now! Price of scrap goes up and down, so following prices for a bit could tell you the best time to sell.

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Hey @goodhors, yes, I filled three full-size “dumpsters” with metal this summer. Three! And that just uncovered more layers. :fearful: There is at least one more dumpster’s worth but I told the scrap yard I need a break until the temps cool down.

Lots of farms have railroad ties. They can be useful. But who has actual railroad tracks? I’ve got at least a dozen sections. Why?!!!

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We are renovating our house and developing 25 acres of property. My husband works all the time and I’m pregnant - it’s just the two of us (for now) doing it. We are drowning in things to do. It’s been my dream to have a property like this, but holy hell. It’s a lot of work.

So far, we’ve addressed mold, had a pipe rupture which required us to empty the house and stay in a hotel for insurance to fix (took months), replaced all the HVAC ducting under the house, replaced the HVAC unit which was also DUCT TAPED to the house, installed fencing for pasture, have replaced 3 bedrooms worth of flooring, painted every single wall, are redoing the kitchen, built a barn, and about 100 other projects that I can’t even think of.

All while maintaining many acres from returning to forest, clearing woods, maintaining vehicles and equipment… who knows what else I’m forgetting. And caring for the animals! So many animals!

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Congrats! If you think you’re drowning now, jusy wait until the baby comes. (Not helpful but oh so true)

Thank you! And I know! Lord, I know!

I did sell a horse which helped a lot. Put another out in a field to chill. We’re trying to get the house to a place in the next few months that will be manageable. We also are buying some better equipment for the property to make it easier to maintain. Trying to prepare as best we can.

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YES! Our house isn’t even that old (2003) but we have a large, somewhat wooded acreage and its ALWAYS someting.

The creek floods washing out our 1/2 mile driveway (stranding us), storms knock trees down across said driveway, septic field wet and puddling (despite 2 companies failing to find anything wrong), HVAC on the cusp of needing replacement (2 units), 1/4 acre pond with a leaky damn, arena that washes out with heavy rains…the list goes on and on.

We want to sell the place and build new on a smaller property but with the market and economy the way it is right now we feel stuck. So, we’re going to wait it out a few years until hopefully things turn around. In the meantime, we have a baby due in 3 months and feel beyond overwhelmed :frowning:

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Oh yes… the pride of ownership when you have a farm property.

It. Never. Ends.

But read the ‘boarding’ threads and we’re all getting rich and the clever horse owners are going to just show us, by buying their own farm and saving money on board!

Fact: i recently sold my large boarding barn and now have a semi-normal house in a neat area. It rained last night for the first time in forever and, as I have for the last 16 years, I woke bolt upright in bed when the rain started… then I realized I didn’t have to worry about all the nefarious things a bit of rain could do to a stable, since i was in a normal house… and I went right back to sleep.

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Oh my…I’d forgotten… I had what I thought was a leak in my roof. When the roofer came to check it, he called me at work and told me to sit down. Turns out the entire back section of my house was part of an old barn they’d pulled up to the house and the attachments were failing! It took about 30 seconds to dismantle it. It was cool though…you could see the ladder leading up to the loft as they were tearing it down.

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Not related to this thread but just because I’m curious - will the barn you sold remain a boarding barn, or did it go for other uses (private owner or development)?

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At this point it remains a boarding barn, although the new owners seem to primarily be interested in a neat property in a great location for their own enjoyment. They hired a barn manager to keep things going but are not ‘horse people’ per se.

As currently zoned it cannot be densely developed, although there’s no financial incentive to keep boarding horses. There were nine serious lookers and only two had an interest in keeping the horses.

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Did that factor into your decision of whose offer to accept?

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Wryly chuckling at your idea of an old house. We lived in one that dated back to the 1600’s!
Absolutely loved that place.
Current farmette is a house from 1892 and 22 acres of land plus 13 acres of woods.
The work is perpetual. We’ve only just got a proper kitchen in after starting the internal work in 2015.
I don’t think we’ll ever be fully on top of the land management :flushed:

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Lol oh I know mine isn’t old, for sure it isn’t. I’m perfectly happy to have modern windows and plumbing such :wink: it’s all work, no matter what the age.

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Circa 1880 homeowner, reporting for duty! It’s never ending. One thing though is we’ve made a huge huge priority to establish and maintain a 20k emergency fund, and we don’t live beyond our income. Which for us means living in a low-cost-of-living area, and accepting that we’re far from family, there are few restaurants / fun things to do (who has time for that anyway? We have fences to maintain, dammit). I get that boondocks living is a sacrifice that not everyone can make, but It makes it so much easier when the big repairs and surprise projects inevitably pop up. It’s not a financial strain --just endless work and inconvenience/ disruption of plans.
For anyone taking out loans to cover the fairly routine costs of homeownership, I urge you to downsize / relocate somewhere that your income will go further. Financial stress is awful.

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endlessclimbAdvanced

1d

Did that factor into your decision of whose offer to accept?

Keeping the property as a stable was one of many factors that weighed into our decision, but ultimately, it comes down to who wants the property, who can buy it, and what their timelines are.

The reality is many of us who own farms today are aging-out Baby Boomers, and our farms- the dirt, not the businesses on the dirt- are our retirement plan. For lots of us, the boarding operations were a juggling act to try to break operationally even, while we paid the mortgage with our ‘real jobs’ and kept hoping that the land appreciation would, one day, provide the security in our old age that most people have with traditional retirement plans.

When you own agricultural property, you are essentially land-banking, doing whatever you can to keep all the plates of businesses on the land spinning while you hope the property itself is appreciating. It’s a long-term hold, often of generations not just years, and in the meantime, life changes, cities expand, houses get built, populations shift, people do different stuff with their spare time and money, and the rural lifestyle becomes harder to live.

The economics of the horse business, to me, make less and less sense. Covid was the great disrupter and now, with the pendulum swinging between crazy demand for horses (already cooling) and unprecedented price spikes in everything it takes to support a horse, the business model is even more fragile than it was a few years ago. Stable owners know this, but I think many boarders do not, but they are starting to get an inkling that their horsekeeping options are dwindling and going to cost quite a bit more than they are used to.

I had a wonderful run with my place, and will always be grateful for the experience, but I also feel very fortunate that we were able to step away at an opportune time to provide security for our family. That security was hard-earned through many years of risk, betting that some day the work and dollars put into the farm would pay us back.

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Trustee for a family property (Historic National Register listed) with numerous outbuildings, main house that ranges in periods of construction from 1790 to 1893, and lots of acreage. It is a large, very large house, there are sections that maybe see a person once a month (come to think of it…not sure anyone actually has been in a certain attic room this year…) There is always something! It is a money pit, and despite the tax assessor’s claims completely unsellable for what it ‘looks like’. I doubt a permit has ever been pulled for anything and the wiring and plumbing was put in during the 1920s and has not been updated, never mind the lead pipes, lead paint, asbestos insulation on pipes, and a complete lack of actual insulation. I love it. I couldn’t imagine living elsewhere, most of the rest of the family would cheerfully burn it down. DH and I will hold on as long as we can before dissolving the trust.
That being said…I do have the odd fantasy about a vacation trip or decorating a room the way I would want to…

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1840s stone home plus a few hundred acres here. Ancient barn (a little bit older than the house even) which we renovated. A couple of quite old outbuilding also. We are in the middle of having a new roof put on, and will have to have part of section of our balcony ripped off and a new cedar post plus some of the flooring redone. Plus some soffit work in a small part of the north side of the house. Fortunately the soffit work will only be 4x20’ (ish).

We JUST ordered new lantern outdoor fixtures that are being made for us. six of them…pretty exciting!

Plumbing from one of the wells into the house was redone last year.

Next year, rewiring.

It’s a constant money-pit…but then, so are horses! lol

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Just to make you feel better, here if I want to add a bedroom I have to add a septic pre-treatment magicbox. It will run over $60K. And that isn’t even to redo the septic system, just the pre-treatment.

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ewe! who wants to spend BIG MONEY on something that’s not even pretty, let alone be septic. I feel your pain. We had to waste 5k on a new transmission on an old car. Not as much money, and slightly less ‘ugh’…butstill

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