Bits and Pieces of my life

The other day I was reading over on a homesteading message board, and someone asked “how did you find your piece of Heaven on earth”. I read some of the replies, and it got me to thinking; just how did I end up on an old farmstead in South Dakota. The short answer I give people is “This is where I found my dream job” but the real answer is way longer than that.

Part One - For want of a toilet wax ring . . .

I’ll take you back to the spring of 1995. I suppose I could go all the way back to 1979, the year I graduated and married my high school sweetheart, but I think I can fill in the pertinent parts of the first 16 years of our marriage as I go along.

We had been living in our house for 4 years now. After 11 years of apartment life, two children and me going back to school, this first home of ours seemed like a dream come true, and at the time we bought it, we really felt it would be our ONLY home. I grew up on a farm, and my husband also had a love for the land, but we’d given up our childhood dreams of owning a chunk of land in the country long ago in our strive to provide food and shelter for our children. At eighteen, we were young and in love, and thought that would be enough, but with our first child born at the age of 20, we soon learned dreams do not put food in your mouth.

After the birth of our second, a beautiful little girl, I got serious about making something of my life, and went back to school and started on my path in the field of accounting. My husband had also settled down, now working for the Operating Engineers as an instructor trainee. He had done a variety of things during those earlier years, mostly in the mechanic field, including a stint in the MN National Guard where he went through OCS and was a 2lt before deciding a military career was not what he wanted.

So here we were, two kids, two car garage, 1/3 acre lot in a southern suburb of the Twin Cities metro area. I had lots of yard to garden; I had my pets, which at one point or another included cockatiels, parakeets, finches, an iguana, anoles, rats, mice gerbils, assorted fish and cats. Hubby had a well stocked garage, courtesy of the early years as an auto mechanic, and enough time to putz around with building projects. We bought the house with an unfinished basement, and soon embarked on what was our first of a long line of remodeling/building projects.

I’m not sure what we were up to at the time this story begins, but for some reason, we needed to remove our toilet. I may have been painting, or putting up new wall paper, I don’t remember. But we needed to move the toilet so I could work behind the tank. Not a problem, but to put it back, we needed a new wax ring, and we didn’t have one in stock.

So this project required a trip to Menards. Our relationship with Menards goes way back LOL!! We headed north on Hwy 3 towards Rosemount, and as we got into town, there was a big sign that read “BOAT SHOW” and out of the blue, my hubby says “let’s stop in.” Now, this really isn’t out of character for us. We’ve always been good at getting an idea and just doing it. So we stopped in, and looked around at the boats. We found a Starcraft with a Force motor, and the salesman started talking interest rates and payments, and it dawned on me that we could actually afford to buy a boat. We had just finished paying off our car (the only brand new one we had bought up to that point), hubby had his used pickup that he had replaced the engine on, and we were making plenty of money at our jobs to make ends meet. We left the showroom with lots of flyers, picked up the wax ring and headed home.

Later that night, after getting the toilet back in place, we started talking about the boat. I knew my hubby had grown up in White Bear Lake, and had spent many an hour out on his Grandpa’s boat. He had spent as much time fishing as I had horseback riding, but he’d never really talked about how much he missed it after we were married. I had owned a few horses when we first got married, but sold them when I was pregnant with our first child. I think at that time, I thought it would be a few years, and I’d get into horses again, but as the time went by, that dream faded. With the purchase of our suburban house, I really thought that was my life, and horses were just a childhood dream of mine that had been put aside for adult responsibilities.

My husband told me about his dreams of fishing, how he had missed it for all these years, and how much he really wanted to teach his children how to fish, and spend time on the water. I got motivated, and starting looking into financing options, and we ended up with a second mortgage on the house, and a 16 foot Starcraft with a 50hp Mercury on back. (And no, we didn’t buy it from the place with the boat show).

And that’s how we started out to buy a $2 wax ring and ended up buying a $12,000 fishing boat.

We loved that boat, and still have it, even though since we moved from the “land of 10,000 lakes” it’s only been in the water a handful of time.

We’d go out fishing at every opportunity. I had not expected to like fishing as much as I did, but found it relaxing, and an enjoyable way to spend time with my husband that didn’t involve the use of power tools. Though by this time, we’d already gone over the whole inside of the house, with only a few odds and ends to finish up. Our kids were getting old enough that we didn’t have to worry about leaving them home alone. Our son loved fishing, and came with every time he could, but our daughter only wanted to come if we planned on cruising around. Ripping across the lake with the wind in her face was much more to her liking than sitting with a fishing rod in her hand. She was 12 now, and mature enough to handle being home for a few hours at a time while we were on the lake.

I thought a lot about what my husband had told me of his dream to someday own his own fishing boat, and I starting thinking about how I had always planned on having horses in my life. I started riding when I was about 5, a fat old pony my oldest sister’s soon to be husband lent to his new brothers and sisters in law. I come from a large family, and am one of the younger children so there are quite a few years between the oldest and youngest. My oldest nephew is only a few years younger than my youngest sister.

I literally grew up on horse back. My whole life revolved around horses until I was 17. My husband was the first boy I’d met who I was willing to spend more time with than my horse. Growing up, I’d always thought horses would figure as a large part of my life, but when my husband lost his job while we were expecting our first child, the horses had to go. I was willing to make the sacrifice; I loved my husband and the child I was carrying. As the years went by, and the children got older and I got more involved with my career, I stopped thinking about ever owning horses again. I don’t think my love for horses ever died, I think I closed it up real tight and didn’t dare let it come back out. By the time we bought the boat, I rarely did anything that involved horses, never went riding, never hung out with other horse people. It was a part of my past, and I had thought I was reconciled with keeping that way.

But we bought the boat . . . my hubby’s dream . . . And then one day I realized I could have dreams too. For 16 years my decisions had revolved around what was best for the marriage, and my children, and rarely for me. I still never expected to own anything more than our suburban home, but I realized that I COULD have horses in my life, just maybe . . .

Then a friend called and asked me to come spend the day with her, at her sister’s place in the country. This friend was going through a nasty divorce, and I spent quite a bit of time with her during this period. We drove out to the country, and I saw that her sister had three horses in the pasture, and my friend asked me if I wanted to ride. Normally I would have said “No”. That was something in my past, and I had intended to keep it there, but this time I said “yes”. We saddled up the old mare, which had not been ridden in for several months, and I climbed into the saddle.

You know how they say you never forget how to ride a bike? It was like my body remembered exactly what to do. The mare was a bit frisky, but I had no trouble staying with her, and getting her to settle down and mind her manners. I rode back and forth, and then gave the kids rides, and went home knowing I had opened the door to something that I had thought was only in my past. It’s hard to really describe how I felt. It was like realizing I could have dreams. My life was no longer the constant struggle to earn enough money to provide food and a decent home for my children. I didn’t have to be the career woman, or good little suburban wife who was content with a few pets and a nice garden plot in the back yard.

I started going to a riding stable near where I worked, and it wasn’t long before I learned they had a “lease to own” program, and I started eyeing the horses, with a future purchase in mind. I talked it over with my husband, and he agreed to let me lease a horse for a few months. If it worked out, I could keep on and eventually buy the animal, and if after a few months, we decided it wasn’t something I wanted to do or had time for, I could walk away without being stuck with a horse I needed to sell. Then one really bad morning at work, I left early and went to the stable for a ride. It wasn’t during their busy time, so there was only one other customer and his young daughter waiting to go out on the trail when I showed up. They put me on a nice chestnut appaloosa with a snowflake pattern on his rump, and the man and his daughter up double on a draft cross. Since there was only the three of us with the guide, she let us run quite a bit, and I really liked the horse I was riding. I’ve always had a soft spot for those appy’s, my first horse was one. This horse was also a pacer, which I thought was really neat at the time. Sure did make for a comfortable ride.

We got back and I went inside to find out more about the horse. He was a five year old, unregistered App/Walker cross (that is where the pacing came from). He’d been used on the trails for three years, and was one of the favorites for the trainer at the facilities. I brought my husband back the next day, and I signed the papers to lease him for the summer.

That summer also had other changes for me. I had gotten about as far as I could in my career based on only having a two year education. I had a good, sound accounting background, but jobs at larger companies required a four year degree. I had always planned on going on with my education after graduating from the Academy of Accountancy back in ’89, but just had not gotten around to it. The problem I was faced with now was because of changes in the MN CPA requirements; the college I had planned on attending would no longer accept my prior Accounting course work. Had I gone back to school even one year earlier, this would not have happened. I was able to get some general credits, and figured I could test out of some of the lower Accounting classes. I didn’t want to attend a different college, as this one was geared toward working adults, and most of their classes were offered in the evenings or on weekends. I started classes that fall, taking two evening classes and one Saturday class, while working full time. It was a struggle, but with my husband’s support at home, I made it through the first year. I did test out of a few classes, and actually took Intermediate Accounting before I realized I was wasting my time. I’d worked in a CPA firm long enough to know that was not what I wanted to do, I was way more interested in the CMA program, and that didn’t require a degree in Accounting, only a four year degree and several year’s experience in the field. I wised up and changed my degree to Finance.

Fall went into winter, winter into spring. I ended up with a new boss, the old one having retired. The new boss was decent enough, but had lots of plans for growth, and started wanting me to do a lot more work than my job had demanded in the past. I didn’t have to dress up for my job, and kept a pair of coveralls in my car. I’d take an hour for lunch, go to the stable and take my horse out for a ride, and go back to work. I think that helped keep me sane, while the pressures of working and attending school full time became too much. I had to make a decision, something had to give. I had to either cut back on school so I could devote more time to a job I had grown to hate, or quit the job and concentrate on school. It really wasn’t that hard of a decision. Since I wasn’t working now, I figured I had plenty of time to concentrate on school, and finished my remaining three years in two. The most classed I took in one quarter was seven, and I really wouldn’t recommend doing that. During that time, I’d paid for the horse, moved him to a private stable closer to home, and we’d bought a second horse. Right after I graduated, we sold both horses and bought two more suitable, a two year old registered Paint (loud chestnut overo) and a four year old registered Quarter Horse (bay without a white hair on him.)

I started a new job; my son was a senior in high school, my daughter in 8^th grade, and my husband working as an Instructor at the Union school. We had two horses at a boarding stable and our quite neighborhood had been turned into suburban bedroom community. In the two years I was finishing school, the land surrounding the small development we had moved into had been sold to developers, and we were now surrounded by houses on all sides. We were making lots of money, had low house payments, and liked our neighborhood less and less. And that was when we decided it was time to bail out of city life. Adding up our first and second mortgage, and our horse boarding costs, we could afford to find a place farther away from the Twin Cities and get out of this rat race. So in the fall of 1998, our search began.

We started our search, and soon found that there was nothing within our price range within commuting distance of the Twin Cities. And then a coworker told me about the house he was buying in Wisconsin. Older farmhouse, 20 acres, $120,000!!!! I couldn’t believe it, we’d been looking and looking, and found nothing west of the St. Croix/Mississippi River for anywhere near that price range. I’d never in my life thought I would ever become a Cheese Head, but we started looking for places in western Wisconsin, and in January 1999 we found one. This was farther away than we had planned on moving, but it had everything we were looking for. An older, two story farmhouse in need of repair, a cow barn in very good shape, and a newer tin pole shed, easily converted into a work shop. Another shed that would work for the horses and a single wide trailer that the elderly mother stayed in during the summer months. But the real gem was the grain shed. This was the oldest building on the property, and had hand hewn beams. The only drawback was the owner only wanted to sell the homestead and small pasture to the west between the house and the cross street. This was estimated at 10 acres, but the buildings took up so much, it didn’t leave much room for pasture, and none for growing our own hay. The current owners, a couple not much older than us with no children, wanted to sell the homestead with a few acres and build a new home on the other end of the farm up near the highway. Their realtor told ours they would consider selling more land, so we put in an offer above their asking price, contingent on getting 20 acres. They accepted, and we could not believe our luck.

Selling our suburban home was the easy part. It was a starter home in a decent neighborhood (for suburbia) and it sold for full price as soon as it hit the market. The only concern was the buyer was going VA, and my husband had heard enough stories during his time in the National Guard about VA loans that he wasn’t happy with that. I didn’t think anything of it. Everything seemed to be falling into place. We’d been pre-qualified before putting in the offer, so the only thing needed for us to obtain our dream farm was the survey and appraisal. My daughter wanted to move before the school year was out, so we asked for a closing date in the middle of March, allowing for only 45 days. The realtors were ok with that, and everyone got to work to make this sale go through.

I was so excited about this. When we were first married, we talked about owning land and raising a few animals, but then reality set in, and we never thought it would ever happen. In order to qualify for the loan, we had to stay at our current jobs, but we both planned to find something closer to our new home once the paperwork was signed. The mortgage payment we would end up with was less than what our house/horse board payments had been, and we could afford a decrease in pay without it being a burden. My hubby planned on quitting his job at the school, and getting back to work in the field. I figured I’d find an accounting job in one of the small towns near by. Our son would commute back to his old school and finish his senior year, and our daughter was excited about meeting new friends.

I made my husband drive out to WI every weekend. I took lots of pictures (this was before I bought my digital camera) and started making plans for how we would fix up the old house. I was so excited about moving out to the country, I showed the pictures to anyone who would listen. A month had gone by, and we were still waiting for the owner to get the survey done. The appraisal was complete, with the stipulation that the house would sell with at least 15 acres. We asked what the problem was, and our realtor told us that the owner was having a hard time coming up with 20 acres. It turns out the original area was closer to 7 than the 10 acres the owner had guessed, so instead of doubling what he wanted to sell, he had to near triple it. He had several hundred acres, so it wasn’t like he was significantly lowering the amount he would have left, but he said he didn’t want to cut up the existing fields. We agreed to accept as little as 18 acres, and were willing to end up with something that wasn’t rectangular in shape.

We were getting things all packed up and ready to move out our old home. We bought a stock trailer to move our goods and horses and were anxious to be out of suburbia. Because the track of land we were buying part of bordered a main highway in Wisconsin, the survey had to be sent in to the State for approval. Our chunk was on the end opposite from the highway, so no one thought there would be any problem with approval. But it would take more time, and the closing got rescheduled for a week later. The closing on our house was still on track (as far as we knew) so the owners of the farm agreed to let us move in and rent from them until we closed on the purchase. They finally got the survey done and marked out, so we drove out there to see what we were going to end up with. It turned out to be a just under 18 acres, so we weren’t sure how much that would be. The property was boarded by roads on two sides, and the owner wanted to keep the field to the north of the fence line, so it was just how far east our land would go that we didn’t know. We found the first stake by the road, and walked back to the corner. The plot was rectangular, with a triangle shape added on to the northwest corner. The north line followed the fence line and then angled farther north along a ravine, and then went straight south to the road.

We stood out in the field, looking over what seemed to be a vast amount of land. We could not believe this was going to be ours in just a few more days. We smiled and hugged each other, and danced around in the hay field. We would have enough land for a nice pasture, and about 10 acres of field already in hay. We would finally be able to live the type of live we’d given up ever having. I can honestly say that was one of the happiest days of our life together.

We were days before the closing for selling our house, the owners of the property we were buying had already moved out, so we started moving in. We got a call from the realtor who sold our MN house, and were told that the appraisal on that property had come in low. Both realtors (ours and the buyers) were very mad because it turned out the appraiser had owned a property near ours, and sold it for quite a bit less than we were getting the fall before. Our realtor could see no reason why the house had not appraised out, other than the VA appraiser was being a jerk. The buyer asked to have the closing rescheduled for Monday, giving him time to come up with the $2,000 needed to make up the difference. We found out that the buyer had been given such a run around with the VA financing that he wished he’d never gone that route. My husband wasn’t surprised, and figured if the sale didn’t go through, we’d just put it back on the market and ask more for it. This was the start of the housing boom, and we knew we could ask another $10,000 for the property than we had earlier, and get it too. Since our closing on the buying side had already been postponed, it wouldn’t mess anything up to extend this one a few days, and the buyer was confident he could come up with the money.

It gave us a few more days to move out, and by Saturday afternoon, we loaded up the last of our goods and cats and headed east. The horses would stay at the stable until we got the pasture cleaned up. We already had phone service hooked up at the new place, and had our answering machine plugged in, and had a message waiting for us, but we got busy unloading, and didn’t notice it at first.

As we hauled the last of our belongings into our new home, I remember thinking I didn’t ever want to move again. This was a childhood dream come true, and I would put down roots and stay for ever. It was getting dark out, and I noticed the light blinking on the answering machine. I listened to the message, it was from our WI realtor (we had two because we were buying in WI and selling in MN) and there was a problem about mineral rights and we needed to call her right away.

My husband got real nervous, but I wasn’t worried. I figured the farmers had got together at some point in time and thought up some scheme to sell some rock or something, and that all we needed to do was have them sign off, and we’d be good to go. We had put in our purchase agreement Land and Mineral Rights, so the seller should have known there would be an issue if he hadn’t owned the mineral rights.

We called our realtor; she had left her home number, and got the bad news. The seller had leased the mineral rights to the property 15 years earlier, to a company called Kramer, on a 99 year lease. Those who live in that area may recognize the name, as they were operating several gravel pits in MN and WI. Kramer had already filed plans to start removing lime rock from the property in a few months, and when the survey was filed, Kramer was the one who told the seller that we must be told before the sale could go through.

They expected to be operating the gravel pit for the next five to ten years, and would be blasting and running heavy equipment 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. Because of our “mineral rights” clause, we could back out of the deal without any penalty. But were would we go? We had agreed to extend the closing on selling our house so we couldn’t legally back out of that unless the buyer could not come up with the money by Monday, and we didn’t expect that to happen. We could have negotiated a lower price with the sellers, but our country dream did not include an open gravel pit less than 1000 yards from our house. And there was no way we would want to do any improvements to the property with them blasting and running heavy equipment near by.

My husband had worked in road construction/dirt work field for enough years to be familiar with Kramer, and the reality of what we would be facing, and he flatly said “No”.

We brought the kids into our room, and told them of our decision, and the four of us huddled together on the sleeping bag we had laid on the floor and cried. How could this dream, this wonderful dream turn into a nightmare so fast. I won’t dwell on the anguish we went through that night, not knowing where we would go, or what we would do now.

Our realtor worked things out with the owner, and owner agreed to let us rent the place for the summer, while we found somewhere else to live. My husband figured the seller was hoping to keep himself out of a nasty lawsuit. Later we were told that the owner’s realtor and lawyer had both told him he didn’t have to disclose the information about the pit if we weren’t buying land that the pit would actually be on. I don’t know what world they were living in, as one of the questions on the “full disclosure” required in WI real estate sales asks specifically if the seller knows of anything that would be happening on the adjacent properties that could affect the value of the property they were selling. We can only speculate that the reason he was having so much trouble with the survey is that he was trying his darndest to exclude the property he had leased the mineral rights on.

One can only imagine the lawsuits that would have resulted had the sale gone through, and then we’d have found out about the gravel pit. Our realtor, who must have been more conversant with real estate laws, could not believe that the seller’s realtor had actually advised him to hide the information from us. We can only speculate that the main reason he was trying to sell the homestead was because he didn’t want to live next to the gravel pit either.

We did close on selling our MN home the next Monday, put the money in the bank and started our search for a new home all over again.

(And that is how we referred to it at the time too!)


With the move, our lives changed drastically. Our first thought was to find an apartment and move out of the place we had just moved in to. We could have rented a storage garage, and the horses could stay at the stable, even though we were over 100 miles away. The stable owner treated all the horses like they were her own and she would know right away if one of the horses needed care. But what do you do with 5 house cats? My husband was so angry, he suggested shooting them all. He did not want to be beholden to someone who had caused us to be in this predicament in the first place.

But good sense prevailed, and we decided it would be best to agree to rent, and keep looking for another place in the same general area. Our daughter started attending the local school, and our son commuted back and forth with us to finish his senior year.

Our day started out with the three of us heading out the door around 5:45 am. I got dropped off at work by 7, and hubby made it in to his job by 7:30. My son then took the car for another 30mn drive to his high school. Son put in half a day, then headed of to the tech school he was attending, which happened to be about 5 miles from where my hubby worked. Son got done around 3:30, and waited around for hubby to get off work at 4, and then they’d come and pick me up, and we’d get home around 6pm. If our Realtor had come across anything she thought we might be interested in, she called me, and if it was on our way home, we drove by, otherwise we would drop our son off at home, grab a bite to eat and head out to look at the property.

This became a routine for us. We looked at so many properties. One would think we’d find something that would suit our needs. We lowered our standards, but we were not going to budge on one important issue. We would not live under a power line or transmission tower. It got to be a joke with us, we’d be driving toward a property that looked good on paper, and scan the horizon for the high voltage power line. This area of Wisconsin seems to be crisscrossed with high power lines, and sure enough, we’d see the power line and end up looking at a home within 50 feet of it.

You might think I’m exaggerating, but we must have looked at 10 properties that were right next to a power line. By May, we were getting nervous. Everything we looked at had something major wrong with it. We starting looking at more expensive properties, and found a beautiful newer home on 25 acres. It was at the top of what we wanted to spend, and only had a small shop for an outbuilding. The house was gorgeous, and we decided to take another look. It was raining that day, and when we went down the basement, there was water pouring in from the top of the cement wall. And I do mean pouring in! We starting looking more closely, and there was a gap between the foundation and the bottom of the house, with the house sitting on shims spaced around the perimeter. Half the house was on a crawl space, but the other half over the basement was not actually attached to the basement wall. It was obvious with the second look that the basement had been added after the house was built. I don’t know why it was this way, sort of looked like someone had not finished the job. The problems with the foundation, along with needed a barn for our horses caused us to cross this one off the list.

We’d been looking for over two months, and the owner of the place we were renting starting asking how long we would need to keep renting, as he wanted to put the place back on the market. Not that we expected he would have an easy time selling it, as Kramer had started working on the pit. They stripped off the topsoil and built a berm on the south end between the pit and the house. During the week, we were not home during most of the time they were operating the machines, so it didn’t seem all that bad. They started blasting and working Saturdays later that summer, but that was just another part of the whole miserable mess.

We also cleaned up the pasture and moved our horses. The stable owner didn’t like having boarders who lived so far away, and we wanted to save as much money as we could during this time. I had hoped we’d find something early enough in the spring so that we could move in and be settled before my daughter would start school in the fall. We didn’t expect to find something in the same school district we had moved to, and I didn’t want to disrupt her school year any more than possible.

We had never considered building, but we started thinking of the idea. One Saturday, as we were coming back from looking at another power line property, we stopped at an Open House that a builder was having. They put up Modular homes. These are the ones that are built in sections in a factory, and trucked to the site. They use conventional building methods, so once put in place; it is very difficult to tell they weren’t site built.

We talked to the salesmen; he showed us some models and quoted us a price of $110,000 for the house with full basement and an attached garage. This was a lot less than what we’d seen for a site built house, so we starting thinking maybe building would not be out of our price range. We made the decision to start looking at land and existing homes.

For the month of May, we spent all our free time driving around looking at properties. We found some beautiful land, one was 55 acres, and could not be divided because the zoning requires 35 acres for a building site. Based on the estimate of the house, we calculated we could spend about $25,000 on the land. Land was going for $1,000 per acre, so we were looking for 25 acres or less. And during the time we were looking, prices continued to rise. Then one day at end of May, our realtor called us about some land that just came on the market. 20 acres for $20,000. We got excited and headed out to see the property. As we got closer, we didn’t see any power lines, and the land had gentle hills and trees, it seemed very nice. We rounded a corner, and there was the “for sale” sign – in the middle of a swamp!!!! We got out and walked around, but other than a small area up near the road, the whole 20 acres didn’t have a building site on it. And the rest of the land would not have been suitable for hay or pasture. It wasn’t the first time we’d looked at land that would have been difficult to build on. We were depressed, and headed on home. Not very far from there, as we were headed west on the highway, I caught the sight of a white board with “Land for Sale” written on it. Hubby did a U-turn on the highway, and we headed down a tar road that paralleled the highway for a mile, and then followed another sign north on a dirt road past a winding creek and found another sign hanging on the fence a mile up the road. The land was beautiful, we didn’t know how much was for sale, but even if it was just the field we could see, there was lots of potential places to put a house and barn. We copied down the phone number and headed home (we didn’t have a cell phone at this time).

Hubby called and talked to the young man who owned the property. He had 40 acres, and wanted $45,000 for it. We decided to go back out and meet with him so he could show us the property lines. It was only 15 minutes from where we were renting, so we hopped back in the car and met him at the property. He had us climb in his truck, and took us for a ride up the hills and around the trees. It seemed like the property went on for ever, it was so scenic, and there was so much potential for doing just about anything on that land.


We told him we’d think about it and let us know. He told us he had just put the signs up minutes before we drove by, and we were the first people to call. We talked about it on the way back home. It was more than we wanted to spend. It wasn’t more than we could afford to spend, but we were trying to keep our mortgage payments down so we could have more flexibility in changing our jobs. But the land was so nice, and we’d look at so much awful properties, and we just wanted to have a home again . . . My hubby called him and told him we’d take it. I offered to drive over and give him a check for earnest money, but he said that would not be necessarily, he trusted us not to back out. This was Friday afternoon, Memorial weekend, and he would not be able to talk to his lawyer until Tuesday to get the papers signed.

I wasn’t worried about us backing out; I was worried about someone else offering him more money and him changing his mind. Verbal contracts are not valid for real estate, and I had lost too much already not to be nervous. But the young man held to his given word and the next Tuesday we signed the purchase agreement, and in 30 days the land would be ours. We did find out later that the person who owned the adjacent land called the young man that weekend and offered him more than he was asking, but the young man didn’t especially like this neighbor, and felt he already owned enough land. After we lived there, we found out that the neighbors were in two “friendly factions”, for lack of a better description. These two were on opposite sides, which is why the neighbor didn’t even know the young man was considering selling the property until after we’d put in our offer. We felt very fortunate.

So, now that we had the land, we got serious about house plans. I think everyone had ideas of what their “dream house” would be like, even if they never intend to build, and I was not an exception. Once we had decided we might build, I’d been doing up floor plans of what we might want. My first submission to the builder came back way over what we expected. Mostly because it didn’t fit into the mold required because the house would built within a building, and could not be wider than 16’ per section to fit out the door. I met with the builder and we went over my plans, and I revised them to meet within the parameters. The builder told us he would submit the plans, and would get a response in a week, and we could expect to get things finalized in a month, the house would take about 45 days to complete, and then another 15 days of work on site, and we could be in by September 1st, just after the start of the school year. Things seemed to be coming together wonderfully. We talked to our banker, and got approved for $160,000. We could have been approved for more, but this allowed $130,000 for the house (the builder was still saying we should be around $110,000 with the changes in the plan) and $30,000 to pay off what we owned on the land. We closed on the land on July 1st, and we were still waiting to hear from our builder on the revised plans. We’d call, he’d say they were working on it, and we’d wait and then call again, and he’d say they had some questions, so we’d come in and go over the plans and wait some more. We had expected they would be breaking ground by August 1st, but that day came and went and we were still trying to get things finalized. Our builder was getting very upset with the sales rep he was working for, and then one day he called and found out the rep had been fired. Our builder found out our home had never even been put on the proposed schedule, and the manufacture told him if they put it on now, they would not even start on it until January. They had such a tremendous growth in business from the time we had started first talked to the builder that they now had a backlog of homes to build. Our builder went to bat for us, and got the manufacture to agree that if we signed the contract within the next week, they would move our house up so that we could be in by mid October.

We did have the plans pretty much finalized, but they came in over what we had expected. Our banker said that it would take him two weeks to get us approved for a larger amount, and we didn’t have time to do that. We talked to our landlord, and he agreed to let us stay there through the end of October, but he was anxious to have us out. Our options were to go ahead with what we had and skip the garage to keep the price within what we had qualified for, or put off building. We actually did go out that week and look at a few more properties, thinking maybe we could buy something and then build on our land a few years down the road, but I didn’t want to do that, I just wanted this whole ordeal over with as soon as possible. My husband finally agreed, and we signed the papers to have the house built.

The building when relatively uneventful, but had the normal setbacks that seem to come with any building project. It was soon evident that we would not be in by the end of October, and our landlord gave us until November 10th to be out of there. Things still dragged on, and during that time we put up a lean to shelter for the horses, and hauled in hay for the winter. We put up a fence, and moved the horses onto our property before we were living there. Our plans had been to finish the basement, and then move into the house, but now it was evident we would be moving in before a lot of the work was completed. We needed a place to store our belongings, so as soon as the horses were taken care of, we started building the shop. My husband took two weeks off work, and we managed to get the building up in that time. It was another pole shed, with a regular 16’ garage door. We put rock down on the floor, and started moving our stuff over. I cleared an area and moved the plants I’d brought with me from our first house, and moved my pond fish too. Those poor fish, they had spent the entire summer in a stock tank, but they were still doing ok.

We had as much moved over to the shop as we could. The day they brought the house was exciting, and it was such a thrill to be able to walk in side and see what had only been plans on paper before. The house wasn’t ready for us by the 10th, so our builder put us up in a hotel for 10 days. We went to check on the place, and they still had not put down the carpet, so I called the builder and asked why. And then we find out they never ordered the carpet. We had picked it out so many months ago; we had not even considered this would be a problem. The builder said he could not get a crew in to lay the carpet, so we agreed we’d take care of it. At this point, we would have agreed to just about anything to get moved in.

They got the well hooked up the day before we moved in. But the electrician didn’t have time to come back out, so my hubby wired in the well himself. He also had to hook up the water heater. We planned on tiling the master bath, so that wasn’t hooked up yet either. We had a full walkout basement, and the kids would have rooms in the basement, which was unfinished. All our furniture was stored in the shop, and we slept on the floor for a week until we could get the carpet purchased and installed. Our first experience laying carpet was something else. Berber with a one way pattern, that went from the living room, across a walkway into the dining area, and down the stairs, landing and down the second flight to the basement. Berber is bad enough to work with even without all the extra complications. But it did turn out quite nicely. The carpet in our bedroom was easy compared to that stuff. We also had to finish laying the laminate floor in the kitchen. The builder had run out, and told us it would be two weeks before they got more shipped in. Stupid ))#$&_*%(*& Wisconsin back woods @)&%$*.

I got on the phone, drove into the Twin Cities and picked up what we needed and we put it down ourselves. We purchased, hauled and installed all the appliances ourselves. Our son got his “bedroom” set up in the dining room, and our daughter got the living room, while we spent the next 60 days frantically working to get the downstairs rooms finished so they could move in.

There were other assorted problems, one of the cabinet doors in the second bathroom didn’t match the others, and there were cracks above the doorways because they had a slight problem during transportation. One half of our house showed up without a roof. They told us it happened at the factory during the high wind a few days before they hauled it out. They set it and put the roof up right away, and it didn’t seem that big of a deal. Then a few weeks later, my husband had called and talked to the receptionist, and in passing she said “can you imagine what the people driving behind thought when the roof came off?” Hmm, now we knew the REAL reason why it sat in the rest stop for two days. They told us they had problems with the road permits, those )*%#$(*Y^$)(.

Oh yea, they also didn’t hook up the main vent. We lived there a few weeks, and my hubby looked up into the attic and realized they had never hooked up the vent. It went up into the attic, and there was a pipe through the roof, but they weren’t hooked together. Very dangerous situation, if you know about sewer gasses. And then there was the one we didn’t even know about for three years. WI requires you have your septic pumped every three years, and when the pumper opened up our tank, it was filled right to the top. It took him two loads to get it empty, and then he saw the problem. The (& %(#*&$#(* plumbers forget to install the pump! We have a mound system, and because we were on a slope, the tank had been siphoning into the drain field naturally. If it weren’t for the slope, we would have had sewage backing up into our basement in a very short time. The plumbing company did come out and install the pump at no charge. The tanks had been locked by the plumbing company, and we never thought to cut them and look inside. The inside alarm was hooked up, but we didn’t have any way of knowing nothing was hooked up on the other end. They messed up other things, so all in all, we felt very dissatisfied with the whole process. But by the time March rolled around, we had the kids moved downstairs, and our furniture moved in from the shop. Things were starting to settle down, after a year of madness.

Well, I’m gonna try to write more on this. I’ve surprised myself at how angry I got over the last part. I thought enough time had passed that it wouldn’t be so bad writing about it. But I think it’s important to the rest of the story to talk a little bit more about the house we built. So many things didn’t turn out the way we hoped. Most were the result of communication problems between our general contractor, the master builder (his employee) and the subcontractors he hired. We spent so much time talking to our general contractor, and then we’d see the results and it wasn’t what we wanted. Some were little things, like making the rooms 12’6” instead of just under 12’, or putting in the windows wrong, forgetting to order the carpet we picked out so we had to choose something we liked less that was in stock, and installing the wrong tub, among many others. And then there were the big things, like getting the elevations messed up so we couldn’t build the attached garage like we had planned on paper. Or screwing up on where the mound system had to go so we couldn’t put the barn where we had planned.

Some people might ask why we didn’t make them redo things. We ran out of time, we ran out of energy, we ran out of money. I’ve been asked “If you had to do it again, what would you do different” I’ve tried to think that one over, and the only answer I can honestly come up with is “I wouldn’t do it”.

But it was our home, and we tried to make the best of it. And it was a beautiful home, on a beautiful chunk of land. Somehow, it just didn’t feel like “home”. So that spring, after I was laid off, I set up to make this house into our home. I repainted, spent hours on eBay finding just the perfect items to put on the walls. My husband and I prefer unique items, so I’d buy something, then repaint it or modify it to make it different. I didn’t put a lot of money into things, but I put a lot of time. Slowly, room by room, the house started taking on a personality. It started looking like we lived there, losing its generic feel. That summer we also built the garage (finally!!!). We’d saved up enough for the foundation work, and would use credit cards for the rest. My plan was once we were done with the garage, and I was back working, we’d refinance the whole thing (interest rates were dropping, values going up). It had always been my plan that once we were all done with the building (House, shop, barn, garage) we’d refinance the mess and get it all rolled into one payment. And it would have worked too, except for the part about me getting another job.

Up until this point, money wasn’t really a problem, except that we needed more each month than we had planned, which meant we stayed out our higher paying city jobs, and continued to commute. I qualified for unemployment, and that with my husband’s salary, we could make ends meet. We’d already tightened our belts so we could save toward building the garage, so it really didn’t make that big of a difference, we just cut out what we were saving. We’ve never been the type to get into the “conspicuous consumption” theory anyway.

At first, I wasn’t too worried about finding a job right away. And though I did have several online sources, and watched the papers every day, I probably could have been more diligent. Still, I figured if I applied for at least five jobs a week, something would turn up sooner or later. I’d never had problems landing jobs in the past; I had no reason to think it would be any different this time.

But after a couple of months, with not a single interview, I started getting nervous. I had written my own resume (which I had always done in the past) so I spent more time researching how to write a resume, spent some money on online courses and wrote a new resume using the all the tricks in the book. And still no response. To this day, I don’t know what it was about my resume that said “Don’t even consider this person.” The summer wore on, and we worked on the getting the garage built. I think in the back of our minds was the thought that maybe we’d end up selling the place, and there is no way it would have sold without the attached garage. That might seem strange, but the house was designed to have that garage, and it looked plain stupid without it. It also looked very small without the garage.

By mid summer, I was listing with head hunters, and still not getting anywhere. I had my resume professionally written. Spent a lot of money on that, and still no results. I wasn’t really paying all that much attention to what was going on in the economy as a whole, but when I learned that the State was automatically extending unemployment benefits from 6 months to 9 months, maybe there were a lot of other people in the same boat I was in.

I did get the house done up, but I was still struggling with accepting the house. I’ve never been one to want to put a ton of money into a dwelling. It’s just a place to live, and though I want it nice, I don’t get any extra enjoyment knowing I can afford an expensive house. I tried to tell myself that it was ok to work hard so you could afford a really nice house, but my inner self kept saying “this house is costing you way too much money”. By the time we were done with everything, we now owed more than double what we had owed before we had moved. It wasn’t that we couldn’t afford it, but it sure did seem like it just wasn’t worth the money. It’s hard to explain . . .I didn’t want to take a job I didn’t think I would really like (corporate climbing and all that stuff) to make a lot of money so I could afford to live in a house I didn’t really like.

I know my husband had similar feeling about the house; it was a love/hate relationship for him too. He was making plenty of money, at a job he wanted desperately to quit. But the income was dependable, and if he went back to work as an operator, that would not be the case.

I have to laugh at myself a bit here; I think I’ve gotten off track so I didn’t write about the other things that were going on with me.

During all this time, I was sinking deeper and deeper into depression. I don’t think my husband realized what was happening. I’m always the optimist, no matter what. I had things planned out, and knew as long as the unemployment held out, we would be ok. And then it would be the start of Tax season, and I told myself For Sure I could get a job at a CPA firm until April, and we would worry about May when May came. I kept up a good front for my husband, never telling him how low my self esteem was falling. With every application I sent out that I didn’t get called on, I felt more worthless. I hated sending out my resume. I’ll never know why I wasn’t getting any responses. Well, I did get a few, but usually they’d say something like “this would probably be too far for you to drive” and I wouldn’t hear anything more. I’d been commuting for several years, I was ok with that, but some perspective employers were not. And maybe there was stiff competition for the jobs I was applying for.

As Christmas rolled around, I did start applying to CPA firms for work during the tax season, and it did land a job with a firm not too far away. The pay was about the same I’d been making on unemployment, so while quite a bit less than my last job; it was enough to make ends meet. The job would start the middle of January, so I had a bit of time on my hands. I still kept applying for permanent jobs.

But I still felt like trash. And I felt like the house was big weight around my neck. My daughter was a senior in high school, and she was making plans to move out once she graduated. I knew I’d never be able to help her with our current financial position, and that made me feel that I was failing as a parent too. I’m not the type to think I own my adult children money, but I didn’t like the feeling that I couldn’t help her at all. I got married and moved out at 18, and one big reason was to lessen the financial strain on my parents. I didn’t want my daughter to feel that she HAD to move out because we could not afford to have her living with us. She never felt that way, but I imagined it and it added to my general feeling of worthlessness.

Christmas came and went, and I sunk deeper into depression. My husband wasn’t happy that I had not found a decent job; he had so hoped I’d find something decent and it would take some of the financial burden off him. He had wanted to quit his job before the late winter training season started, and that wasn’t going to happen this year. He was depressed and unhappy, I was depressed and unhappy.

In our relationship, I’ve always been the optimistic one. My husband is pessimistic. The glass will always be almost empty to him. He always counts on me to be the one to say “it will be ok” no matter how bummed out he is about things. He counts on me to know what is going on, what we can and can’t afford, and to only bring it to him if there are problems he needs to know about. After all, finance is what I do.

I don’t know if I’m making much sense with this, but it’s like if my husband said “things are crappy” I’d respond with “No, we can make it work, it will be ok”. But if I said “things are crappy” my husband would respond with “ I knew it, we’re going to starve to death!”

Where am I going with all this? I think it was right before New Years. I had not started the job with the CPA firm yet, and was feeling like I was the worst parent/accountant/person in the world. I’m the type that the more depressed I get, the more I will withdraw from people. I’m not the type to have a lot of friends anyway, and usually my “friends” are the people I work with. I had not worked for almost 9 months; my contact with the outside world was almost nonexistent. I didn’t have any internet friends to chat with, the only other humans I saw on a regular basis was my husband and daughter, and my daughter was busy with school and friends, so I didn’t see all that much of her.

I don’t know, maybe I was in the middle of a break down, maybe God was trying to tell me something and I refused to listen. But I kept going round and round in my head about the house. I’d tried so hard to make it a home, and things were just working out so that it kept looking more and more like we should sell, and I wanted to, but I didn’t want to, I guess I didn’t know what I wanted.

I was so confused, I went down to the barn, and cried about it all. I looked up at the house, and told myself it was ok to have a nice house, it was ok that it cost a lot of money, because we could make the money. It was ok if we spent a lot on a house instead of other things, lots of people did that.

I could go on, I could work for the CPA firm, I would find a better paying job, things would start looking better. I just needed to hang on and trust in the Lord. I prayed a lot during that time, but it seemed like God was not listening. No, it seemed like He kept putting an idea in my head I didn’t want to listen to. I did not want to give up the house. I did not want to say “This did not work out like I hoped”, I did not want to walk away from four long years of hard work. I did not want to give up the dream of living in the country.

I remember praying “Lord, I can get through this, I just need some bit of encouragement, I need someone to talk to, someone to help me through this. Just give me ONE PERSON who understands me, and I can make it through.” We’re pretty good at trying to make deals with the Lord, but it’s not usually a good idea. Unless you’ve been at the end of your rope, you may not understand the anguish that drops you to your knees. I was there.

I finally went back up to the house. I knew my husband was also depressed, he knew I was upset, but didn’t know what to say or how to handle it. The more depressed I’d become, the more depressed he’d become.

I got back into the house, and he walked up and asked how I was feeling. I said “I just don’t know how we are going to make it, things seem so bad” and he replied “yea, life really sucks right now” and he walked away.

I saw red. All I could think was “you a-hole! All I needed was one word of encouragement and you couldn’t even give me that”. Of course, I didn’t say anything. He went to the bedroom, and in his defense, he was too confused about how to handle my depression. He counted on me to be the positive one, and he honestly had no clue how to deal with me.

I walked in the living room, and saw the Christmas tree with 25 years’ worth of decorations, and I started taking them off the tree, getting madder with each one. I kept saying “I’ve given you 25 years, and you can’t even give me one word of encouragement”. I don’t think I was rational at that point, and opened up the patio door and started whipping the ornaments out into the yard. With our walkout, this door was on the upper level on the south side, and we didn’t have a deck so it was a ways down to the ground.

I though out the glass balls, I through out the decorations, I through out the ones my kids had made in grade school. I started ripping off the lights, and that is when my husband realized I was a bit more than a little upset. He came out and asked me what I was doing, and I started screaming at him. And I kept whipping stuff out the window. When the lights wouldn’t come off the tree, I threw the whole tree out the window. I’d knocked my glasses loose, and they followed the tree. I looked for other things to throw, I looked at the open door, and that’s when my husband grabbed me. I don’t know if he say it in my eyes, and I don’t know for sure what I would have done if he had not grabbed me. All I was thinking was “I hate everything, and I want it all to stop.” It was only a 12’ foot drop, so I doubt I would have done more than bust myself up. I can’t say for sure I’d have jumped if my husband had not stopped me, but I know I that is what I was thinking. I don’t think I really wanted to hurt myself, I was so mad I wanted to throw SOMETHING out the window, and my body just seemed like the next thing to toss . . .

He got me calmed down enough that I was thinking a bit clearer, but he still had no clue how to deal with me. He’d never experienced me acting like this. And I’d been hiding my feeling quite well, so this seemed like a rather abrupt personality change for him. I think he knew that I’d calmed down enough that I wasn’t going to do myself harm. That really isn’t in my nature, and he knows that. I told him I needed to go walk and clear my mind.

I was mad at him, I was mad at God. All I wanted was one word of support from another human, was that too much to ask?

And then it dawned on me. People will always let you down. I let myself down. I wanted a person, just one person to be able to lean on. But I wasn’t willing to lean on God, and God alone. If you don’t have a personal relationship with God, you’ll just shake your head at my delusions, but that is ok. My “delusions” get me through the day. I’m not writing this in an attempt to get someone to believe the way I believe, and I trust that those who don’t believe as I do, won’t belittle my beliefs. This is my story, and this is the truth as I see it.

I’ve always had this problem, wanting someone else to help show me the way. My biggest fear in life was being responsible for myself. Not so much living alone, but being at a point where I did not have another person who cared about me that I could count on. Whether it be my husband, family or friends, a church leader or employer. I wanted SOMEONE to say “you made the right decision”. And it’s caused me trouble in the past, wanting to put my trust in another human being, and not solely in the Lord.

I also believe that many things in the Bible can be interpreted many ways. What’s important is that we learn what God is saying to US, not what he said to the pastor, or what he said to the person next to us. I’m not talking about major doctrine; I’m talking about the little things that help us be the person God wants us to be. Sure we keep failing, but we can also keep trying.

What came to my mind was the verse that says something about the path to heaven being narrow. I always took that to mean that very few people took that path, but there were others that I was following. I realized that for me, the path was narrow because it was MY path, and I needed to stop trying to follow someone else. I needed to go where God wanted me to go, not where He’d already led someone else. I said “Lord, your will, not mine” and I made a commitment to try to hold true to that. I had worked so hard to get where I was, and I was miserable. I needed to either believe in God with my whole heart, or not. And if I chose the first, I had to be willing to turn my back and walk away, no matter how much it hurt to do so. And if God was willing, my husband and I would walk away together.

I walked back up to the house, and found my husband cleaning up the broken ornaments in the snow, and trying to salvage what he could. He straightened out my glasses and handed them to me, and we went into the house and had a long talk. 2002 was the last year we’ve had a tree set up. This year it didn’t work out, but maybe next year we’ll have our house put together enough to have a tree again. That will be a real milestone for me.

We had made it through 1999, and into 2000. That next summer we put up fencing to enlarge the pasture, we worked on establishing a lawn, we finished the shop (cement floor and siding) and seemed to be fighting all the time. We had a lot of good times too, but it seemed that we both had real short fuses, and ended up screaming at each other over little things. Then one day it hit me, I was the reason we were fighting so much. My husband has always had a hot temper, and always leaned toward complaining about things. I’m the optimistic one, always with an encouraging word or soft answer to help cool his anger. I had gotten tired of his complaining every time we had to do something, and I wasn’t tolerant any more. If he’d start complaining, I’d tell him he was a whiner, he’d yell back and we’d be off to the races. It seemed like no matter what we did together, it would end up in a screaming match.

I’ve never been much of a screamer. My kids learned early on that if you got Mom mad enough that she really hollered at you, you were in BIG trouble. My husband takes very little to set him off, but he’ll get hot and holler and cool down and get on with things. When I get worked up enough to loose my temper, I take a long time (maybe a day or so) to cool back down. So over the years I’ve learned to pretty much ignore my husband’s temper tantrums, and he’ll get over it quickly and we can get back to work.

But I wasn’t doing that anymore. As soon as he’d start complaining about something, I’d be all over him. One of his favorite complaints was a variation of the “I don’t have time to relax” or “We never do anything but work on this $#)%) place” and the madder he was, the more explicatives he’d use. I hate swearing, and if there is one thing about my husband I’ve always really disliked, it’s his swearing.

And we were working hard. We’d both get up early and go to work (we carpooled) then get home 12 hours later and try to do things on the house. It’s a ton of work trying to carve a home out of raw acreage. And my husband did want it all done now. He hated not having a nice yard, he hated not having his shop finished, he hated not having time to kill the poison ivy on the hill, he hated that we had to park our cars outside because we didn’t have the garage built. My husband likes to use the word “hate” and I was taught you only used that word for things you really, truly disliked. But I did grow to hate listening to my husband complain about the life we were living.

And one day we had a really big fight. He was just reiterating his usually litany about how much he hated all the work he had to do, and I really lost it. I told him if he couldn’t handle the hard work of living in the country and having land, he could take his #*&%)#& a$$ back to the city and live in his little suburban house and gripe about the neighbors, and the noise, and the traffic, and the stink, and he could do it all without me, because I wasn’t going back. Then I accused him of being a spoiled city puke, who couldn’t handle the hard work required if you wanted to own more than a nice suburban lot. And of course, my ace in the hole – “I never wanted to build anyway, you talked me into it, I KNEW it would be this much work, I TOLD you that and you didn’t believe me. Now I’m working just as hard as you, so SHUT THE F!!!! UP!!!”

Some may say, “Wow, I bet that made your husband stop and think” but you don’t know my husband, and I had just challenged him, he was not going to back down. I know better than that, because he won’t quit until he’s won. He learned from a master, someone who can fight nastier than anyone else, his mother. It’s amazing what hurtful things you can dredge up when you don’t care what you say, you just want to make the other person stop first. My husband use to get in screaming matches with our then teenage daughter, and I would tell him he should just stop, and not let it escalate until he had her in tears. He needed to just back down and not rise to the bait. He replied “but then she wins”. I told him I expected one of them to be the adult. If she didn’t like his decision, he didn’t have to argue the point with her, he could just walk away.

My husband and daughter don’t fight any more, she “grew up” and learned that she could sweet talk her daddy and get whatever she wants.

I guess the whole point is that I started arguing back. And my husband was not going to ever let me win a screaming match, so he’d pull out all the stops, and say some very hurtful things until he’d gone to far and I’d shut up. Which was all he wanted, for me to shut up. And then he’d walk away and cool down and half an hour later, he’d wonder why I was still mad at him. We hurt each other more during that time than we had when we were first married. Our dream of living out in the country was turning into a nightmare.

So one day I sat down and asked my husband if he knew why we were fighting so much, and he (probably assuming I would blame him anyway) said that he was under a lot of stress, and complaining a lot more. I told him “no, you’ve always complained like this, it’s that I don’t tolerate it any more”. That did take him back a bit. We got to talking and he came to the realization that even though I didn’t complain all the time, I wasn’t any happier about our situation than he was. And I told him he had a choice to make. He could walk away from it all, or he could choose to stay. He used the “and now I’m trapped” rational for his irrational behavior so often.

“If you hate it so much here, you can walk away”

“No I can’t, I’m trapped, this place is sucking the life out of me”

“No, you CAN walk away, you can get in your car right now and leave. I won’t stop you.”

“But we’ve put so much into this place; we’ll never get the money back”

“I didn’t say anything about selling, I said you could leave.”

He considered that for a bit and said
”If you won’t come with me, then you’re trapping me here”

“No I’m not. I’ve made up my mind, I’m not moving back into the city. I was raised on a farm; I knew it would be a lot of work having land. You said you wanted to live in the country and raise livestock and grow hay. It’s a lot of work, and if you can’t cut it, go back to the city without me.”
“But I never have time to relax, to sit around and not do anything anymore”

“Welcome to country life, if you can’t cut it, give it up. Go back to your suburban yard that only takes you 2 hours a week to take care of, and then you can spend the rest of your time watching TV, complaining about your neighbors and how much you hate living in the city. But if you decided to stay, accept that it’s your CHOICE and stop complaining all the time, because I can’t take it any more”

And I walked away, leaving him to think it over.

My husband didn’t leave, and though we still had our moments, the constant complaining and fighting stopped. He wanted the country life we’d planned, and he wanted that life with me in it. I tried harder to ignore his moments of temper, when something went wrong or he injured himself when a tool slipped or he hit the wrong nail with his hammer. Aiming for a roofing nail and hitting a thumb nail can make anyone swear a blue streak.

I spent a lot of time during that summer and fall trying to come to terms with my feelings toward my husband. There were days I asked myself if I still loved him.

We were both having problems on the employment side too. My husband had hated his job for some time. He loved the work he did, but hated the environment he worked in. And that I couldn’t fault him for, he really did have an awful situation to work in. Most people think we are making things up when we talk about the situation, but if you’ve ever worked for a psychotic boss, you would understand.

My work wasn’t so bad; I only worked for a boss whose main concern was figuring out how he could finance his next vacation. The company made a habit of paying at least 60 days late. Part of my job was deciding which vendors would get paid, and dealing with a constant stream of collection calls. And no matter how hard I worked at it, if they got past me and talked to the boss, he’d promise they’d get the money and I’d be left trying to figure out where it was going to come from. The boss also didn’t want the rest of the employees to think the company was not doing great, so when other departments would get raises or equipment, he’d always ask me “but can we really afford it” when it came for anything dealing with the Accounting department. Both my husband and I wanted to find new jobs, but finding a new job is a lot of work, and we were both so busy with working on the home, it was just another thing to do some time in the future.

We were heading into the fall of 2001. During that time, I’d sold some horses and bought more. I now had a yearling gelding and a weanling filly, along with my husband’s quarter horse that we’d brought with us from Minnesota. As much as I had dreamed of owning horses like this, they were turning into just another drag on my time. Everything seemed to be a chore. I kept telling myself it would get better once we got done with our building. We still had the garage to build, but the shop, barn and pasture were done. We had also got the hay field established, and our yard had finally stopped heading toward the barn every time it rained. I’d given up on having a vegetable garden the summer before, and my flower bed was mostly weeds. But things were turning up. We had plans to buy a tractor that fall, and the company I worked for was starting to climb out of the hole they were in. And then 9/11 happened. My boss had been counting on introducing a new product at a trade show the middle of September, and the show was cancelled. He sold to other businesses, and many of his customers decided to cut back and wait things out. That winter everyone had their hours and pay cut 15%. The cutback in hours didn’t affect me all that much, I was salary. But I still got the pay cut. With the company still struggling to make payroll, the boss asked me what his options were, and I recommended he cut some upper management positions, one of which was mine. That may seem strange to some, but this company didn’t need me. I’d trained my assistant in the day to day operations, and she could handle that fine. She could ask the CPA firm if she had any questions if something arose she wasn’t sure how to handle. She was starting a family, and wanted to stay working there, I’d wanted to leave for a while. In March of 2002, my boss took me up on the offer. I had the choice of staying until I found something new, or taking a severance package of 5 weeks pay. I chose the severance package, and was finally out of there.

My husband and I had a long talk. Not just hours, but over the course of several days, we talked and talked about where we were, and where we had hoped to be. We also had to deal with the rumor mill concerning my husband’s job. It was pretty certain that his current boss was going to retire in the next year, but there were also lots of rumors that the Center would be moving. Some said St. Cloud, some said Hinckley, but no one had a good answer. That was normal for that operation, disinformation ran rampant. But we knew there was a core of truth. Plans had been in the works for a long time to relocate the Center, as they were on leased land, and continually having disagreements with the landlord. We finally decided that maybe the best thing to do was sell the place and move. Move away from the Twin Cities, move away from family (they didn’t have much to do with us anyway) move away from the home that we’d thought God wanted us to have.

The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, BLESSED BE THE LORD. The decision was not that easy. We’d convinced ourselves that this place was our dream, that it was where we would spend our retirement years, that it was where our Grandchildren (when we had them) would come and learn about country life. We’d made friends in the community, and felt we fit in well. But in the end, it seemed like we were fighting an uphill battle, and it was time to wake up and smell the toast. We had to deal with the whole “selling is admitting failure” routine. It was a grieving process, and in some ways writing this story is still a part of that. It wasn’t the selling the house that was so hard, it was that decided to leave felt like we giving up what we had worked so hard for, and gone through so much difficulty to obtain.

We really didn’t know what was going to happen, where we would end up, and maybe selling the place would not happen anyway. But we put it all in the Lord’s hands, and I starting looking for jobs in other areas. In our situation, we felt it would be best for me to land a decent job, and once we moved, my husband could find work. He’s got experience in a wide range of blue collar occupations, I’m just an accountant. At least just about every company needs an accountant. We decided that I would look between the Mississippi and the Mountains, and no farther south than Nebraska.

I also started working at the CPA firm. I’ve worked in CPA firms before, so once I got familiar with the software, I was on my own. I enjoyed the work; it felt so good to be back doing what I was good at.

I’m not going to go way into the detail here, but by mid February things were looking much better. Things had settled down where my husband works, and we knew that even though they did want to move the Center, they had so much work to do first; it would be a few years before anything happened. And I was starting to get calls from recruiters, and I got a call from a company in South Dakota that I had sent my resume too.

That call caught me off guard. The HR rep called and said they wanted me to come out for an interview. I’m thinking – you are 500 miles away, I can’t just “stop in”. I told them I would prefer to do a phone interview first, and then if both sides were still interested, I’d come out there. I have to laugh at myself; it wasn’t until after the interview that I realized they intended to pay my expenses so I could come there. The HR person called me back and said that would be fine, and we set up a time for the supervisor to call me on Tuesday the next week. I thought about it, and realized that I actually COULD make it out there the following Friday. I talked with my husband, and he was willing to take a day off work and we’d drive out there together. I hate traveling, unless it’s a road trip with my husband, then I love to go.

I called the HR person back the next day, and we set up for an interview on that next Friday, pending the outcome of the phone interview. I was excited and nervous. Up until now the whole idea of moving to another state was just an idea. This made it more of a possibility. But I knew an interview was a long way from a job offer.

The phone interview went well, and we made the trip the next week. This place was a lot bigger than I thought, and I realized this job would be right up my alley. It was so strange, if I had to “design” my ideal job, this was closer to being it than anything I’d ever come across before. I thought the interview went well - I answered all the accounting questions on the current Finance Director asked me. He actually did give each applicant an oral exam. I hate to even say that, there are too many jokes out there about having to pass the “oral exam” to get a job. But in this case, he had prepared about 30 questions that he read to me, and I had to answer them. I though some were downright silly, but I was told months later that I was the only one who actually answered all the questions correctly.

I was told it would probably be a few weeks before they made a final decision, said my goodbyes and I went back to the hotel. We had the whole afternoon ahead of us, and planned on seeing what the area had to offer in the way of real estate. In my dreams, I’d have a nice short commute to work, but in reality, we found that there wasn’t anything affordable in the local area. Housing was pretty steep, and farms with small acreage were few and far between. Now, if we wanted 1000 acres, that was available, but we were NOT going to get into that trap of spending more than we wanted to again. We left that town somewhat depressed, feeling like we could not afford to move out into this area and live the rural life we wanted. We headed about 60 miles east, and stopped in Mitchell to see what the realtors in that area had to say. We found a good one, and she showed us some properties that had sold recently, and even though they didn’t have anything on the market at the time, it was obvious that we could afford what we wanted, as long as I was willing to drive a bit farther than I’d planned.

We left South Dakota, and discussed our options all the way home. I spent time during the next week deciding what we’d need to sell the house for, and what salary I’d have to get in order to accept the job, IF it was offered. Two weeks went by, and I was starting to think I’d been passed over. I was working with a recruiter on another possible job, and was going scheduled to go in for my second interview when I got a message.

My daughter, 18 and a senior in high school, called out to me as I came in the door.

”Hey Mom, some guy called, he said they were going to send you a job offer in the mail. I don’t remember his name, but he said he’d email you too”

Don’t you just love the way kids take messages . . .

I’m going to take a jump here, and just say that within a short period of time, I had the job offer from the place in South Dakota, one from the second company in Minnesota, and an offer of a permanent position with the CPA firm in Wisconsin. I wasn’t really interested in staying at the CPA firm; I prefer to work for one company. But the other two jobs had a lot of similarities. Now we had a choice. I could take the SD job and move, or take the MN job and stay in our current house. The bid IF in the whole mix was if we could sell our house for enough to pay off the debt.

And this is where I made a big mistake. I asked a coworker that I had grown to trust if they could recommend any realtors in that area. Based on our previous experience, I didn’t have a real high opinion of WI realtors, but he recommended someone quite strongly, and I gave that realtor a call. I found out some time later that she was the wife of a personal friend of his, and he’d actually never had any experience dealing with her concerning realty. Then I made my second big mistake, I explained my situation to her. I told her flat out that I had to make up my mind on a job offer out of state, and that if we could not sell the house for at least XXXX, then I would not take the job, and I needed to give them an answer in quickly. I though by telling her the seriousness of my situation, it would motivate her to provide me with a realistic number. If someone had come to me and said “based on the information you provide me, I’m going to make a life altering decision” I’d make darn certain I provided them with the most accurate information I could. The last thing we wanted was for me to take a job in South Dakota, and then not be able to sell our house in Wisconsin.

She sounded capable, she sounded competent, and she sounded like she could do what ever it took to get the job done. In a few days, she met with us and showed us the comps. I was skeptical, I thought she was reaching a bit, but even considering that, she had come up with a selling price range well over our minimum. Since we had set the price on our first house, and sold it in four hours, we felt it would be better to have a Realtor help us set the price for this house. We were hoping for a quick sell, but we didn’t want to sell it at a deep discount either.

My hubby and I had already decided that if we could sell the house for over a certain amount, that is what we would do. So I accepted the job, and we signed the papers with the realtor to put our house on the market. And I started making plans to do something I’d never done before in my life. I was actually going to be completely on my own.

I packed up my car, and we waved goodbye. I would be 500 miles away, in a place I’d only been to once before. I knew no one, had no family in the area. To many this may seem like an adventure, but for me this was a big scary thing to do. It took a lot of trust in God to get me headed down the highway on my way to the great unknown. Our realtor was confident our house would sell that spring, so we had visions of only being apart 4 or 5 months at the most. My daughter had plans to be moving into an apartment soon, and my husband would stay in WI and at his current job until the house sold and he could join me as we started our new life in South Dakota.