Moving to the Country (Gonna Eat a Lot of Peaches)

That is, if we can find tasty peaches that thrive in zone 8b. (They typically do best in 6-7.)

Back in 2020, the hubs and I decided that we wanted to pull up our stakes, pack the vehicles and get the heck out of the suburbs. Easier said than done.

First off, Dan currently has a lucrative job close to the Gulf of Mexico which has kept us tethered to the area our entire marriage. His career doesn’t particularly exist anywhere outside of the refinery area south and east of Houston.

That being said, there was no way on God’s green Earth that I was going to set up shop near the coast. With the threat of hurricanes, tropical storms, and flooding potential on the Texas shores, I didn’t want the added hassle of trying to keep a house, outbuildings, animals, and crops protected from saltwater. The Gulf Coast was out.

For a year, we limited our search for acreage to a 60 mile radius from his current job. The land we found was overpriced, in poor school districts, or just not somewhere we would want to call home. We got discouraged. (Or at least I did. Dan is a go-with-the-flow type of guy.)

Finally, in 2021, I began to look further away from Houston, telling myself even if we didn’t move now, if I found our perfect piece of Heaven hours away from our current location, we could always visit on weekends and build a haven for our retirement years.

Well, I found it.

12 acres, fantastic price, great school district, located on an FM road, absolutely no restrictions, and 5 miles from a fantastic fishing spot.

We scooped that property up so fast, we didn’t have time to talk ourselves out of it.

Now that we’ve owned it for half a year, the country life is calling out to us even louder. However, are you aware of how much it costs to get RAW LAND suitable to even start building on?

We were unprepared.

Let’s just say that starting OPERATION: Let’s Build a Farm during one of the biggest periods of inflation in the US was not the brightest idea we’ve ever had.

Numero Uno, we had to get a culvert installed before we could lay a driveway. Since our property is on an FM road in Texas, we had to first get a permit from TXDOT. That part was simple. Trinity County is literally a dream to work with after living in Harris my entire life. Shout out to Thomas. You rock.

Second was to find a culvert installer. TXDOT Thomas referred me. “He’s not the cheapest but he’s the best around,” came the referral. And it wasn’t wrong. The culvert guy had the 24′ culvert laid and covered in 8 days after I called with a hefty price tag to go with it.

Since the culvert guy was on the ball, I asked him if he would bulldoze a few acres that I had tried to get another local (who had given me the best quote) to do for the past six months. Culvert guy gave me a quote, I choked, and then gave him the go-ahead.

So at this point, we’re about $12,000 into building our farm (not counting the price of the land itself) and we have almost nada to show for it except a beautiful culvert and a few less stumps and divots in the parcel.

Next up is a fence (the hubs, my FIL, and I will be doing this ourselves), which we have estimated around 4k in material. After that, we are getting our shop up (so we can lock up all the costly building materials for the house when that’s being built), then electrical, a well, and sewer.

In order to do all this fancy building, Daniel will have to keep churning away at his job. So, as much as we want to don overalls and escape to the country, looks like we’ll be paying for our future homestead with city paychecks for quite some time to come.

Although I have schemed a few times over a evening glass of vino about dropping everything and moving out to the property, we now realize it may be a 10-year plan, rather than the 5-year plan we originally envisioned. No matter what, at least we have a place to look at the stars on the weekends and get away from the grind of the traffic-packed suburbs for a day or two.