Searching for a home

Tumultuous. Thats how I would describe the first seven years of my marriage. Not because of the marriage itself, but mainly, our home situation. Literally our housing. We married in Houston as I’m a native being born and raised there. My family has a very long and proud history in Texas. Imagine my dismay when shortly after we married my husband got a job offer in Mississippi. What’s a girl to do?

So we packed everything up and moved to Missi-fuckin-ssippi. My father in law in Houston begged us to move back to Texas. I hated it in Mississippi and (secretly) rejoiced when a year later his contract was not renewed. By then, my father in law had taken his inheritance and resigned to be a hermit, buying a horse farm in Florida. I stepped up to the plate and got a job in Arlington and happily moved us back to Texas.

When we moved back to the state, my husband used the retirement he had accumulated to buy a small piece of land in a suburb outside of Fort Worth. A year into my job, we decided to try to move on to the land. It was a vacant quarter acre and was an awkward shape to try to build on.

In what eventually became an utter disaster deserving of its own blog series, we put a tiny home on the land. The “city” hated it. We tried to work with them but they were not having it. Three years and two lawsuits later resulted in a court order from a judge stating that if we slept on our land (that we owned!!) we would be arrested. Yeah, not kidding. We are literally political refugees from DFW.

Like I said, tumultuous. So without having any idea of what to do or where to go next (by now my job had ended) we moved our stuff into storage and stayed with my parents in Houston to strategize through the winter. Imagine our surprise when my husband got a call a few days before Christmas that his father was in jail. A quick search on the county website showed that my father in law was behind in his property taxes! Worse yet, Florida is a tax certificate state and the certificate had been sold. If the back property taxes weren’t paid, then the holder of the certificate could foreclose!

*Horns blast, banners unfurl* Here we come to the rescue! We couldn’t let my father in law get foreclosed on (& become homeless). Also, my husband is an only child, meaning eventually he could be inheriting that horse farm one day. Foreclosure meant my father in law loosing his retirement home and my husbands inheritance in one fail swoop! Especially since the property taxes were so cheap. $2,000 for 27 acres, I mean c’mon!

We needed a place to live and his father clearly needed help so we once again packed a moving truck and moved across (multiple) state lines. We knew the house needed some renovation, we figured we could help pay to renovate it and make it more to our liking since he would be inheriting it one day.

We sat him down and tried to have a serious conversation with him. We told him how much his back property taxes were (with interest) and told him his due date for when he could be foreclosed on. We told him it was going to be ok. We had his back. We could pay his back property taxes. He said he didn’t want us too, that he would have sold it by then. Thats when he told us that he never intended for this to be his retirement home. Apparently he intended to rehab this house and then sell it for a profit, ‘flipping’ it, and then use the proceeds to buy another fixer-upper. This is what I wish he would have told us before we moved across four states.

The problem with his plan is that he’s terrible at it. His fatal flaw is that he put all of his cash into buying the property and didn’t leave himself any money to pay for the renovation or to live off of. When we had last seen him he was living without electricity (not even solar) and all he ate was eggs because that was all he could afford. He would buy a dozen, boil them, and eat them for every meal. He was skinny. To say he needed help is an understatement. He had lived in this house for three years and had done almost no renovations. It needed a lot of work too. There were almost no finished floors, half of the drywall is missing throughout the ENTIRE house, and the electrical had been eaten by mice and rats he had never gotten rid of.

Another crucial piece of information emerged that we didn’t know before moving in with him. He’s crazy. Not just a little quirky. As in totally paranoid, potentially hallucinating, with hoarding tendencies and a gambling addiction. He had very little human contact for three years and spent his time binge watching Alex Jones, you tube conspiracy series, and videos detailing every horrific act committed by ISIS in gruesome detail. And he was armed.

Apparently all of my husbands aunts and uncles knew. It was a well known family secret that no one had bothered to tell us. They had all tried to help him and ultimately had given up. They had reached a point where it was too painful to watch, they couldn’t let him take them down with him. The point that my husband and I reached.

My husband has a line of products and we traveled to fairs (sometimes in other states) to sell them. We were driving through upstate New York when my husband received a series of frantic texts. His father was in jail again.

Remember when I said his father was too broke to pay for electricity? His fathers solution was a ‘horse renter’. This chick, who I have no idea how he found, paid for the electricity and in exchange she got to keep her horses on his land for free. We immediately didn’t trust her. We asked if he had a written contract with her and he said he didn’t need one. He said that he trusted her more than my husband. We recommended that he make a contract immediately. He responded something about how it wouldn’t work in Florida.

He apparently had asked her to move her horses out and they scheduled it for during the time we were at the fair. We weren’t there personally, which we are very glad of. My father in law has three stallions and one mare. His ‘horse renter’ had nothing but mares, and a bunch of them. What my father in law claims is that the horse renter was trying to steal the ‘hot box’ which kept the fences electrified. Without the electric fences the stallions could burst through the fences and trample people trying to get to the mares. So to prevent her from ‘stealing’ the hotbox, he shot the ground in front of her. Of course its currently up for debate how close he was yada yada. Like any normal person, she called the sheriff. He shot at her and he was arrested.

My husband says his father pulled a ‘Yosemite sam’ referencing the looney tunes character. Its making light of a serious situation. Florida has something called ‘stand your ground’ laws & hearings. The result is a wide range of sentencing. The judge could say that he was trying to protect people from the stallions and make all of the charges disappear. Or he could sentence him for up to 10 years in prison. The worst part is that he’s too broke to afford a attorney so he has a court appointed one.

We could pay the back property taxes and save the farm but we can’t afford both the taxes and a unknown amount of legal fees. Previously, my father in laws words and actions weren’t congruent. He would hire a realtor to sell the house and then talk about getting cows. Now there were no options left. He has to sell the ranch to pay an attorney or risk prison. He got beyond our help.

It had now become painfully obvious that this horse ranch was not a long term solution for us. By then we didn’t want it anymore because it had been tainted with too many bad memories. Where were we to go? My parents are trying to move themselves so that wouldn’t give us the stability we so desperately wanted.

I have a great husband. All he wants is for me to be happy and he works very hard to try to keep me happy 100% of the time, even going so far as to cook me breakfast every morning. He does’t care where we live, as long as Im happy. I’m the deciding factor. Both my husband & I own businesses, we can do them anywhere. That doesn’t help us decide where we should move to though. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you go?

After moving five times in seven years I want to settle down. Im tired of moving. I want to get in a place and stay there for twenty years, maybe more. I first decided to stay in the US because I didn’t want to overcome a language barrier for the fun of it and our companies are US based. I love the environment and am very sad for its ever increasing destruction. I believe in global warming. I believe the seas will rise in my lifetime. That eliminated staying in Florida. I wanted to be in a place with as few natural disasters as possible. That eliminated California, which has all of them. I dislike the desert, so that took out the entire southwest. I don’t do winter, so I crossed out every northern state. I was basically left with the southeast.

Texas had left a bad taste in our mouths after our tiny home lawsuits. Louisiana has its own weird system of government called “Napoleonic Law”. We did not go through all the trouble of attaining a decent understanding of the legal system with the *ahem* aforementioned tiny home lawsuits only to have it rendered useless. I hated Mississippi. Seriously HATED. The choice would really come down to entertainment options. Which one had active social scenes revolving around my unique hobbies?

After our tiny home lawsuits with the ‘city’ we had vowed to never live inside city limits ever again. If we want to really settle, we want as little government interference as possible. Having narrowed it down to a single county, I showed Ben a listing on Craigslist that I had previously seen and shrugged off. The listing said it was on the side of a mountain and steep so I didn’t think anything of it. The price was good so he wanted to check it out anyways. We went and hiked all around and he fell in love with it. It had boulders galore and several spots we could put little cabin rentals. We consulted with an attorney about the best way to own the land. We wrote up the offer and he accepted. We gave him his asking price, which was already really low, so we requested terms. We gave him $4,000 down and he agreed to carry a note for two years for the remaining $6,000. The total is only 10k for a whopping 22 acres! We got a great deal.

It’s raw vacant land and its going to be hard converting it into not only a home for us but also a cash flowing eco-resort as we are calling it but we are up for the challenge. Follow along with us as we share our building plans, schematics for rain barrels, and talk watts for solar panels. Not everyone wants to live off grid with sustainable aquaponics and wind turbines. It’s not the American Dream. It’s our dream.