The Origins of Mayday Farm

My husband Jeff and I have always been attracted to old houses.  Our first apartment was a lower flat in an old house.  No cookie cutter apartment for us.  There was no real bedroom, but it had a fireplace and a dining room for entertaining!

The first home we bought was 75 years old, which seemed quite old to us, and for our area in suburban Detroit, it really is!  But as our  lives seemed increasingly centered a half an hour north of our home, it seemed like the smart thing to maybe think about moving.

That’s kind of a lie.  We weren’t discussing moving.  A house two blocks away from our kid’s Waldorf School went up for sale.   We never looked at another house.  This house was a charming, carpenter gothic style home – from the outside.  We went to look at it for the first time on our anniversary, May 1, hence the Mayday. 

It was not charming inside.  It was listed as a five bedroom, but we couldn’t even tell which rooms they considered bedrooms!  There was no fireplace, in an old house that seemed crazy.  We had even had a fireplace in our apartment for Pete’s sake!  There was SO much work to do.  The basement was so spooky I didn’t even go in it!  So we didn’t buy it.  But I couldn’t let go of the idea.

We went back to visit over the summer.  The price was reduced.  We asked for more information about the house and we were given a thirty page report of what was wrong with it.  THIRTY PAGES!  There is no way we could do it.  So why were we thinking about it?  When the price got below the price of our current house we thought, maybe, MAYBE we could get enough from the sale of our house to do needed work on the new house to make it liveable.  And we wouldn’t be married to it!  If it was too much, we could sell the house, acre of land, (and did I mention the barn?), and move on, right?

If I had made a list of reasons to buy “the farm”, and reasons why not, the “not” list would have been longer.  So why did we get it?  All I can think now, is it had enough room for all of our dreams to reside.  They would all fit there, under that old roof with the ridiculous outdated solar panel on it.  And although I’m afraid of almost everything (really! storms, bees, deep water, flying, fast moving vehicles, calling people on the phone), I still felt brave enough, with my husband as my co-pilot to go ahead and do this.  Brave enough/crazy enough!