Putting Down Roots

Buying land in Northern Minnesota

I’m so excited to announce that our family will be putting down roots in Northern Minnesota! After over three years on the road, and then a crazy year and a half of living in two houses up here that aren’t ours, we are getting our own house! Before I tell you all about our land and the plans we have to homestead on it, let me back up and tell you how our little family ended up buying 2.5 acres of raw swamp in Northern Minnesota.

Camper Living

Seth and I moved into a camper my senior year of college, and hit the road graduation day. We knew being in full-time ministry was what we were going to do vocationally for the rest of our lives, and the camper was the right fit for our lifestyle. I didn’t want to spend the majority of the year apart, and we also didn’t want to have a house or apartment somewhere that we were paying on but only using 30 days out of the year (like our coworkers). I convinced Seth to move into a camper (I know, everyone thinks Seth is the adventurous one but RV life was my idea) and then we somehow got our parents on board. I think we just wore them down.

It’s been a wild journey so far. And us pursuing full-time ministry gave me the opportunity to live out my dream of being a poet and writer! Which has been incredible. We’re not ready to give up on full-time travel yet, but we’re more than ready for a peaceful parking spot and a small dwelling that can weather a Minnesota winter better than our RV can. Full-time travel can be…stressful. In the beginning, everyone always said something along the line, “It must be great to always be on vacation!” That is not at all how it felt for us, though. It’s amazing what a person can get used to, and we got used to waking up in a new place every few days (or maybe we didn’t? It took a few seconds each morning to remember where we were). Managing the logistics that go into nomadic living is so different from being location-dependent.

And maybe full-time travel would be different if our camper could weather a MN winter, or if we were in a tiny house that could but as it stands, it’s stressful to have to leave our space every winter to live in someone else’s home. Not being able to find a spot for our belongings. Having to remember if we left that in the camper or is it in the shed or is it in the house we’re renting? If we’re going to keep traveling in the camper and have a house house, we’d rather it be our house.

*Our driveway on our land, and the view of the trees from where we’re planning on putting our master bedroom.*

In Need of a [some] Stability

There were times in the beginning where we didn’t know where we would be parking when we moved next, but we knew we had to keep moving. There were times when we pulled off tired and parked for the night, only to move because we felt uncomfortable or worse, we were asked to leave. And there were times when we knew where we were going and when we were leaving to go, but not how we were going to afford gas to get to our destination.

Since we’ve established our non-profit, things have gotten a little easier. We’ve been on the road long enough to pick up a few tricks and we’ve been doing ministry long enough to be recognized and gain some credibility. The biggest thing we learned is that it is so much more sustainable to be seasonally nomadic than to pack up and move every two weeks or so. And that’s when the desire to have a home base led to us actively looking for land.

I’m writing this post from our camper, having just moved it and knowing that we’re moving it again about every two weeks. But I also know that this is just for the summer this year, and that makes the stress of moving it a bit more bearable. I do know that the camper allows us and the kids to have a routine when we are on the road, because we have the same immediate physical space wherever we go. But I think a rhythm or routine of seasonal travel would allow us to put down roots and really get to know community members. And to know we’ll be coming back to the same parking spot year after year would help. And that’s where we’ve been heading slowly but surely.

*Seth setting up for a camp in Bemidji, MN. We have been coming to this camp since 2018.*

Location, Location, Location..?

In 2019, we left the ministry that we had been serving with and started Engage Outreach Ministries. And one of the first things we needed was an address. Where was our ministry going to be located? This was a really hard question for Seth and I to answer, because we constantly feel pulled between Colorado and Minnesota. We both thought that by the time we were ready to start our own ministry, we’d already be living in Colorado. The winters are so mild compared to Minnesota’s (in Denver, at least). We spent our first winter in an RV right outside of Denver. There seemed to be endless opportunities, for both of us, in such a big city.

It seemed more viable to build up Seth’s career in a place where there were more people in a similar occupation. Whether we were being hired by a church or a local community group, there were more of them in a tighter radius. Seth would be able to do events without me, but still come home to me and the kid(s) without driving forever. And the art scene in Denver is incredible and I enjoyed the time we spent out there so much. Like I said in Already Almost Home, I get homesick for Denver whenever we’re gone.

And yet every year, we ended up in Minnesota for longer and longer stretches. Our family is up here. More and more of our ministry events are within a day’s drive. And our hometown is a great place to visit as a tourist and raise a family. We knew we’d still be traveling a lot, so we wouldn’t be giving up Denver entirely, and being up in the woods in the middle of nowhere would be really relaxing after living on the interstate system.

We’re looking forward to being in Minnesota, in a slower-paced rural area. We’re looking forward to homesteading pursuits like gardening, possibly keeping animals, and learning how to make things from scratch. And being able to fully recharge so that when we do travel, we’re ready to do so.

Raw Land

We were planning on paying off our first camper, and then selling it to build a tiny house on wheels. Honestly, a tiny house is still a dream that we have. And so we were planning on being able to park our tiny house on our land in northern Minnesota during the winter and be able to survive, or take it down around the country as we had events. We wanted to be able to do things as environmentally consciously as possible.

But a big part of the equation was financing. We could afford to build debt free if we built something up incrementally. Which is why we’ve had land for two years and are just now moving a house. Our land wasn’t too expensive (Raw land is $1000-$5000 an acre where we live, if it isn’t farm-able) So we were able to do a few things on it in 2019, but then we didn’t really get to it last year to make any more improvements.

I will say, if you are looking for a house it might be just as expensive to start from the ground up than to buy a finished house and renovate it. Building in the infrastructure is expensive. But like I said, our original plan was not to build/move a house. Just to have an tiny house parking spot.

*We camped for a week on our land in August 2019.*

Buying OUR Land

If you are looking for land, it might help to know how we bought our land. Maybe you’re in an apartment dreaming of more space to roam. Or in a tiny house or RV and like us realize that you need a more permanent parking spot. Perhaps you’ve been browsing Zillow for months (or years?). Here’s how we came across our land.

It’s not the first piece of land we looked at, but it sat just a mile outside of the city limits yet was walking/biking distance to most of town. There wasn’t even a way to access it. The neighbor was letting the previous owners use their driveway. And our piece of land wasn’t for sale.

We actually approached the owners and asked if they’d be willing to sell one to five acres to us, and what the price per acre would be. We settled on two and a half acres. Then it was a pretty long wait. The titling company had just bought out another company and were backlogged, if I remember correctly. We had to have our piece parceled off and then transferred to our name. We started the process in late March and I think the land was “officially” ours in mid-June.

More to Come!

This is just the beginning in a series on our homestead and home renovations! We’re moving a 100+ year old farmhouse to our land and renovating it this fall, and I’ll be blogging about that process.

Keep your eye out for more posts. And thanks for reading!