We Bought a Zoo

I’m sitting at the DMV in Amery, WI waiting to update our licenses to make this transition offish. Let me tell ya, this DMV is a real room full of stereotypes. We’re not in Minnetonka anymore.

I thought it would be a good time to write a little bit more about how we, somewhat suddenly, ended up on a farm in a village called Dresser.

I’ve always had a far-off dream of owning a farmhouse. My love for vintage started early when I covered my childhood bedroom walls with antique gold frames. I loved going to Unique (a thrift store in Burnsville) to dig through shelves of people’s old stuff. I’ve also always loved old homes, too. I had to delete Zillow off of my phone because I was spending too much time looking at random Victorian houses in like… Detroit before bed.

Our search for a farmhouse started on accident when I stumbled upon one in the middle of Hopkins, just 5 minutes from our old house. I dragged Spencer to go look at it and he was very confused why we were doing that. It didn’t take much convincing for him to see the charm of an old farmhouse though. We put in an offer a few days later.

That one didn’t work out and the more we talked and dreamed we started exploring houses outside of the cities. We expanded our search to homes within an hour of Minneapolis. We found another one we fell in love with and put an offer on it. That didn’t work out either.

We kept a lot of this on the down low as I didn’t want to have to start explaining myself and answering questions when it wasn’t even necessarily happening. After we didn’t get the 2nd one I thought we’d put the search on hold. But you know what they say, you always find “the one” when you stop looking for it.

I was scrolling MLS (ok so did I really put this search on hold?) one morning when I found a recently posted farmhouse in Dresser, WI. I loved it so much I literally woke Spencer up to show him. He first said, “can I look at this later?” Followed by, “I am NOT moving to Wisconsin.” Two days later we were touring it and the day after that we put an offer in. There were already 2 other offers so we knew we had to act fast.

And hot damn, just like that, we live in Dresser (errr Osceola Township? We aren’t quite sure). We’re moved into our 1904 farmhouse and are preparing for many large summer projects on our 16 acres.

I’m going to do a separate post in sort of an FAQ style as I’ve been asked a lot of questions lately, understandably. I’ll dive into things like:

Why a farm?

Why so far away?

Are you staying at your job?

Are you crazy?

Are you going to get animals?

What will you be farming?

Do you have a riding lawn mower?

But for now, I have more unpacking to do. So stay tuned for many more posts from our little, currently name-less farm.

Thanks for following along!

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