We want to explain a little about where we live, how we live and look at why we chose this life because let’s face it, no-one chooses to be a smallholder for the short hours and easy money!
Why did we become smallholders?
Have you ever noticed that it’s much easier to know what you don’t like – but harder to identify what you really want? It was that way for us. We worked ridiculously long hours and came home tired. We then paid people to do jobs that we would rather do ourselves because there weren’t enough hours in the day. It felt that we were getting older but weren’t getting closer to the life we wanted. We agreed we needed a radical change
We decided that the radical change for us was self-reliant living. The right version of smallholding for us was to produce our own food, fuel, and other necessities to minimise our outgoings. In order to do this, we needed to buy a place without debt as we knew that we just weren’t sufficiently skilled to make enough money from a small place to pay a mortgage! Given our jobs we knew that we could also make some money working on short term contracts to provide actual income. The theory went that the better we were at self-sufficiency, the less often we would need to take on contracts. Aren’t theories great?
Our Plan
We set a plan that sounds easy but took a long time with a lot of compromises.
Step 1 was to earn the money to buy our dream property. This meant moving around to where the work and money was. This was not always easy, moving away from friends and family and having no fixed location for a long time. We had to move between lots of cities where the large companies were based who paid the best rates.
We were lucky enough during this time to live in country places, but with compromises. For example, one house was a flint cottage that was also home to mice and squirrels!
Step 2 was to find the ideal property regardless of geographic location with the right attributes for us.
The attributes we wanted:
- A unique building
- Few, if any neighbours and no properties directly overlooking the house.
- At least 1 acre of potentially productive land (no steep inclines or waterlogged land)
- At least one outbuilding
- Potential for private water to allow any crops to be irrigated without a cost
- At least 3 bedrooms
- The ability to heat the house using open fires or wood burners
- A price that would mean we would not have to work until the day we die to pay for it.
And the most difficult to find
- The right “feeling” about the property
It took us 10 years of hard graft to get the money together and 5 years of serious house-hunting before we found our home.
Our Smallholding
After a lot of looking, we found a lovely place, a beautiful but run-down centuries old, farmhouse in a rural location with a few neighbours, none of which were close enough to directly overlook the house.
We have a small amount of land and barn steading although the largest barn when we purchased the property had no roof and the other buildings lacked doors, windows and in one case structural integrity. The previous owners had added doors and a mezzanine floor without worrying about minor matters like joists, beams or lintels!
When we found the property the house needed major work with high damp readings, joists that had rotted away from the walls, central heating that involved a gravity fed coal boiler with a flue that blew smoke back into the room and to top it all off electrical wiring that was unsafe.
The Restoration
The restoration of the Cottage had to be done before we could move in. That was, honestly a nightmare. We were living 200 miles away and Fiona was driving up and down to supervise builders sleeping in a sleeping bag in a shell of a house without heating or lighting. If you’ve ever seen the 1980s film “The Money Pit”, that was our experience. Restoring dilapidated farmhouses is not for the faint hearted. A litany of horrors was uncovered from the fact that the wet area described to us as a “Winter Pond” was in fact raw sewage from an inadequate septic tank setup to the realisation that upstairs joists had rotted away from the wall. On more than one occasion Hugh threw his toys out of the pram and wanted to put the cottage back on the market!
With Fiona calming the waters and the occasional stiff whisky the restoration was finally completed (late and wildly over budget of course). The cottage was then and is now totally beautiful. It’s small, quirky and with the charm that centuries of life bring
Moving In
We finally moved in after 9 months of work. If you ever want to set a speed record for removal men unpacking, get the firm to drive two lorries half the length of the country in the middle of Winter and have them start to unpack as the light goes and the snow begins to fall! I’m quite surprised that they didn’t just shove all the stuff into the first room they came to and run but they didn’t and they did a great job.
The snow continued to fall with temperatures hitting a 30 year low – below -15C at times. It was a beautiful way to enjoy our cottage although there was so much ice that it was impossible to get a car out of the drive. Fortunately, as part of the restoration, as well as installing central heating we had put in an Esse Ironheart range cooker although we did have to take one of the guys installing the range to hospital when he forgot the low doorways!
The cottage has small rooms and low ceilings as well as low doorways and we soon learned that the Esse could easily warm the whole cottage provided we left all of the internal doors open. We had wanted a different pace of life but we found keeping the range lit and walking miles across snow closed roads felt like more than just a different lifestyle, it felt like we could expect to see Mr Tumnus and the lamp post in Narnia at any moment.
After that first magical Christmas it was back to work in 200 miles away for Hugh, returning to Lincolnshire at the weekends.
This set the pattern for the coming years with one or other of us doing contract work in the Winter to provide some income as the restoration had wiped out our savings and we weren’t yet productive.
The first Spring and Summer our main task was to cut back head high weeds in the paddock. The land was horribly overgrown and liberally dotted with mounds of rubble and rotting carpet. Being in Lincolnshire and very close to sea level, field drains were vital, both to make the land viable for growing and to make the soakaway for the septic tank work!
Living the Dream
Once we got back to a blank canvas, we were able to begin to build the structures that we need to make our home productive. With a relatively small amount of land, we have to be selective as to what we do but we firmly believe that smallholding is a state of mind. You don’t need 500 acres and a tractor to live The Good Life as Tom & Barbara showed back in the 70s!
We take a pragmatic view on our priorities, devoting our time and space to those activities that most reduce
our outgoings. We now produce and preserve most of our own fruit and a lot of veg but not bulk potatoes, wheat etc.. We raise chickens for meat and eggs, cut
and season our own firewood, produce our own wine and beer and most household products from soap to shoe polish.
We love our lives here and have, through luck more than
judgement, found a wonderful part of the country. We have fantastically supportive & like-minded friends and neighbours here who don’t see us as weird, or at least not out loud! We think, in a good way, that we need a sign announcing “You are now entering the 1950s” when anyone visits from our “old” life.
