How much house space/land do you have and what do you do with it?

[CrunchyJess]

I realize that there are various levels of homesteaders on this forum and I'm curious as to what kind of space you have and what you do with it.

My fiance and I have been looking at a property for a few weeks that has 2 acres and a nice, new, 1600 square foot home.  He was raised in a little house in the country with 8 brothers and sisters and an amazing home birthing, natural momma.  I, on the other hand, was raised in mainstream America, in a 3 bedroom brick house in the burbs.  When we first started our relationship, we agreed that homesteading was our dream.  

We felt the 2 acres and new house was a good medium to start off with, thinking we would get to our real dream of being completely self sufficient later down the road.  Then a new property came up, 11 acres with a little 1200 square foot house.  Its actually a metal building that has been ultra-insulated and equipped with a wood stove and was lived in my some like minded people (live cheaply, off the land, etc).  The inside is actually very nice, wood floors and exposed wood beams, its very Cabin-y/ We are going to look at it today to make sure the land is workable. 

The idea of a small house made me nervous at first. Then I started thinking about how much space that REALLY is, and I realize that we will be just fine.  My mother is a hoarder and I have spent my life contently purging my belongings in order to avoid being like her. I know we can make that part work. 

The acreage also has a separate hookup for sewer/utilities and we sat down and talked to his mom last night and asked if she might be interested in building and sharing the land/homesteading responsibilities with us.  She is in school to become a CNM and still has 3 kids at home so we could really help each other a lot.  She sounded really excited and wants to look at it with us. 

There is so much I would like to do with 11 acres. My plan is rough but I'm thinking this spring we would plant berry bushes and fruit/nut trees, and start converting one of the 10 x 20 storage buildings into a shop for fiance's woodworking, then hopefully get started on a barn that could be ready by next year. 

Early next year I'd like to start laying hens, 2 Nubian's, and a pig for slaughter. And also get a garden started with perennials and a smallish plot of things that grow well here (tomatoes, peppers, greens, etc.)

Then the next year, I would like to add meat birds and expand largely on the garden.

My goal is that in 5 years the land it feeding us and paying for itself so that we can start building our dream house with solar energy and a rain water reservoir/filtering system.

I am hesitant to to get excited about it. Who am I kidding, I'm ecstatic! I'm curious though what all you do with the land and house you have.  If you have a small kitchen, do you have enough space to can/preserve?  I am planning on opening a booth this spring at the local farmers market to sell my jewelery, knitting, soaps, and crafts so I really will have to figure out a space to make these things in a smaller house. 

Looking forward to reading responses

[Alyantavid]

Sounds fabulous! 

We have 4.5 acres.  Our house is around 1800 square feet and while it has a weird layout, it's more than enough for the 4 of us.  Right now, all we have on the land is large garden and lots and lots of fruit trees.  In the past, we've had goats, pigs and cows, but right now we're animal-less.  We will hopefully be getting a couple pigs to butcher soon.  Dh's in school right now and won't be around much, so I'm trying to make life as easy as possible for myself, so no animals for now.

[Eresh]

Do it!

DH, myself, and our 2 kids are in a townhouse right now.  If I calculate square footage just from footprint X 3 (three floors) it's under 1400 sq ft but that includes the stairwells which, well, aren't livable space :P.  It also includes DH's work room which in a place like you're looking at would be in an outbuilding.  The boys theoretically share a 9x10 bedroom but in reality they sleep with me and DH sleeps in DS1's bed (he gets horrible sleep when he bedshares with anyone).  As you said, you do have to be a stringent gate-keeper on Stuff coming into the house.  An outbuilding for storage and workshop would make 1200sq ft quite livable imho.

One thing to consider if you're also planning on building a home for your mom on the property is to double-check with the county on zoning, permits, and building code laws.  I have NO idea about Arkansas, but in many states you can't just up and build another house.  Also, if it's on septic vs. city/county water, the septic might not be rated for another house.  And if it's on well water, you'll want to get that tested as a contingency (for quality and flow).  There's a book that you might want to try checking out -- Finding and Buying Your Place in the Country by Scher.

This sounds like a wonderful opportunity.  DH and I are also looking to get out in the next few years so I'm jealous :)  Good luck!

[crazyms]

That sounds amazing. If it was me I'd go for the 11 acres with the smaller house. We have 10 acres that we will be building on after we pay it off. It will be a while yet before we actually move to the property but we are hoping to be developing the land and hopefully start building within a year. I've been working on our plans for a house and the land to figure out what we need and how to lay it all out before we develop anything. So far I'm only planning on our house being 1200-1400 sq ft.  We've spent most of our married life in a mobile home that had been added on to and I'd say it was around 1200 sq ft. total. It was plenty of space for us and could have been a lot nicer with better organization and a little more decluttering. We briefly lived in a large old farmhouse of 2100 sq ft and although I love the house it was really too big. A small house can be really comfortable as long as it is decluttered and organized. A lot can be done with 10-11 acres too. I'd definitely check it out.

[limette]

We just moved to our homestead in July/August. It's a 150 year old farmhouse. Around 2000 square feet total which is huge. I wanted to go smaller than our previous house (1800) but this is the house that came with the property! The property is 4 acres, we hope to buy the 3 acres next door some day.

We have 3 goats, 1 pig, 3 breeding rabbits, 2 bunnies, 7 quail, 2 ducks (1 died) and about 25 chickens. Next week we'll have more bunnies and 14 chicks. The 2 does are pregnant and I have an order for a dozen each of geese, turkeys and chickens coming in the spring. I want to have 40 egg chickens and about a dozen breeders. Oh yeah, hoping to get 3 sheep in the spring as well.

We're selling chicken eggs right now but want to add quail eggs and the various meats as well as a market garden come spring. If we can acquire that 3 acres we'll get into selling goat's milk products as well. Fruit and nut trees will be going in in the spring.

We fenced in a bunch of paddocks when we moved in and hope to fence in the rest of them in the spring so we can rotate the animals through the pastures.

I'd definitely take 11 acres over 2.

[Smithie]

Yeah, take the land. Far easier to add on to a house than to add on to your land. 

I'm a fan of the detached "shop" for all homesteading ventures, as it gives people a place to go and get some space without leaving the farm. Sounds like that would be a particularly important feature in your case. 

I'd love to see pictures of your cabin-y metal house...

[hildare]

go for it!!! for the small kitchen part, outdoor canning is a whole lot easier to clean up.  get a propane burner and away you go!

i think your plan sounds great.  we have around 11 acres ourselves, we bought 7 initially with our house, much of that pasture.  the additional acres are woods..

you could always add on to your home down the road, but the land, if it's nice, and has a water source, is much more important imo.

we have:  5 bunnies and a huge hutch

12 buff orpingtons and a tractor

3 belted galloway cows

2 milk nannies, a rather stupid and obnoxious billie, and 2 weathers (and a new one coming soon!)

2 dogs 2 cats

a whole bunch of beautiful wild birds, wood ducks, etc.  that make everything about living in the country worthwhile.  our house is big but it was what we kind of hit on with the nice land, i was not seeking a big house.  big house means working your tail off to keep it clean, that is all.

a detached shop is awesome.  you can get out of the house/ or someone can/ to work on stuff.  sometimes that's a break that is much needed.  i like that part too.

[diana_of_the_dunes]

That sounds awesome!  I personally don't consider 1200 sq ft a small house.  That's about the size of ours, and we have plenty of room for DH, DS, and I, and we're considering TTC #2 this summer.  Of course, we are fortunate that our house has a very usable floor plan, a reasonable number of closets, and a partially finished basement.  I rarely go downstairs except to get into our storage, but it's DH's "man cave" down there.  A workshop would likely accomplish the same thing... 

We only have a half acre of land right now.  I would KILL for 11, but my dream is about 20.  I want woods, with plenty of room for cattle, chickens, and a big garden.  On our little plot, I have 4 laying hens (will be 6 in the spring), and a decent-sized raised bed garden.  I have plenty of room for fruit trees and bushes, and could certainly expand the garden while still having plenty of open space.  Check out the book Backyard Homestead.  You can do a lot with even a quarter acre lot as far as feeding yourselves, then the rest could be for livestock, a woodlot, etc.  I've read that for grass-fed cattle, you need about an acre per animal (assuming large breed cattle).  You could raise a bunch of goats in the same space, and even more chickens. 

You're lucky to have someone interested in sharing the land and expenses with you!  I agree with checking into local zoning ordinances.  Our neighbors, who only have 5 acres, chopped down the woods between their house and ours in order to build a home for their son...  Only to find out that the county wasn't having any of it.  Now we have to stare at their house instead of the pretty woods.  Grr...

Good luck, and keep us posted.  I'd love to see pics when/if you have them!

[mattemma04]

I would go for it after making sure the house is OK(electric,plumbing,septic,well,bug issues,insulation) and the land is properly surveyed.

 If everything checks out good and the taxes were decent enough then I would jump on it.Your plan sounds great. I wish I had planted fruiting things the first year.

We have a 1400 sq ft house and a .87 lot. Every year I replace more of the lawn with edible landscape. We fenced it all in 2 years ago.Got chickens last year.It is decent but I would love to be further from neighbors.My only option is to buy a neighbors house when it comes up for sale.Then I would have my mom or a friend move in! My neighbor has her daughter living in the house next to her.

[HeatherAtHome]

Go for the smaller house! You can always add on later if you need to. Plus the fact that it's already set up for the lifestyle you want is a major bonus. 

We live in a 100 year old farmhouse, about 1000sq ft of space but with a very workable layout. We have about 1/3 of an acre which is way less than we were looking for but after seeing the house and land (and price tag, it was so doable!) we fell in love with the place. I have a good sized garden that we're still eating from and will for a while yet. I have complete confidence that I have a big enough space to grow enough for a family to eat year round (takes a bit of trial and error plus it was my first garden ever!) We're planning on planting some fruit trees, maybe some berry bushes (blueberry seeing we can pick raspberries in the woods... yeah, not our woods but we know people!) We have space for kids, a dog, chickens, other small animals. I don't think we have the space for sheep/goats/pigs, definitely not cows. And we don't have a woodlot to get firewood from. (other than the 4 old trees that have to be cut down because they're falling apart!)

The barn to our house and fields were sold off long ago. It would be nice to buy some of it back to have more space someday. (The barn is still standing behind/to the side of our house)

I have a blog with lots of pics if you're interested. Here's the Garden last summer. 

[BabyFireFly]

Our farm is 50 acres and the house is less than 1200 square feet. We do however have a detached garage that's pretty much the same size as the house - part of the garage is was converted into chicken coop with access to a fenced pen in the backyard and another part was converted into a storage area for gardening tools, canning stuff, etc. We also have a 200'x80' metal 27 stall barn for our horses as well as a turn of the century bank barn with three levels and a total of 10 additional horse stalls. Most of the property is fenced in for the horses and most pastures are crossed by the creek that splits our farm in two pieces, allowing them access to a constant fresh water source. We are coming up on our one year anniversay at the new farm and hope to make some more additions in the Spring as far as livestock goes - maybe some pigs and goats or even a pair of cows. Also thinking about tapping some Maple trees and starting a garden project.

[GardenStream]

We have 8 acres and built our our house on the land 7 years ago. I think the house is a little over 2000 square feet. The land was an old farm field so there were no trees or buildings on the property when we bought it. We have since put up a big pole barn, but that's for storage of tractors and trailers. I love our house, but there are some things I wish I had known before we bought the land and built the house.

In Ohio you need 10 or more acres to get CAUV (current agricultural use assessment) tax breaks. It cost us about $20k to put up a big pole barn with no heat, water or electricity. We decided we were going to build our dream house rather then even considering existing homes. We could have gotten a decent house on 10+ acres with existing outbuildings for what we paid to build our house. It's going to take us at least 15 years to get the house and property to the point we want it.

We don't have much of a homestead happening yet. We have a large garden and hope to get some bees in our newly built beehives this year. I'm hoping to add a chicken coop sometime next year. We've also planted about 10 fruit trees, 8 berry bushes and 5 grape vines. We're planted at least 50 other trees throughout the property over the years and they're slowly growing. It's definitely a work in progress.

[Arduinna]

I've lived on 10 acres in two different states but one of them I was a teen and we relied heavily on hunting for food. We had some animals and a huge garden but no dairy animals. The other time it was after I got married and we had a dairy cow, a couple of calves, pigs and the odd sheep we'd raise, a herd of about 30 goats, some horses, a variety of poultry and a decent size garden and fruit trees. Most of our land was pasture though.

If/when we are able to do it again I'd like property with a mix of hardwoods and open pasture since we had little for usable trees previously. As someone that has done the whole, land over house thing I won't ever do that again.

[rchoyt]

We have 160 acres but a lot of it is farmed.  We rent out the land currently but are hoping to buy enough equipment to start raising organic crops.  The rest of our land is not farmable, it is wooded and has two rivers running through it.  My husband cleared trails for hiking and snowshoeing.  We are also friendly with our neighbor and use her land for hiking too!  We have 5 acres around the house that we raise our own food on.  We have raised beds with strawberries, raspberries and grapes (soon to have blueberries too!) then our lower garden has tomatoes, beans, peas, cucumbers for pickles, carrots, etc.  We can/freeze a lot of our own food so we have a large garden.  Across the road is the old barn and outbuildings.  We are hoping to turn one of the buildings into a chicken coop and start to raise our own beef.  Our house is a work in progress, currently we are all living in one bedroom until we can finish the upstairs.  When we have the upstairs finished we will have about 2200 square feet but right now we have about 1100 so it isn't too bad. 

Your idea sounds great, let us know how it turns out!