Measuring Progress and Finding Balance
April marks our one year anniversary of living on our homestead. We’ve been doing this for a whole year now! We’ve seen the seasons change, endured the hot, the cold, the too dry and the too muddy. I think we’ve learned a lot. I hope we’ve grown a lot. I hope we’ve made mistakes we’ll never make again!
In this year, we’ve lived in five different structures, one of them twice. We’ve started some huge projects, like the well and digging the house hole. We finished some big projects, like the root cellar and the beginnings of sectional fencing, but, honestly, it doesn’t feel like we’ve made a lot of physical progress, and it doesn’t really look like it from the outside.
Fortunately, progress can be made in different ways. We feel we’ve made a decent amount of mental and emotional progress through lessons we’ve learned. Here are a few of those lessons.
I have learned how to cook with more primitive cooking methods, and I’ve learned that I’m really okay cooking the easy way, with a modern gas stove.
Spencer has felt the thrill of digging a well with his two hands, and decided that, while he will continue to work on that well until it is finished, he is also okay with having a well for the house drilled.
We learned that the soil here has a ton of clay in it! This is great for doing projects that need clay (plastering, a cob oven, etc.) but not so good for a garden. When you dig down, though, you find a lot of that sand, so we’ve been remixing the clay and sand in planters for this year’s garden.
I learned that easy is not just for wimps, and I am really glad to now have a travel trailer for my family to live in!
We’ve learned that straw bale buildings go up really quick, are nice and study, but that plastering them inside and out is a must!
The biggest lesson we’ve been studying all year is that of time vs. money. You can pay money and get modern amenities, or you can spend time and do it yourself. Sometimes it is better to pay the money, and sometimes it is better to spend the time and do it yourself. I think looking for that balance is something we will focus on a lot this year. We have found that there are many benefits of spending the time. We’ve grown, and we’ve seen our kids grow, new skills and abilities that we wouldn’t have acquired without the sometimes grueling effort. There is pleasure that comes from doing it yourself, for sure! But we’ve also missed out on some more immediate and temporal blessings because we’ve done it ourselves. For example, we recently spent the money and bought a travel trailer instead of spending more time to continue to pump out the subbing root cellar and more time fighting the constant humidity. We could have done this in January, or even last April! If we had spent that money sooner, however, we would have missed out on some amazing experiences, and we would have been a lot colder over winter!
As you see, balancing the spending of time (or hard work) vs the spending of money, is a delicate matter, and it will take a lot of study, trial, and error to get it right! Seasons of life also weigh in to shift that balance. That balance will look different in month A, when a young family has kids still in diapers than it will in month B when diapers are a thing of the past! (Still looking forward to that one, by the way! Perhaps that will be on the checked off list this year.)
With all these great lessons behind us, we’re excited for another year on the homestead and the new lessons we’re going to learn! Thanks for taking this journey with us!
