The Call of the Open Spaces

The author with burn pile and a couple of bee hives in background.

The gateway drug was beekeeping. A friend took up the hobby a few years ago, and he made it look so fun and doable. I helped him check the hives on a fall day, and suddenly, I had to have my own. I took a beekeeping course at Penn State University online, ordered some equipment and I was ready to go. Just two hives -- no problem, easy to handle.

A full frame of honey I took off the hives in spring, sitting on the handmade Mexican tile in our kitchen.

Except, today I have both of my hives and his four hives, because he is moving to New England. You can't do six hives in the big city, and you can't drive four of them across the country in a little VW. In the city, they only let you have two hives, and they want to tell you how many frames you can have on them. You also have to worry what your neighbor thinks of them. Or you are supposed to. I never cared. These are my bees, they are legal, and they are here, making your life and your crops possible. Deal with it. I wasn't long for the city.

Me with the hives my friend gave me as he prepared to move.

The city also limits your number of chickens. I didn't have any, but I wanted some, and I didn't want any rules about them.  Lastly, the city recently declared that hoofed animals were off limits because some lady had a pet pig that upset the neighbors. In short, the city has terminated our relationship with food. You aren't supposed to want to make you own honey, or grow your own crops, or slaughter a chicken, or milk a goat. You are supposed to forget about our culture's roots and just buy frozen foods and snacks.

And there was this other thing -- a perverse financial situation. I did too well at work, I guess, or at least I did the last two years, which led to a breathtaking increase in my child-support obligation, during a time when, actually, we were having a terrible year in the business, and my wife was very sick, disabled and running up medical bills. I want to warn you, this next paragraph is going to look like opportunistic whining, but it's an important part of the story, and it will be over with soon. Bear with me.

To put it plainly, our child support doubled.  I didn't fight it, because I couldn't afford to, and because I was advised that it would not help if I did.  So on short notice, I went looking for $1,000 of monthly savings (ouch) in our budget.  We could no longer live in our modest 1,900 SF home in one of the city's less-expensive neighborhoods. One day, things were fine, and everything was in balance. The next day, the court was, essentially, telling me it didn't matter that I had a child by my new marriage, and we needed money for him, and that it didn't care that new child support for my first two children made me unable to afford my modest life. Also, it did not matter that the kids were quite comfortable with their mother, living in a much larger, nicer home than ours, and with a lot more financial privileges. And it didn't matter that we spend a lot of time with these kids, and spend money on them, feeding them, loving them. Everyone is treated like a deadbeat parent, no matter how involved they are. You consult the table, and there is no cap on the table. It just keeps going up and up. Alright, that's all that I will ever say on that subject. You just needed to know how this got started. Everything will be positive and life-affirming from this point forward.

Here is about half of the trees that were logged off our property. Free!

We did some very quick soul-searching, and what found there in our souls was a desire to move out "to the country" somewhere and find a place where we could live less expensively, yet have more. More land, space, rights to grow and raise things, more helpful neighbors, more small, locally owned stores. We wanted to pay less, yet have a better quality of life, and build a homestead where our children could find out how food is grown, how animals are raised, and how you act like a proper neighbor. We wanted to make goat cheese and beeswax candles and listen to tree frogs at night.

Seedlings camp for the night in the new straw-bale gardens.

In terms of a home, we were searching for a needle in a haystack. The house had to cost less than our current one but offer a lot more. It could not be in Little Rock or anywhere in Pulaski County, because the proximity to the urban area and workplaces made real estate too expensive. And it had to have at least two acres because I was going to grow a large garden, build an orchard, keep a lot of bees, have a shop and raise egg-laying chickens and milk goats. Right away we figured out there were no more than 10 properties in a four-county area that would even remotely qualify. And really, in the end, there were only two. And we would have to fight to get their prices down so this would work.

The first was a 1920's farmhouse in Fountain Lake, (Garland County) right across the street from the high school campus. We were so interested in this place that we actually paid for an inspection before our offer. We were excited and looking forward to yelling "Cobra Strike" for the local high school team, even though we are pretty sure they don't say that. We were chatting up clerks at the local Sonic and taking our son down to the creek. The needed repairs were massive, a corner of the house was in the flood plain, and we priced our offer accordingly. And it was promptly laughed off. The seller actually rejected an offer that was higher than their stated selling price for the package of land we wanted. The offer price mysteriously disappeared from the realtor website.

That was around Thanksgiving, and we had our heart set on that old place. My wife was devastated and wanted to take a long break from the search so she didn't have to think about it during the holidays. On my own, I studied the last three or four properties on my list and took a realtor to visit them. After seeing some of the most horrifying property in central Arkansas, we arrived at this barn-shaped cedar house in Bryant.

Beans spouting on the new property.

It was situated on three acres, backed up to the railroad tracks, and had a very large outbuilding to one side and a smaller one to the other. Hastily, we arranged for my wife to see it the very next day.

The siding was mossy green from years of algae build-up on the cedar, and the driveway was covered in dried mud. Huge oak trees hung over the front, and the back was deeply shaded by a million pine trees. The roof was covered with wisteria vines creeping over from the back. You could see some actual holes in the roof with pine needles stuffed in them.

Here is the realty photo with the mossy green siding.

In the back was one of the largest pools I have ever seen, completely decrepit, with several feel of frozen, dank water and a dead bullfrog suspended within. The pool was surrounded by a wild castle of privet and overgrown landscaping, but no fence or rails.

Sexy pool after it drained itself, but you get the idea.

The place smelled horrible inside and had been essentially abandoned by the person who was living there. Both furnaces were condemned, and the owner was running around in coats and wool caps. The water main had collapsed and water merely trickled. The carpet smelled like a dog that had died 20 years earlier. Bats were living in the attic and bees were making a hive behind the front window. A hole in the master closet wall -- hidden by furniture --  was full of leaves and pine needles, and it was large enough for a raccoon to walk through. Squirrels were running through the walls and rats were running through the basement leaving gifts. The outbuilding had broken windows, its electrical service had blown down , there was a giant crack in its foundation. a window was busted out and the place was full of the decrepit supplies from about six area firework stands. What do you do with boxes and boxes of old fireworks punks, miles of string lights and six cash registers?

But there was also, amid the crap, this totally custom-built house with gorgeous bones, tons of handmade Mexican tile and a large space behind the house to run and play, with plenty of land left for animals and gardening. It was this mythical country oasis, right in the middle of a city, and close to our jobs in Little Rock. A little research showed that Bryant did not limit bees, chickens or goats and you can even have burn piles. My city alderman turned out to be a friend of mine. Several friends live in this little town and were incredibly encouraging and welcoming.

To buy the place, we would have to get in a short-sale. That is where the property is sold for less than what the seller owes on the loan. No payments had been made by the occupant in months. Further, we would need massive repairs and would have to finance them into the deal -- a renovation loan -- and almost no bank wants to mess with that. The place had 3,000 square feet, with about 1,000 of it in a two-room basement where water had seeped through the concrete block walls for decades.

My rough ideas for the place.

So, of course, facing all that, we bought the place, banking on a series of miracles to pull of the deal. And as I sit here, writing this, every one of the miracles has come to pass, with one exception, and I think that one is going to come through on Monday or Tuesday.

The house after tree removal, new roof and the power-washing of the cedar siding.

We closed the deal in February, 2015, and began a contractor-led renovation, then we moved in early May, renting out our old home so we didn't have to sell at a loss. We have been here almost six months, and only now are the cosmetic improvements starting to happen. First, we had to replace all water service, gas service, nearly all the HVAC, re-roof the place, put in new toilets and get the critters out. The patios on both sides of the house had badly sunken due to improper drainage. We corrected all the drainage issues (and of course, now it hasn't rained for three months) and covered the sunken stone patios with decks. I have been slowly building a 1,000 foot farm fence with gates and paddocks for animals, orchards and gardens. That fence and its progress have defined this adventure for me so far.

As for the giant pool, it would have cost so much to repair that we would have little money left over for other improvements. So, we came up with the idea to build a large deck over it, and even left a trap door so we could go under the deck to clean the pool drain, if need be.

As the pool deck was being framed. Note the trap door.

Completed deck after I sealed it. 

That, in short, is how we came to own the Barn House of Bryant. And in the stories that follow, I will tell you how we are transforming it into Mills Park Farm.

Stone patio in front of our house after power-washing.