The Insane Plan

When I tell friends of our decision to sell the farm, I am typically met with open mouthed stunned stares of disbelief. I think that the reason for this, before I even get to telling them about the live aboard boat part, is also the reason why this is such a good decision: I had too many ideas for the farm.
For the last 15 years I have not only been spending almost every spare moment working on improving the farm, but also planning and drawing out what I want to do next. I have shared many of these plans with the now incredulous friends, and thus their reaction is not surprising.
It all really started twelve years ago with the first Tractorfest. We spent the better part of the summer clearing and leveling the field, campsites, and building a stage. It was an amazing day, with great music and good times with friends that has built some enduring friendships. Preparing for this annual event ironically made us somewhat anti-social. We always seemed to set the bar a little higher, and so when we saw a house in Hansville was going to be torn down, we saw an opportunity to get the materials to build a recording studio.
We stripped the house, salvaging as much of the roof and interior as possible, and then cut the walls and subfloors into ten and twelve foot sections, later to be reassembled as 12 by 20 cabins back at the farm. In the process we called in a lot of favors, but our friends seemed to revel in our crazy scheme.
The studio got built first, and has functioned as a practice space, recording studio, guest house, party room for the kids, (it is really nice to send a bunch of noisy kids out to a completely separate building,) and more recently as a Home theater with a ten foot wide projection screen. The guest house got built next, at a 90 degree angle to the first building, and then I cut cedar beams to frame up the truss that support the roof over the stage that is built in between them. That stage hosted the bands for Chloe’s sweet sixteen, as well as the tenth anniversary Tractorfest. The concrete work for the courtyard still needs to be done, but it is already an epic stage.
When I was approached by the owner for Burma Queen, a 56’ 1926 steam boat, about moving her to our property to save her, an unexpected opportunity presented itself. Jerry had a bulldozer with a six way blade that he lent me to do the dirt work to clear a site for the boat. The other two bulldozers I had already acquired were very tired, and while I had Jerry’s machine, I was able to do a lot of things I had wanted to do for awhile, like finish the road off the back of the property to connect with the old logging road on the 200 acres of timber trust, clear and level, build a circular drive around the front of the house, and do the site work to level the back of the house in preparation to put in the footings for an addition.
I had big plans for the house too. I was going to use Insulated Concrete Forms to put up a retaining wall and load bearing walls for the addition. This would have housed a mechanical room, sauna, work space, a solarium (it has good southern exposure for passive solar gain,) and expanded the upstairs and downstairs bathrooms. I was also going to add a loft bedroom when I reworked the roofline.
A friend who builds water features and owes us a favor was going to build a waterfall on the lower end, which was going to instigate yet another project to build a cedar lodge perched above it. Even further out was a subterranean recording studio above the waterfall, which I had already cleared a spot for. Then there was also the boat I cut in half as a club house for Katrianna, or the other half that was going to a balcony/ bar behind the stage.
So when people look at me and say, “Why are you selling the farm, you had so many plans,” they are also answering the question. I had so many plans, it was going to take the rest of my life to get them all done. For the last fifteen years I have been driving past my prize possession, our sailboat Gullmar, to work on a house that is worth half as much, while thinking I would get to it soon. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Thinking I was going to get it all done and go sailing into the sunset was pure insanity. Now we have a sane plan to do just that.