I accidentally bought a farm at 3:00 a.m.

It all started with one of my typical bouts of insomnia. Wide awake at 3:00 a.m., I grabbed my iPad and started scrolling real estate listings—something I often did to lull myself back to sleep. As I scrolled, I came across a listing for a modest farmhouse with acreage on Lookout Mountain, and something about it made me pause. Bill and I had been scouting properties for years, looking for our “Golden Pond” retirement/weekend getaway. We’d camped at Cloudland Canyon State Park before, so we already knew and loved the area.

Within a few days, we went to see the property…and it was not what we expected. The creek crossing on the driveway was washed out. The fields were littered with junk and rotten logs. The farmhouse was in rough shape, and the barn was packed with debris (including—believe it or not—a dead deer… but that story can wait). It felt like a project that might be too big for us. We left thinking, this isn’t the one.

But the funny thing is… we couldn’t stop talking about it. And we started to notice that we hadn’t truly ruled it out. Unbeknownst to me, Bill made what I’ll politely call an “ambitious” offer. They didn’t accept it—but they didn’t shut us down either—and that kicked off a few weeks of negotiations. By February 2016 we were under contract, and we closed in late April.

And that’s when the real adventure began…

(More to come.)