Still looking, but maybe getting closer...

Well, we've seen quite a few places over the last couple of weeks. We've seriously discussed a few of them, though most had more negatives than positives. We have, however, recently found a place that meets most of our wants and needs. We found a hundred year old house on 6 acres, only 5 miles from our current house. It's five miles further away from Pittsburgh, which makes my morning commute a bit longer, but it's five miles closer to my in-laws, where Tiffany and the girls spend a lot of their time. The land is split between woods and open lawn and there is a stream running the length of the property. We're already deciding where the crops and animals would go, so we're thinking pretty seriously about it. The biggest drawbacks are with the house. It's old. We want an old house, so we assume that we're going to have some work to do with anything we find, but we're not sure if this house will require more than we can / want to do. We have a friend of the family who knows how to do everything, willing to take a look at the place in two weeks. Since we can't do anything until then, it gives us a chance to work on selling our house. We'll also be out of town for much of these two weeks, so it might work out fine.

Trying to buy a farm.

My wife, our three daughters, and I are trying to buy a small farm. We've lived in our current house for 4 and 1/2 years and have been doing all that we can with our almost half an acre. We have a veggie garden, a compost pile with a few bins, and a rain barrel. We built an arbor for our grapes, planted blueberries bushes and apple trees, and inherited black raspberries and sour cherries. We bought three clandestine chickens, built a coop, and then bought three more. Two of the first batch have been laying eggs for the last two weeks, and it turns out that the third is a rooster, which will most likely get us in trouble at some point.

We love our house and had no interest in looking elsewhere. We started by looking for chunks of land that we could "play" with - garden, raise chickens and things, camp, and anything else we could think of to get away from our neighborhood. Though we only looked for a few weeks, none of what we looked at was even close to acceptable or affordable. We then decided to take a look at a 6ish acre farm and love it. We are trying to figure whether or not we can actually afford and need our realtor to appraise our current house. The market isn't fantastic, but Pittsburgh and the surrounding area never bubbled and burst like so many other places. We've only lived here a few years, but we've made several improvements, so we're hoping that the difference between our current mortgage and that of our potential future home is fairly small. Our realtor had to cancel an appointment with us today, and we're out of town when she's available at the end of the week, so we're looking at early next week to get the ball rolling.