The Craftiest Workshop

My nephew was visiting my parents recently and he had apparently questioned how my husband and I could enjoy acreage living after having lived in so many different urban communities. He and his wife are looking to buy an acreage at some point and maybe he is questioning whether they will enjoy it?

As a military family, we were strongly encouraged to buy newer houses in neighborhoods where we could easily resell. We didn’t even entertain the idea of buying an acreage as we moved every 3-4 years. We truly didn’t live in any large cities but always in town.

Here are some of the factors we weighed to decide to live on an acreage.

1.Neighbours – the old saying goes “you can’t choose your neighbours”. We have had some interesting experiences with people we have lived next to. One next door neighbour had social anxiety disorder or agoraphobia. In three years, she came outside a handful of times and never once spoke to me. Another neighbour tried to commit suicide in their garage. Some of our neighbours thought that if we were outside doing yard work, we must want to visit. On the flip side, there were some neighbours we really did enjoy spending time with.

On our acreage I have met our immediate neighbours once and another retired neighbour from down the road maybe three times. The woman that lives directly north of us walks down past our place on weekends when the weather is nice and we wave at each other. That is the extent of our interactions and we welcome the solitude.

2. Noise – we have lived in a townhouse where the walls seemed paper thin and any noise seems to pass through. We have lived next to a major bus route that started its route at 5am. We have lived just above train tracks with two trains per day passing through. We have lived near military airbases with planes and helicopters that flew overhead daily. We have lived in an oil industry town where everyone owns a souped up truck with loud mufflers. We have had neighbours with barking dogs. We also were limited in the noise we could make with our power tools and limited by noise bylaws dictating quiet hours.

On our acreage we hear blissful silence the majority of the time. Some days, if the wind is from the south, we can hear our neighbour’s dogs barking. During seeding and harvest we hear the farm machinery working in the fields. The only other sounds are those made by birds and animals…the sounds of nature. We can use a chainsaw, grinder or planer any time of day and no one will complain as they are too far away to hear it.

3. Smell – a few of the communities we lived in had distinct smells. In Trenton there was a wet cardboard smell from a factory in town. In Winchester there was the sour smell from the cheese factory on Main Street and on other days sewer smell from the wastewater treatment pond just north of us. In Ontario, in the heat of the summer, we often experienced hazy pollution in the larger centres making the air heavy with industrial smells.
On the acreage, we do get a sewer smell as our septic system flushes the grey water out but it only lasts for a few minutes. Otherwise, you can breathe deeply and smell clean fresh air.

4. Space – Living in a community you have immediate neighbours to your left and right and often right behind you as well. In our townhouse, having a shared wall, we ended up with an neighbour’s hamster in our basement. We have had next door neighbours with decks higher than our fence so that they looked down on us when we were outside. We had neighbours on either side of us that would walk across the front of our house to visit each other.
We now live on a 15 acre plot of land. Our closest neighbour is still a good ten minute walk away. We have the space to plant trees and gardens. There is space to create walking paths. There is space to build a Quonset or workshop. There is space to have animals if we decide to. There is space for pretty much anything we might want to do.

5. Firepit – when trying to fit a firepit into a yard design you usually have to be 10ft from any wooden structure. Once you have built a deck, shed and wooden garden boxes, you often don’t have five feet between structures let alone ten feet. We were never able to have, or got around to creating, a firepit at any of our urban properties.

Part of the appeal of the property we bought was the firepit area. In winter we can have a fire every day if we wanted to. Summer is a bit trickier as the winds need to be less than 12km/hr and we have had very dry summers here the last two years. The firepit area adds to the aesthetics of the property and makes it feel more like home.

6. Wildlife – buying houses in areas where it is easier to resell tends to mean the houses are less than five years old with little or no landscaping. When there are no trees, there are no birds. If you live inside a busy community, it is rare to have deer wandering about. We did have a flock of turkeys that frequented our street in Trenton.

On the acreage, almost every day, I have some sort of encounter with wildlife. Sometimes it is just seeing them with my binoculars and other times it is much closer up. I hand feed the birds and watch them interact. I find communing with nature very soothing and uplifting.

7. Maintenance – newer urban properties tend to not need much in the way of maintenance. Perhaps you may want to build a shed or put in a garden. You may have to reseed to get a nice lawn going. The most costly thing might be to build a deck.

When we bought an acreage, we knew we needed to plan for bigger maintenance expenses and we were prepared for that. You have to buy something to move snow or have the time to do a lot of shoveling. You need a chain saw to cut fallen trees and maybe a log splitter to reduce it to manageable pieces. You need a lawn tractor to cut all the grass and a brush cutter to keep some paths through the wilder growing areas. If you plan to build your own structures, you need the power tools and wood to do so. You may need to buy trees and build a shelter belt.

8. Distance to amenities – when you live in a community, you take for granted how easy it is to swing by the grocery store, pick up your mail and participate in a church, club or sports team.

We aren’t overly social people so being 25 min out of town is alright for us. Our trips to town are planned and we hit multiple stores to pick up what we need. We have started to play board games in town once or twice a week as our outing and often do our shopping before or after to save us an extra trip in. Our community mailbox is five miles from our house so we purposely go past it once a week on our way into town and grab the mail.

9. Solicitors – at certain times of the year it felt like someone was ringing the doorbell every day. Kids selling chocolate bars, adults collecting donations for Heart and Stroke or Jehovah Witnesses coming by to chat.

Since we have moved in 14 months ago, we have had only two unexpected visitors. One was an oil/gas company representative collecting contact info in case they need to reach us to notify us of a leak. The other was our retired neighbour looking to borrow a tool. Now that all our kids are grown up, I also don’t mind that we don’t get trick or treaters on Halloween.

10. The Ability to Dump – when you live in town and have a fairly small yard, you always have to take your grass clippings, leaves, garden waste somewhere else to get rid of it. Sometimes it would be picked up on garbage day if properly bagged but it was always an inconvenience.

Out on the acreage, when we pick up twigs or cut branches, we just start a new pile somewhere out of the way. We even dump the sawdust that builds up from the saw and dust extraction system. We just mulch the grass when it is cut and let the leaves blow about and break down where they end up.

Overall, I think that moving so many times and seeing what we liked in a one area over another allowed us to envision a property that would work best for us. We stayed away from train tracks and busy roads. We drove around the area ensuring there were no industrial buildings that could potentially create unwanted smells. We made sure our house would be far enough from our closest neighbour to allow us some privacy. We budgeted for big item purchases that we knew we would need in our first year. We made sure we were close enough to a community to be able to drive in for essentials but not too close that we would be tempted to drive in all the time. After a year, it still feels like we made a very good decision to purchase an acreage.