A Start

Where do I begin?

My name is Eviee. I’m a 38-year-old woman, She/Her pronouns, mother of a wonderful boy, and married for 17 years. I am an artist and a writer.

For many years I have dreamed of owning my own land, really since I was a child. I grew up taking trips to rural Montana. We spent summers helping build a cabin, well my parents did. Us kids were busy trying to catch badgers with chips or open canoe kayaking Quake Lake. We hiked and camped and roughed it out. My parents and my parents’ friends were drunk most of the time and us kids had the run of the place. I fell in love with Montana. I fell in love with the fresh crips air of the mornings and the eerie brightness of the night. I fell in love with the deep snow, playing capture the flag at night using hunting kites and snowmobiling dangerous trails. It was magic.

And ever since then, I always had a goal to move to Montana. I have journals from childhood with wild plans of moving to the wilds and becoming an outdoors person. But that dream never happened. I stayed where I grew up: Salt Lake valley in Utah.

Growing up, I didn’t have a lot of money. In my younger adult years, I found myself frequently in the negative. I even had my phone shut off a few times and stole food from a roommate, which did not go well. I made poor money choices, and it’s something that I still struggle with due to some of my mental illnesses (looking at you Mania). And because of this, achieving my goal of moving out of state to someplace rural seemed impossible. And so, it was a dream that was set aside. The longing was still there, and I found a pang of sadness whenever I saw someplace beautiful online.

Then Covid happened.

My work turned to work from home. My husband lost his job. And money was for the first time at the forefront of everything. I thought we were going to lose our house, everything! I pushed my husband to find a job immediately, I didn’t care what it was, fast food, grocery store, anything. This caused a lot of fights between us. But that focus on Money really helped me to see that I was a part of the problem.

So, I bought a financial tracker on Etsy. It was painful to write out everything for every month, but I began to see that I was overspending constantly and putting myself further and further into debt. Now this is not a “How to get out of debt” guide at all, and I still struggle with overspending, especially around Christmas (my love language is giving gifts). BUT using a financial tracker has helped me immensely, and I highly recommend it. Just buy one or make a simple one for yourself. It helped me to see that I spend way too much on food and I impulse buy constantly. And I was living paycheck to paycheck, spending all of my check instead of letting the funds roll over to the next month. A tracker helped me. I went crazy with it and planned out from 2023 through 2028. I made financial goals and put it in my tracker so that the money was spend and out of my purview.

It helped me to see that I could find a way to get the money to purchase land. And with the option to now permanently work from home from almost any state, the dream re-emerged and glowed bright in my heart. I never wanted anything so much as this. I looked around from state to state, trying to determine where I could get the most bang for my buck, and something as far north as I could go because I love the cold and want a wood burning stove. And we’ve settled on Maine (or Michigan, debate is still happening).

Maine. I’ve never been there. I know the ticks are bad, and that it gets hit with the polar vortex. I know that pot is legal and as a medical cannabis card carrier, this is ideal. And it’s covered with woods. Oh how I love the woods and want to listen to the trees sing to one another in the breeze. I want to live far away from people, and I want a new start. This is about as big as a new start as I can imagine.

My husband was on board. I shared my thoughts with him about homesteading and my desire to live off mostly off the grid. And he shared that he would like that too. We want to build our own house and even found a floor plan that we love. We watched people building houses on YouTube. My husband has some construction experience as he’s an electrician. Watching these people build their own dream was amazing to me. To have built something of your own with your own two hands, it became a goal. We began to narrow our searches and watched framing videos, insulation videos, plumbing videos, and HVAC videos. I learned about animals and husbandry. I wanted my own flock of sheep to harvest their wool, their milk, their meat.

We planned everything. I bought books and watched homesteading shows. I became obsessed with it. And that’s currently where I’m sitting. I have all this knowledge and I’m trying to find ways to put it into words. A repository for myself and all that I’ve learned. It was suggested to me to start a website to write this all down and to share my journey to our homestead.

So here I am.

It’s nice to meet you. I hope we become good friends.