Guest House, Part 5
posted on
June 13, 2023
I've been telling you the story about the guest house we've purchased, and I've given you some farm history leading up to the "why" of this project. If you want the details so far, you can read the previous blog pages: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. This whole thing ended up being a lot longer than I thought, but I promise, today I'll finish the story!
As I said last week, you can see that various family members have owned various parts of the farm over the years, but it's been in the family since 1893...130 years. We'd like to see that continue as long as possible!
Then, in January of this year, we were blind-sided by tragedy...Marita's husband passed away unexpectedly. This was a very difficult time, especially for her, of course. But God has a way of bringing joy out of pain. The silver lining for Marita is that she found a house close to her daughter's family in Canton (about a half hour away from us). This house is perfect for her...it's small, several doors away from her grandchildren, and even has a playground and fenced in back yard. (This picture was taken in February for the realtor listing.)
This meant that she needed to sell her farm property. Like I said, we'd like to keep it in the family, and no one else was interested in/able to purchase it at this time.
One of my dreams has been to have a guest house/short-term rental/Airbnb property of some kind. I enjoy doing hospitality projects. I've actually been researching tiny house plans, thinking it would be fun to put one out in the woods and use it as an Airbnb. That was a "maybe, sometime, out there in the future" kind of dream. But when this all happened, I did some very fast research on various aspects of the project and decided to run with it.
So there you have it...there are really 2 parts to the "why" behind this venture: the desire to keep the property in the family as long as possible, and my hospitality dream.
I will keep you posted over the next month or so as we do some renovations and get the property prepared for guests.
