Couldn't afford the city. They got Starter Homestead in Vermont

We met in this kind of pseudo-rural college town and we had every idea to move back to that college town and it just didn't work out and winds of circumstance and grace blew us further north than we ever anticipated. We didn't know the area but we realized through enough of our traveling and trial that we wanted to be in Vermont. So when we started searching at the time we were on a spring break trip both working in schools in New York City and we found where there was housing. And from there we said well let's job search in this area let's be here. I think this might be it. Your destination is on the right. And then we were looking for a home and we found what was for us. That's it. They're in their house. Hi. We got the right place. Hi. Oh my goodness. Hello. So you guys wanted to come out to the country. You want to live off the land. What was the idea? The first idea would be to not live in New York City anymore. I'm from New York City. I love it. I love the people from it. We were living in a small roach infested box and it wasn't working. Yeah. And what were you looking for? Like an affordable house? I mean what was the sort of goal right? A place to live. So yes we were looking for a house that was certainly affordable and that we could work with and grow with. What's that? That would be a gunshot. But as opposed to the gunshots that I grew up in in Brooklyn I know exactly who that was and what they're doing. Dale runs a greenhouse a few doors down and groundhogs are the bane of his existence. This house is a godsend in the sense that it is a bit of an anomaly looking for a one-bedroom sunlit cottage for a small family on one or more acres. Did you disclose the price of the property? $160,000. Wow. Okay so that was like hard to find I bet right? It was the only one. The only one. This is the only place that we could live. Only one for under $200,000. I mean was your $250,000 was probably the closest one after that? Yeah. This house was listed for I believe three to four months. The price was lowered because people weren't interested in it and one-bedroom house it's not not that popular and not that common. We'd love to show you inside. They're going to check the mail. Can you open? No. No mail. No mail. Okay let's go show your toys inside. I'll get the door. It's a fixer-upper and we've been working on that these last three years. So how big is your house? 670 square feet. Approximately. That's small for being rural. It's an anomaly. It used to be the garage for the house next door and then I believe around 50 years ago it was moved. It's like a guest house. It was rented for some time. So who was living here before? It was an office. Oh what so it wasn't a home? No this has not been a home for at least a decade. It was a civil engineering office. They had machinery and maps strewn everywhere. The curtains came with the house. And all the cupboards came with it as well. All the wood came with the house. This came with the house. This is our late 1980s gen air stove. It has a griddle. It has a downdraft because if you look around there's no place to put a hood to suck things up. So it goes right into our basement. I think that's super neat. It's two burners. It's you know it fits the small cute aesthetic that we have here. Everything's small scale. It has to be. And I love that I can stand here and watch my wife and toddler play in the living room because it's all one room. You just said the other day our life is in two rooms. We're going to the closet. We're going on a trip. Okay so this is kind of like our office. It's honestly we rarely sit here but it is a desk and it's functional. This is the other half of the house. When we say we live in two rooms it's true. This is a one bedroom house but we essentially treat it like a two bedroom because you can see the kids room side of it here and then this little curtain here separates to mom and dad's room in the very back. So what we'll do is to make two rooms just simple curtains which actually came with the house and there are two of them so plenty of fabric there and now you have another room. It feels like it. I mean and what a gorgeous room honestly like with this view. It's awesome. Here right now it's all green but every season is like a different color or with the maple tree leaves changing in the fall. We get really beautiful foliage like people come from around the country to this town specifically to see foliage. This room is just great with the views. The fact that when you look down you sort of see the meadow actually you own it. It's lovely to wake up here and every day I'm like I'm so grateful to be here. Yeah you see to see the fireflies or the stars like as from when my head is on the pillow I can look out and see stars see fireflies and then in the morning yes to see the meadow and to remind myself like hey you know no one's gonna kick us off. We don't have to move like we as a couple moved so many times between when we met in college and when we moved here three years ago and we don't have to move. It is an amazing feeling. It feels really cozy too in the winter like when you're inside and then there's like white all out here. You can't talk about the seasons in Vermont and not talk about the winter. Yeah this house we're doing a lot of work for weatherizing, winterizing. Because it probably wasn't that weatherized being a garage. No the basement is crazy. Okay the window inserts are in the basement right now because it's like almost summer but that's the window insert that helped us to retain heat and make the a little bit more efficient while we are waiting to replace the window. Here hun I'll carry it. Are you sure? Okay all right. Oh you're welcome. Every insert matches a window. It fits directly in the window. You press it in and it's just another layer of insulation and it saves they say like a thousand dollars in the winter in terms of insulation. Wow and it's a big deal. What is it plastic? Yep plastic it's just cheap wood and plastic on both sides. So there's a pocket of air that keeps some heat. How cold does it get here? Oh negative 20 with the windchill negative 35. Yeah because we're at the latitude of like southern Canada. Yeah so yeah lots of curtains, lots of wall storage using all the space that we have. Yeah so and then you have his bed here which is like good for now. Yeah that's just exactly it's amazing difference from having bringing a newborn home into the space to having a two-year-old and and counting. You know in the spirit of using the space that we have I've decided to just do this like basket storage for my son's clothes, socks. We really just hang things up as needed like here's a piece of yarn. I mean we do things just kind of improvisationally and we have all of our clothes. This is a mess but one closet that's that and on the other side is our pantry. This is pretty much just another packed little pantry. We did manage to get a microwave in here. Another thing that was found for free I describe our furnishings and most of our aesthetic as gifted thrifted and free because that's what most of these things are. This is a family I would say heirloom at this point from your folks. I ate my meals as a little toddler on that. And most things everything is either multi-purpose or storage or fold away that kind of thing. So this guy's little bench can move and then this is our formal dining room. This will come out and there's our table. You can just easily set the table and kind of move along the chairs that are here. There's another chair right out there. So we can either do this folding chair if we have more people or just put this. This guy had a high chair. But we don't sit there anymore. He's not interested in that anymore. So he's got this little spot. Yeah the last thing about the table is that it has another wing to do the same thing so it can be twice as long for our very rare dinner parties with six people. Like six or seven I think. Is that heating? Yes this is a fireplace that is really an electric space heater and with our solar panels we really want to use as much electric base infrastructure as we can because that's what we're paying into. And there's enough sun in the winter to get to get some solar? Yeah we I think overall we equal out. We just don't have this battery storage but because we're on the grid and we're paying a loan for the solar panels we pay that instead of electricity. And over the coming decades it will save us a lot of money. Out here actually used to be a porch. This was a deck but we had to deconstruct this. He deconstructed this over over the course of two days the first summer that we were here because we needed this new door. Our carpenter said that the sliding door that he took out was the saddest sliding door he has seen in decades of work. Yes. And with winter fast approaching we we had to. So hence there went the deck and now we have what we affectionately term the pit which is another future project. Things like you know even our bathroom getting a fan in here a ventilation fan because eventually our goals for this space are to rent it out. Yes. Yeah so like Taylor said I think that we're outgrowing the space with this two-year-old it already feels like we're bursting at the seams and as he grows or our family grows we're going to have to live on this land but in another house hopefully. And what to do with a one-bedroom 670 square foot cottage. And we don't feel quite so motivated to turn it into an Airbnb spend your ski money and then leave that I think Vermont has too much of that already. So Raphael these are some friends and we're going to show them the beach. So if this can be a house that allows folks to live in dignity like we have for these past few years then we would love to do that. And then what would you do build another thing on the property. Yeah. So you have you were able to get permitting to build another home here. Yes. Yes that was one of the qualifications of why we went forward and wanted this place because we knew that if we had a family growing up that we would outgrow it. Yeah because we can't afford a three-bedroom four-bedroom house at the but we can afford a cottage. And then work up to what. Yeah. Welcome to Full Joy Farm. It's big. Yeah it's 2.65 acres and coming from living in apartments this is huge. This is huge for us and we have everything that we could want here. Is this what you imagine when you were in Brooklyn thinking about living in the countryside? I mean is this what you picture? This is much better than I could have imagined. Like we have a lot of space to expand here in ways that we never really did. This is a garden. Right now we have some lettuces mustard greens in this row and some very very young corn and beans on this end. Usually by early July they should be like to your knee so we're getting there. So do you get much of your greens from here in the summer? Yes I would say by mid-summer we'll be getting kale and collards chard and spinach pretty regularly. This is our fourth year gardening and growing like vegetables. I'm very experimental about the way that we garden. We use cardboard in the garden so if we have like extra boxes we just toss them down here. This area used to be all covered with weeds and just recently we tilled it and now it'll be ready to plant later in the season if we need more planting space. This was just recently tilled. We just put in the tomatoes peppers we have some cucumbers and eggplants. It's very simplistic as far as like using cardboard and other recycled materials and using the grass clippings as compost cover. We have a couple onions and rhubarb that have come up. This area is still a little bit wild but when we do plant here I've got a little bit of recycled glass bottles that are kind of providing a little bit more of like a raised bed function. This is all scrap wood and it's no build we just place things as we need where we need them. So it was no till and no build? Yeah no till no build. So this is our compost area it's kind of like a nest sort of method. You can see it's it's like pretty dark but this is one that's active. I just composted earlier today. This is an older pile that we'll probably be using next year. I think it's about 70. That's not very active. Which is probably normal because it's an older one. Yeah it's older and it's sitting it's kind of like curing right now. This is the one that's currently active. It's going up to like 80. At the hottest of the summer like we want it to be like maybe over 100. We use our compost. I give it extra time because of the human or process and I just want to make sure that everything is decomposed. Every year we'll have another bin ready to go for the planting season. So right now we're not producing any food to sell. It's all like veggies for our family over the summer. We do like some preserving of like pickles or onions. We have goals of becoming more self-sufficient. We don't have the space to can and preserve and all of the things that ideally would help with that. So how are you able to work out here because it's quite remote? Yeah I am gainfully employed in both the towns of Hartford and Woodstock and they are 15 minutes in either direction. Nice kick mom. Thank you. What kind of work do you do? I am primarily a youth worker. And you don't have to make a lot of money because you're not spending a lot on a mortgage or right? Yeah absolutely. We pay 800 bucks a month in mortgage. Half of what our rent in Brooklyn was. For a lot less. Yeah and you're paying off the house and property and a lot of land. A lot of land. Are you guys gonna go for a ride? I want a tractor. Hey Rafa this is gonna be a place for mama to dance. I am an artist and I thought that leaving Brooklyn I would be giving up pretty much most artistic opportunities. I've actually found that quite the opposite is true. I'm actively involved in like the improv dance community. I found that living in a smaller area I have been able to plug into the local networks with much more ease and access than I could in a larger in a big city. So this is the pathway into what we call Raphael's Point. It's a beach named for our son. Every time I walked here when he was a newborn he was like sleeping like in a baby wrap and now he finally like you know he'll throw rocks and play here. Here we are. It's Rafa's Point. Yay. That was so good. That was such a good surprise. That was good. Welcome to Rafa's Point. That's pretty amazing to have your own river almost. Spring creek. I mean it's creek I guess but it's pretty there's a lot of water. It's called Millbrook and it runs like through our neighborhood and all the way five minutes from here down to the White River. So you have like your own yeah kind of pool. This is our beach. It's your own beach right. And we dunk here. We love to just cool off in the brook after like going for a run or working out or when it's super hot. Yeah it's really clear. Yeah it's absolutely beautiful and you'll see in a moment our campsite is a stone's throw away from here so and we've camped around the brook as well just to have the lullaby of the water rolling past you. It's funny because I think about this these areas up here where there was a lot of people going back to the land and they chose Vermont back in the 60s and now you've found this maybe because it was one of the more supportable places but yeah like do you do you find any inspiration from what people were doing back in the 60s? Certainly we're inspired by what people have done in the past. What I think is different is that our goal is really taking what is already here and fixing it up for the hereafter. So I I think that our goal of like taking this dejected cottage and making something out of it yeah is what kind of differentiates us from the the prior movements. Using what's there, using what we have, using maybe what other people would throw away and not find value in and making it something in a creative way. So this is the campsite. We mow a little fraction of the meadow. We dug a hole and lined it with river rocks and called it a fire pit. So people will come and they'll set up their tent. It's like a micro business for our family and with hopes to expand with different arts workshops. We do humanure and compost all of the toilet material. That is a bucket and toilet lid that is ready to go and a cover material bucket for the next campers that are here. Okay you you didn't even bother to build a whole outhouse or something? We really I don't know how to do that. We don't know how to do that. Like we we are beginners and and learning and I'm from Brooklyn. I don't know anything. I've made so many mistakes but I know how to do this. I can dig a hole and line it with rocks and it's pretty nice as it turns out. What we really do realize is that there's so much joy to be found. Hence again Full Joy Farm. Like there's so much joy in materially few or simple things. I've got to be careful because of the flowers. I don't want to I don't want to hit the new lights. Solar powered lights that I installed. We're going to head towards the Vermont space. Yeah let's back home. Okay we feel like we have a lot because we've accumulated a lot since we've come here. You can see all the little solar lights along the path but our our approach is is what is going to get the job done and allow us to have the freedom or the joy that we're looking for without spending a lot, without time or money, without doing something that's more than we can handle. Is that how you why you picked the name? Yeah we took a formative trip to Jamaica in 2016 and it's a Jamaican aphorism because with enjoy the joy ends but for full joy you're full of joy forever. I'm just gonna bring these things. Hey love you. Thanks. You got it? Yeah. Okay and with the house instead of tearing it down or trying to focus on like aesthetics primarily like we're focusing on functionality on efficiency and on meeting our needs and creatively growing on that. Salad. Oh so gorgeous. All right um I think so since this is already washed I'm just gonna go ahead and do the onion hun. Is that okay? Yeah. Okay I got this. And I think that you know there are different ways that people choose to like be a part of the revolution man you know what I mean? Oh yeah are you gonna have a pretzel? You were sharing. That's so nice. A lot of folks are looking to make a whole new space. Some folks are working within the system. I feel like we're finding the cracks and trying to grow in that where you know the plants are growing in unruly ways and things are forgotten and cast aside like that's that's where we find home. Sorry I'm crying. Onions. I don't I don't I'm not used to this. Yeah and we do an annual road trip. We are gonna go and see uh grandparents.