In the Beginning
It all started in 2007 when I (Laurie Pledl) met Greg. We met online through Yahoo Personals. Greg had a hobby farm before and he was dreaming of having one again. I love animals and have always enjoyed farms but I never really thought about owning one. As our relationships grew, so did this dream. Greg quickly found out that he met someone whose dreams become realities, if at all possible. We married in 2008.
Greg's other dream was to build a teardrop trailer. I heard him talk about it for years and saw him research it many times. Finally, with my encouragement, we started building. I bought him some plans online for his birthday. Greg found out that it was not that difficult to do and we discovered that we work well together. Our teardrop has been done for about 8 years now and we have traveled many places with it. Some of our longer vacations in the teardrop include: the Outer Banks, NC, Maryland, Utah, California, Virginia, and Florida. The teardrop has also played a huge role in our farm dream. In fact, I would have to say that our farm dream could not have become a reality without our teardrop.
For five years Greg and I searched First Weber Realty online for farms. We found a few we liked and went to look at several properties. It was simply remaining a dream. It was getting tiring and frustrating for me. I believe Greg enjoyed the looking and dreaming more than me. All of a sudden, a property we had looked at before showed up again. The price was down a bit but probably still a little more expensive than we could afford. What intrigued us was that it was listed as an old Montgomery Ward house, it had 15 acres and it was in the drift less area of Wisconsin (a part of Wisconsin in the western part of the State that was not covered by glaciers in the ice age). We made an appointment to see it. We looked at the house in February, 2018. There was snow on the ground and it was cold. The house clearly needed a lot of work. It had stood vacant for over 8 years. However, the potential for this house was plentiful. What sold me on this property was not only the house but also the area. In researching the nearby city of Monroe, I discovered it was quite a quaint with an artistic flare. It has a great town square and some really fun shops and places to eat. It is also not far from Madison, WI. As a graduate from U.W. Madison, I was thrilled. Greg can live out in isolation and have no one else to talk to but I, however, would go stir crazy. This place was looking better to me all of the time. We started to think about it more seriously.
Before we even put in an offer, we had the well tested. The current owner did not want to deal with any contingencies due to a few previous deals falling through. The water tested fine and we put in our offer. It was considerably lower than the asking price but Greg had figured out that we would have to put about $55,000 into it. We decided to leave it to fate and put in a low bid based on what we could afford. To our amazement and surprise, the offer was accepted. Then we had to start jumping through some hoops; loan companies have a lot of them. Our credit was really good though and so we were able to make the jumps like thoroughbreds. The expenses began to multiply. Even before closing we discovered we had to put in a septic system. We decided that this was not a bad expense to get out of the way. We closed on our farm on April 27th, 2018.
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