About

My husband, my two kids and I moved to this house about 5 years ago from a busy town just outside of one of the biggest cities in North Carolina. The goal was to move into a more rural area and hopefully get enough land to start a mini farm. The first priority however was to get the country living feeling.

I really didn’t want to move back into a neighborhood. I enjoy my privacy and saw this huge farmhouse and 5-6 acres with a huge beautiful kitchen with kitchen island, breakfast bar, a huge living room, a den, office and 3 bedrooms and a huge bathroom with a soaker tub in my dreams.

When looking for homes during that time it was known to be a sellers market. This was absolutely the truth. We put our house on the market on a Thursday at the end of July in 2016 after prepping it to be ready for over a month. We went to the beach for a week that Saturday and Sunday morning our house was sold. Just like that we were homeless. We were very excited about our house selling so fast, but this also meant that we had to find a new home for our family asap!

We stayed at my husbands parents for a while. My daughter was just starting Kindergarten and we decided we had to find something in this school district. We looked all over the place, but not much was available. Some houses were nice, but not enough land, too expensive or too much work to fix up. We needed something move in ready and preferably NO neighbors and a little bit of land. It seemed like an impossible task. We felt discouraged and knew we had to lower our standards to fit our budget a little more.

We had looked at our current house before through a listing online and decided to check it out. Negative parts were: it’s in a neighborhood, small kitchen, 3 bedrooms, 2 small bathrooms, no soaker tub and definitely no den and office. But it was clean, cute, the backyard had a building and a huge patch of grass! I could see my kids and dogs playing here. The backyard was fenced in and there were some trees for shade.

So I settled. I gave up my dream of having this huge kitchen with farmhouse style sink and we put in an offer on this home. We knew we had to do a little bit of work. We replaced the flooring in this house with hardwoods, painted the walls and we basically moved in. Our dogs, cats, fish tanks everybody was getting their new spot. The kids moved into their new rooms and soon enough we missed our space we had in our “old” house but we made it work.

We started plugging away. After a year of living we added a small garden behind our garage. This was tiny compared to what we have now. But it gave us plenty tomatoes and zucchini's to cook and eat!

After living here for a while we got to know some of our neighbors and quickly learned that anything can and goes in this neighborhood. People down in the cul-de-sac had horses in their backyards. Some had chicken and even goats!

We started with building a chicken coop in the spring of 2017. We bought 12 chicken knowing that half of them might not survive and we could end up with a bunch of roosters. We raised them in a tote in our closet and low and behold, we had 1 rooster and 11 hens alive by the time they could go outside. The first fencing around the chicken coop wasn't very practical so we ordered a 10x20 dog lot with canopy and put that around our chicken coop.

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The year after we made a goat lot next to the chicken coop and bought 3 goats. At first we brought home 3 little Nigerian dwarf goats. All boys. We had two of them wethered and 1 stayed intact. The plan was to get some girls and start raising goats of our own.

A friend of ours gave us two more goats, a female pygmy mix and another Nigerian Dwarf wether. Soon after we bought 6 more pygmy goats and two of these pigmy's were pregnant. In the cold winter of 2020 we had two little kids. A buckling and a doeling. We had been very unprepared though and after a few weeks we lost both of them. Within 24 hours they went downhill so fast and we were not able to save them. This made us all very sad and we sold our pygmy goats to a friend who has more room and other goats for them to roam.

Spring 2021 came and our female Athena gave birth to a white buckling. We didn't even know she was pregnant up until the very last moment. This little boy was born in the midst of tornado warnings and us raising a litter of 10 Labrador puppies.
It was still a little chilly outside, so we enclosed our lean-to completely and bought heating lamps. We were not going to lose this one!

A couple weeks later we have decided to add two small females. We drove to the state border and met with this lovely lady who sold us two doelings. A Nigerian dwarf and a Nigerian dwarf/ Alpine cross. She showed me how to milk a goat and how the stand worked and now these babies are a part of our herd.

We are starting to get excited again about making our goat area bigger and adding more and better shelters and hopefully we have goat milk around this time next year! 

Thanks for reading our story and we hope you keep following us to see what's next in store for us.

The page should be updated regularly especially now that the season of planting has begun and we spend more time outside.

The Turpins.