Thanksgiving 2010 will be one I will remember for a long time. Our first winter here in Elko, NV is interesting and hard. If you know me and are reading this, you might be wondering how we came to live in Elko. I guess I should give a little history about us and our journey over the last 12 years.
Curtis and I met in May of 1999 and we married in September of 1999. During our 12 years together we had four beautiful children. Without going into great detail, we have been through a lot. We have had a home, jet skis, a new car, and a new truck. We have lost it all and moved quite a bit. We have grown together as a family through hard times and not so hard times.
We moved to Las Vegas in 2007 and moved back to my hometown of Phoenix in 2009. Just in time for my great grandmother’s 100th birthday party. When we left Las Vegas, we sold everything and moved into a 32 foot RV. I know what you are thinking…. why in the world would you want to live in such a small place with all the kids and animals. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the animals we now have. Bella, our Chihuahua was bought in Phoenix and came with us to Elko, we then added 3 cats and a stray lab mix. Will elaborate more later on the animals and how we acquired them. Anyway, we moved to Phoenix, Curtis transferred to a store there while we decided what we wanted to do. Like I said before, we started to envision this dream of living a more simple life of homesteading and homeschooling a little over two years ago. We were living in Las Vegas, and realized we needed a safer place with a yard to raise our kids, with the values of hard work and respect. So, we started doing some research and soul-searching for what we wanted most in life. We found a nice piece of property in Winnemucca, NV. We found an investor that sold land on eBay of all places. Very reputable and nice, I did my research. He has more land for sale all the time (insert ebay link here). When we decided to move to Phoenix we knew it would be temporary and because it was in November of 2009 we figured it would not be the best time to move to a place where it snowed pretty bad. Curtis was offered a job in Elko, NV in (insert date here), we had about two weeks to get ready for the 3 day drive here and find a place to live. We went back to eBay to see what our good friend had for sale in this area. We looked at one piece of property and it had no development at all. He then emailed me a few pictures of another place he had but it would be a lot of work. His email was titled Junk Lot. Boy, he was right. There were 23 cars and a school bus abandoned on it. It had 3 single wide trailers in very bad shape along with crap that was dumped there, including dishwashers and garbage. But, it had a well, a septic system and power at one point so the potential of about a $20,000 savings of having all that stuff put into the other lot we went with the “Junk Lot”. I always say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. We saw past all the garbage and saw potential. So we got to work, cleaning up. My brother in law, who came with us, started going out to the property and cleaning and clearing everything. We had to find the septic and well. After one week we moved onto the property and started dry-docking. we spent a lot of time cleaning and getting rid of junk. We had a guy come out and haul away the vehicles. We found the well and septic, purchased a water pump and filled our tanks with ice cold clear water. Here are some pictures of what it looked like before we moved onto it.
Well, I am going to end this post for now. I will work on the progress posts as I can. Until then Blessed Be.
