Live a Good Life
Should You Start a Home Based Business?
So the question that I have been pondering for the last year and pondering even more intensely the past few months is…”Can a family earn a sustainable income on one acre?” My musings have taken my thoughts along another path as well. In our research (because our youngest daughter has also been investigating this thought), we have discovered that it is more difficult to find jobs working for other people at our own house than it is to start our own home based business.
Things have been moving so fast around here since Gramma’s surgery. She has Physical Therapists that come to her house. That is so wonderful for all of us. Other sets of eyes to check on her and to be sure her mobility is getting better and that she is staying hydrated and is safe. We help her out with a couple of meals a day and keep her dishes and vacuuming done. She convinced herself that once she had a “new” hip, all the pain would be gone. There was no talking to her about recovery time, incision pain, pain from muscles that she hasn’t used in several months or anything like that. Now, she is so discouraged that she still has trouble moving. Her stubbornness is what allows her to live as independently as she does but it is also what makes caring for her so difficult.
In these last several weeks we have also moved Cameron home from his apartment in North Dakota. It is wonderful to have him home again. The extra house furnishings were a little frustrating to work through but I think we now have a home for everything. We also partitioned off part of the garage and built him a wood shop and put more shelves in the other part of the garage to make room for my pantry items and dishes that were stored downstairs until the flood last spring. It really has been a year of life changes in our household. All of these things are exciting and scary all at the same time.
Is it possible to earn a living from home?
The area where we live has always had very few job opportunities just because of the low population. As we were driving in the early morning before sunrise, I was thinking about the very few lights on the horizon. I was wondering how many other places in the continental U.S. has a horizon like that. When Cameron brought me here the first time, I knew this is where I wanted to live. “But there aren’t any jobs here!” he exclaimed. “We will make them”, was my response. So after the Navy and college, this is where we settled and at “finding those jobs” he has done so well. Many of them involved Cameron traveling for work.
The idea of living and working on the same property is not new. It is, in fact, probably as old as the idea of putting a shelter on some land. In our wanderings, we have met people who have lived where they work.
