This is the story of how me and my wife ended up in a remote farm in Norway. Join us on the daily life and shores on our Norwegian farm/homestead.
Hi, my name is Eirik. This is the story of how me and my wife ended up in a remote farm in Norway.
The choice of country is kind of obvious as both me and my wife are Norwegians. However that is not the only reason. It is a country full of untouched beautiful nature. From the deep fjords to the beautiful mountains. Every lungful of the clean air gives energy to body and mind. The bigger question then is why by a farm? It is no secret that small farms were abandoned for a reason. In the modern world it is not room for small inefficient farms so why by one? To answer that question, we have to go back nearly 20 years to a young adult and a Nintendo 64 game called Harvest Moon. I was a gamer in my younger days but not a typical one. I hated the popular games with war scenes and lots of fighting. For me the setting was just as important. I loved games with beautiful nature. Harvest moon was by then already an old game that I tried on a Nintendo 64 emulator on a PC. The graphics was terrible, and the story of the game was quite boring but the calm life on the farm an in the small town spoke to me. I became obsessed with the game and soon started to fantasize about creating this life for real. I spent hours locking at farms online and after a few years I bid on several small farms in the area where I grew up.
I was not successful. The cost always ended too high for what a young single guy could afford. I ended instead up buying an abended old cottage in the middle of the woods. It did not have a bathroom or indoor plumbing, but it was my little piece of nature. I used a lot of time renovating this cottage but there was always something missing. Although I loved the beautiful nature on the property and the boathouse by the fjord it could not replace my longing. I wanted land and animals. Some years later I met my wife. We bought an apartment in Bergen, the second largest city in Norway and kept the cottage as a weekend and vacation home. We both hated city. We felt trapped in the apartment. The weekends on the cottage in the woods was the only place we could breathe. We sold the apartment after just one year. The plan was to live in the cottage while saving up money to buy a farm, but the opportunity presented itself just a few weeks later.
The 32 acres farm looked perfect. The price was not too bad, and the farm was in a remote location while still close to friends and family. Due to some luck with the sale of our cottage and apartment we had the financial muscles I lacked when I was younger. The farm was ours.
We had the farm we dreamed about. Now we needed to start creating the easy lifestyle we wanted. We started with two pigs. The next animals on our farm were the sheep’s. Later we got chickens and even some turkeys. It really started to look like a farm.
Our first child came just after we bought the farm. We had wanted a child for some time, so we were in haven. The farmhouse had not been touched since the 70s so it needed a lot of renovation. He came early and so our living room were missing the windows when he moved in. Luckily, we goth them the first week.
The dynamic in the working duo changed. We were not prepared off how much work raising a baby is. I was working on the farm alone in the afternoons. In the daytime I worked an 8-hour workday with two hours commute. I always felt guilty for not spending enough time with my family. Two years late our daughter was borne. It was a happy time, but it became increasingly difficult to find time for the farm. All renovations on the farmhouse stopped.
Then came the final blow. Our daughter did not hit any of the expected milestones. We started to worry that something was wrong after the first month. We had no eye contact and no smile. When she was six months old the doctors agreed. That was the start of a one-and-a-half-year medical examination. She had a ultra-rear genetic mutation called DDX3X syndrome. So, we had the farm in our dreams but we were not living the dream. The only time we had for the farms was the leftovers after the jobs had three hours and the kids were in bead. The problem with our dream was that it was in conflict with the modern society. If you want to live of a farm you will need to have a really big one. It has to be a factory with milking robots and giant machines for harvesting. The romantic pictures I had in my mind is what is sold to our children in nighttime stories. No animals are treated that way in modern farms. Many of the animals we eat has never seen the sun.
Our farm was too small for us to make any money. It was not a job; it was a hobby. You don’t get rich from you hobby. I got a job closer to home and that helped. My wife also got a job as she had used here maternity lev. That consumed the extra time we had saved.