Chapter 1 ~ Finding a Home by the Beech Trees
Our First Year at Baggebo Homestead, May 2023
Being a student of literature and history I had taken an interest in old Danish houses, especially from the beginning of the 20th century. I could not tell you why, but something about that old way of living in the countryside seemed so appealing to me.
In old photographs I would see their bikes parked underneath the trees, little tents in their back gardens and the animals and people that occupied the homes and homesteads roaming around or working in the fields.
I would imagine the smell of a good grain harvest, the sweat of the people working there and the sweetness too, that of a cold drink after a long day in the sun. I would imagine the sound of bees buzzing, cows mowing, and children laughing.
It was a lively place, at least in my imagination, and I think this aliveness, this abundance of living things, is what I dreamed of most of all when we began the search for our homestead.
I researched buying a homestead extensively for years before we even set out to look at any.
I remember especially one book, where the writer boasted about having bought a property for much less money than it was worth. By not expressing his fondness of the place when negotiating with the old farmer who was too tired now to take care of it himself, the writer had been able to pay way less than the worth of the land and thereby get more than he paid for.
When we finally felt ready to start viewing properties, we were given the exact same advice by my own father. “Don’t go now and talk too fondly of everything. You want some leverage to negotiate with,” he said.
Talking to the real estate agents that showed us most of the places we visited, this was easy. “You can really hear the traffic here,” I would say. “It’s funny, I haven’t even noticed that before you said it just now,” they would clap back.
We were looking for a home close to our families, that both reside in the Northern of Denmark. A year prior we had had our baby girl, Oda, and we longed for a sense of community and shared family traditions. We longed to be closer to family, even though it meant I would be even further away from potential job opportunities and friends.
Some day in May, my parents in law, Herlufs parents, contacted us about a place near them. They knew the owners and it was just by the woods, they said. Herlufs dad had always been very cautious about properties that lay out too open to fields, as Denmark is very windy, and the wind would carry unpleasant smells and make it impossible to grow anything. A caution he had passed on to his son who had been vigilant of open spaces from the beginning. This requirement, I found very hard to meet when researching possible homesteads, as most of the country is laid out flat, with fields upon fields of big farmer’s mono-culture, as long as the eye can see. This house, however, was not. It was nestled in between the woods, with a south-east slope, that would catch most of the sunny hours despite being by the woods.
The house and property were cheaper than any of the houses we had looked at prior, but this had become more and more of a priority when searching for homes. We wanted something that we could afford to live in, without spending all of our good hours away from the home.
”I want to go see it,” Herluf said as soon as we heard from his parents. I was quite surprised at this as I had seen the property and house listed earlier and deemed it too simple, and too old-timey for Herluf to be interested in. I knew he wanted something move-in-ready and properly functioning, that we could renovate slowly, but surely, and this home was nothing like that.
But this was not the first time he would surprise me like this, and surely it would not be the last.
Herlufs parents set us up with a visit to the owners that same week. We drove up in the country and down that long, long road, where big farm industries would become smaller homesteads and at last, the forest would close in on us. A tunnel of green it was back then in May and where it opened up ahead was this little white brick home.
Back then the home was overgrown with ivy and a big front porch that was not in an original style (as old homes in Denmark do not originally have porches). It was barely standing up either way. The rest of the property was covered with trash, plants and small trees. It would only be a few years before the forest which lay behind it would have swallowed it whole.
When looking at homes I had been very particular about the building method, the style some would say, that I wanted. I knew certain homes from the beginning of the 20th century were built in the so-called “Bedre Byggeskik” style, and that these homes would have been built by good materials with old timey features that more modern houses do not necessarily have, such as a kitchen to the north, a pantry and proportionally sized rooms. I recognized the symmetrical style of house right then and there, though a door had been blocked and the porch hid most of the houses good features.
The owners came up to greet us and where ecstatic when they saw, we had brought our baby. The woman had moved into the house with her little ones too, 25 years ago. “Take her inside, out of the sun,” they said and showed us indoors.
Indoors it was dark, with a warm brown timber ceiling and exposed beams. A smell of smoke hung in the white brick walls and dust laid on the red floor tiles.
They showed us upstairs the small farmers stairs, placed directly in front of the entryway, and the woman told us with fondness how her children had had the whole upstairs room available to laugh and run and play in. “You’ll have this too,” the man said at closed a baby gate home-made of wood in front of the staircase. The room was big, but well lit. When we saw it that day in May, it only contained their bed as upstairs was warmer than downstairs they explained.
Downstairs the kitchen and bathroom were of very simple nature. All the doors and trims had been stripped, except a primitive barn door that worked (not very well) as a bathroom door.
They then showed us the two rooms where the spring sun shone in on wooden floors, nailed in with copper nails. These two rooms were the best in the house, in my opinion, but in order to get to them, you had to walk through all the rest of the north-faced rooms: the entryway, the kitchen and darkest of them all: the dining room.
We sat down in the last, sunlit room to drink a very strong cup of coffee. “Here let me find a duvet for the baby, the floors are too dirty” the woman insisted. She even found some old toys for her too and were sad they had already packed up most of it.
“We know it is not much,” they said. “But we have been very happy here, and it really is a wonderful place.” At this point I found it very difficult to keep up with my unimpressed facade. I wanted them to like me, as I had liked them. “I think it’s lovely,” I responded. I could not help myself. The woman smiled. Herluf and I looked at each-other, and I gave him a nod, but I didn’t have to. He could tell just from the look on my face. We then proceeded to drop all pretense and we told them the truth. We really wanted to buy the home and the 2 acre property, but we had not been officially cleared by our bank just yet.
When we had first inquired in the bank about the house, they assured us it would not be a problem as the house was much cheaper than what we had been approved for. However, when we called them again to inform them that we intended to buy the house, they asked us to send our papers, and returned with the news, that, upon further inspection, we would not be able to attain a loan.
“The house is cheaper than the cabin we live in now,” said Herluf. “You have access to all of our spendings, and as you can see, we never had any trouble paying of the loan we have now. We have never spend more than we own, you should be able to tell that from our papers.” But it did not matter either way, we were told.
Since buying our cabin Herluf had returned to his studies and we had had our daughter. The bank had a number, a special number, that every family with one child would supposedly spend each month and we could not meet this. “But you must be able to see, we don’t spend that much, not in any month,” Herluf pleaded. Nothing he said could change the bank man’s mind. “I’m sorry,” the bank man said at last. “I see where you are coming from, but I can not give you a loan. I would be losing my job.”
Herluf was livid. He never really gets angry, but this time he was furious. “I’ll go for a walk,” he said and left the house, leaving me with the baby and boxes, that we had already started packing up, as our small cabin was sold in less than a week.
When he returned, however, he had a different look on his face. He had talked to his father on the phone, who, upon hearing the news, had immediately said: “We will buy it for you. My parents bought our first home for us, when the bank said no.” Herluf had at first been wary of this proposition. “You can buy the house of off us, as soon as you have finished your degree and get a job in about a year. I’m sure your mother will agree,” his father had said.
We talked for a long time, when he returned home from that walk and the talk with his father. Contemplating if Herluf should just drop out from his degree in order to get a job now and thereby allowing us to retain a loan from the bank. Or if we should simply wait another year to move, with the possibility of the home being sold to someone else and having to wait and search for another one in a year’s time. We could rent something in the meantime.
“I don’t want to do that,” he said. “We have already decided to move, and we found a homestead with good land, by the forest and close to home. We should not let this opportunity pass us by.”
“Don’t you feel bad for your parents, having so many money and commitment locked up for our sake?”
“They don’t care about the money, don’t you see? They have the money to spare for a couple of years, without worry. They want us close. They want to spend time with their grandchild. That’s what’s important to them.”
Like so, we talked back and forth, but still I was hesitant. From my own upbringing I learned, that there should not be money between family members, and that you should seek towards independence at all times. A loan should be paid back as soon as possible, and ideally you should be in debt to no-one. This goes for kind gestures as well. And if we agreed to the idea of letting Herlufs’ parents buy the house, we would live in, there would be no way for me to repay them for many, many years, if ever. Sure we could buy the house from them in a couple of years and take over the loan, but the gesture, I was sure, I could never repay them for that.
The last possibility I presented was to buy the place in cash. We had had quite the luck selling our cabin, when the rates where high, which somehow enabled us to cash in our loan with 1 % rating for much cheaper. I still don’t really understand how that was a possibility, and it was for sure not by any smart thinking from our side, but the purest of luck. If we could just save for some more months, rent something extremely cheap, and move in with the knowledge that we had no money to use for renovations in the first year, then perhaps, we could buy it in cash.
We called Herluf’s parents again in the evening. They were ecstatic, already acting like we would be moving in soon. I laid out the idea for us to pay in cash if we just saved up and lived frugally until Herluf would be done with his studies next year. “That’s not going to bring you happiness,” my father in law told me. “You will want to have money available when you move in, because thats when you will have the most energy to get things done. That is when you will be most eager and if you don’t have any money to spend, you will not be able to do any of it. You will grow sour of the place, trust me on this.”
When Herlufs’ parents were young and they just had had him, they too moved in to a old farmhouse, with lots of outbuildings. Herluf’s father is a farmer by trade, and back then the new big thing was ostriches. It had just come to the market, and sellers were sure it would be sold like chicken meat in the next five to ten years. So they put all their money and saving towards that. But ostriches never made it to mainstream, it died out, and they were bleeding money on the ostriches and the outbuildings and the house. After four years they gave up, sold their dreams and lived in a camping wagon for six months with three small children. They were out of jobs and money, when Herluf’s own grandparents, the parents of my father in law, offered to buy them a cheap house, that they could repay them, when they had found jobs. They still live in that small house today, having renovated it and bought extra land to keep poultry and ducks on.
We talked back and forth, as I tried to explain them, that we would be forever in their debt, and that it was not something I could say yes too. It was too much money and too generous. Herluf has four younger siblings, and we could not possibly have so much financial help. It would be completely unfair to all the others.
“It’s not a trade-off between us,” my father in law insited. “It’s not loan you take at the bank or a trade of services. We want you here. You will pay us back in time, but for now, let us do this, and not think about the help we are offering in a transactional way, because it isn’t. It’s a family matter.”
Nothing I said could make them change their mind, and Herluf was to no help. “You don’t have to make yourself deserving of good things happening to you, Anne,” he told me. In the end, I had to abandon my better judgement and my calculating mindset. I listened with an open mind to my husband and his family, and at last, I agreed.
So that was how our home was bought. Not by us, not by our hard-earned money, not by us tricking the sellers into selling it to less than it was worth, but by the acceptance of extreme financial help from our family and sheer luck. As you can probably tell by now, our story is very far from the one of the self-made and self-sufficient man, as much as this was the story that we might have wanted and were told about homesteading. But it would be very far from the last time that we were would have to accept help from the most unlikely of places and with absolutely no way of retuning favors.
When it came to actually buying the house, we decided to bid a bit lower. Not because we wanted to trick the buyer’s into anything, but because we knew already that we would have a lot to do and pay for as soon as we moved in, and simply we needed the money to do this, about 20.000 $ we estimated. We offered them a little under 100.000 $ for the house and property, and to our big surprise, the owner’s where on board with this immediately. Not because they had tricked us into giving more that the house what worth. Not because they fell into our trap or was made to feel in any way, that they had to sell the house to us, because no one else would be interested. But simply; because they liked us. They wanted us to move in and were willing to go further down in price for us to be able to buy. Because they wanted it to be us.
So in May we packed up the last of our boxes and drove away from our small cabin, to the north, where we would live in the camping wagon with Herluf’s parents, until June would come, and the home by the beech trees would be ours.
Read the next chapter:
The Big Move
As with many other moves ours was done in a hurry, and time was very short. You see, we had hoped to be able to move in a bit earlier, since we needed to be out of our little cottage at the end of the month. But we could not move in or get the keys until the 15th of June, which left us two weeks to make the house that had now been abandoned by the previ…
Very nicely crafted, you really take the reader through the troubles and joys of that first move. In the end, makes you feel like the world is looking after us in a way or another. Lovely hint on the smell of wood inside!