Welcome to the Homestead — Western Skies Homestead

Hello! My name is Jessica. My husband, Todd, and I bought this little homestead at the end of 2022. It was an absolute roller coaster of a year and how we ended up here. I am not even sure really how to tell the whole story, but I guess I’m going to try! 😂

To begin, we have to go clear back to… about March, of 2021. Around that time, we had started watching more YouTube and less TV. Because… let’s face it, not a whole lot of good is on the TV these days. Todd had somehow come across Gone with the Wynns channel and we started watching it. Their story was that they used to travel the country in an RV and pretty much ran out of places to drive so they decided to buy a sailing catamaran to see all they could, now by water. So we went back a good bit in their channel and binged watched them from the time they purchased the boat.

Now you have to understand… This couple knew pretty much nothing about boats, and certainly nothing about sailing… yet here they were diving in head first and purchasing a boat and then figuring out the sailing part later. Well it worked for them. They hired a captain to train them how to sail on their own boat, and before you knew it, they were off on some pretty awesome adventures.

“Jessica, why are you telling us about some random YouTube channel?” might be what your asking… Well because of this next conversation Todd and I had after watching them for a while…

“Should we buy a boat and do that?” Todd asked me…

“Absolutely not.” I said

End of conversation….

We kept watching their videos and now a few weeks later….

“I think we should buy a boat and do this!” I said to Todd

“For real?” Todd asked

“Yes! You only live once, and if we don’t love it or if it doesn’t work out, we can always start over and do something different.” (A little foreshadowing here I now see 😂)

All of the animals living in the trailer

So began the start to a once in a lifetime adventure. That next year, we pretty much had to get rid of everything we owned. We did have a little bit of smarts to keep a few things incase things didn’t work out that we could start over. So we put a few things, tv, coffee table, couch, etc. in our storage unit. Other than that, it was just keeping our clothes, and a few things that we were taking on the boat with us. After most of our stuff was gone, then it came time to sell the house. This is a little more condensed version of this or this would be a novel, not a blog post haha. The house sold, we moved in to our trailer (thinking it wouldn’t take too long to find a boat, but we were VERY wrong) but as winter was approaching we knew that we didn’t want to set up the trailer to live through a Utah winter because we were not planning on being in it after we found a boat. So, we moved into a rental house (thank you to Todd’s son, he was an absolute godsend).

SV Western Skies (our home on the water)

It took us 3 months to find a boat and in December we became boat owners. Now maybe someday I will write an entire post on our whole “living on a sailboat experience”, but for now, let’s just say that my earlier foreshadowing came true. That life wasn’t for us and so we were now on our way back to Utah to “start over”. Since we had quit our jobs to do this, that meant we were not coming back to jobs, but luckily Todd’s company picked him back up and that allowed us to get into a townhouse rental (both Todd and I were completely against living that lifestyle, but sometimes you have to take what you can get until you can get to something better). We rented for 5 months before we found our little homestead.

So that brings us to present day. We moved in November so we haven’t been able to do much because the snow came pretty quickly. We do have massive plans for this place, so we hope you stick around to see the progress and changes to come!