Couple moving to SE Tennessee in spring '23 - ISO small cottage on homestead for rent / work/trade
We are a couple looking to build our homestead dream life in Southeast Tennessee (Chattanooga area). We visited the area last year, and fell in love with the beautiful landscapes and welcoming people, and are moving to the area in the spring of ‘23. Our current plan is to rent or enter into a work/trade living arrangement for the first few months, as we get on our feet and explore long-term homestead options. Ultimately, we envision buying property in SE TN and developing several land-based enterprises (e.g., livestock grazing, tree nursery,
aquaculture, breeding guardian dogs, etc.).
We want to offer our skills,
experience, intellect, and
energy to help you get your property to where you want it to be faster and create a web of enterprises and relationships that sets all of us (you, your homestead, and us) up to thrive in the coming decades.
What We Are Looking For
A quiet, rural/semi-rural property with a 1-2 bedroom/1 bathroom cottage or small house. We are especially interested in areas within a 40 minute drive to Chattanooga, though if you have a quiet place in the
city proper (especially if it is on or near Signal Mountain!), we would be open to considering it. We are open to shared amenities on the property, but really need our own living space. We need a bathroom (toilet,
shower, bath is a plus), full kitchen (we cook a lot), and access to laundry facilities. We could furnish our own place, but don’t have a ton of furniture so if your place is already furnished, that could work for us, too. We do need high-speed internet access (or capacity to get it) to run our businesses. We don’t watch TV, so don’t worry about cable hook-ups. We are pretty quiet people, likely to be found reading at night and going to bed around 9 or 10pm. We wake up early and like making the most of our days. We love working with our hands, which may be beneficial to you if you need help with gardens, nurseries, or animal husbandry (see below for our skills and experiences).
A little about us…we are Casey and Sammy, and we love
freedom, creating and working with living things, growing, preparing and sharing great food, our families, and each other.
More About Casey
I love learning and doing things that create more freedom and choice in my life. I am quiet, curious, skeptical and an incurable questioner. I love to build things with my hands, create systems that liberate time and yield abundantly, and love DIY projects that check both of those boxes. I enjoy tinkering with the major elements of fire,
water, earth, air and metal. I love growing
trees, raising animals, natural building, improving myself, and spending time in hammocks and Nature (for some reason this is where inspiration always strikes)! My passion, mission and purpose is to help liberty-loving people create nature-connected, sovereign homesteads that yield maximum freedom and a high Quality of Life using
permaculture design.
I have been self-employed since college, and have been a fitness trainer and CrossFit gym owner, farmer and now design and implement regenerative broadacre landscapes for homesteads, farms and ranches. My California-based business is
7th Generation Design, and my solo-spin off enterprise that is coming with me to Tennessee is
The Sovereign Homestead. I’ve also been growing and selling trees for agroforestry systems since 2016 at
Honey Badger Nursery, and hope to expand this enterprise when we get settled in TN.
More About Sammy
I am a recovering university academic (I earned my PhD studying coral reef resilience and taught college students for 10+ years) rediscovering life outside of the ivory tower. ;) I love solving problems and helping people, and all of my work must return to this basic idea, though I have interests and skills that span a variety of subjects. I love teaching and mentoring, especially ecology and other natural sciences, and I focus on instilling a self-directed, independent, and resilient learning style in my students (and myself). I love deep conversations with small groups of people, cooking large meals to share with others, studying interconnectedness between people and places (history, ecology, languages, mythology, etc.), and reading quietly by the fire. I am a natural with kids and animals (not as much with plants), and I enjoy care-taking and nurturing. I have also been told I am a natural at sales, as I love to share the things I love with other people! I am definitely a homebody Hobbit, though I do love to have a bit of an adventure ‘off the property’ now and then. I consider myself extremely tolerant and willing to discuss and consider alternate views, though I maintain strong personal values and boundaries.
Skillsets/Experiences We Bring to the Table (if you’re interested in work/trade arrangements…)
Equipment Operation (small farm tractors, mini-excavator, skip loader)Water and Irrigation Systems (design and install) - for market gardens, nurseries, plant propagation, mushroom propagation, multi-species orchards etc. Plant and tree propagationLog-based Mushroom Propagation Forest and Orchard Management Web and Tech (design/management of business websites, e-commerce, media) Whole Systems Property Design (see examples at https://www.7thgenerationdesign.com/ and https://thesovereignhomestead.com/ ) Digital Property Mapping (using QGIS to incorporate geospatial and drone data for property design) Aerial Photography and Videography (piloting drones, downloading and processing images and video) Animal Husbandry (experience with caring for chickens, ducks, and pigs; including feeding, sheltering, and processing - but still lots to learn!)
Thanks for taking the time to read this post, we look forward to hearing from you if this might be a good fit!
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