Well, as I believe pretty much everyone in the world would agree, 2020 has been a doozy so far! On my last post in February, we had about six weeks left of pregnancy with Henry, Olivia had just turned two, and I said we had something big in the works that I was almost ready to share, but wanted to wait until the next week until it was official. Well, it’s now been official now for three months, haha! As of March 2, we became the owners of the Red Bank Creek Ranch!

This property is 128 acres about 20 minutes south of the town Steven has already signed to work in when he finishes fellowship. It was put on the market back in September 2019 for far more than we could have thought about affording. Steven kept an eye on it for a few months, and we requested to see it November after a small price drop. That appointment ended up falling through with the realtor, but we drove by and knew we were still interested after just seeing it from the road. Things got a little crazy with the holidays, and I kind of forgot about it, but just after the first of the year, Steven was scrolling the Lands of Texas real estate website and it was still there with another significant price drop. We felt like with the drops it had already taken, there was potentially enough room to talk them down into our price range. It was a little earlier than we really planned to actually buy anything, but we felt like this property was just too good not to try, so we decided to move forward.

We made another appointment with the realtor, and toured the property in early January. That tour confirmed that we were in love- it had everything we wanted, plus more we didn’t know we wanted. There is an 18 acre lake (a legitimate named lake on the map), multiple cultivated fields, and many acres of trees and pasture land that slopes up a hill. The roads were already cleared for the most part, it had water, electricity, and septic in place, and there was already a clearing for a home site (we didn’t really want anything with a house already on it because we’ve always planned to build our forever home from scratch). It is located in the more rural school district we wanted for our kiddos, and not too far from the property Steven’s brother and his wife bought.

We took the weekend to talk it through and get a game plan together, and first thing Monday morning, Steven called the realtor with our offer. He did so much research, like looking up the appraisal values with the county tax assessor, and calculating out totals based off every possible price per acre, so he was totally ready when he put in that first offer to lob back and forth. This is one of the reasons we felt like we were able to make this happen, and for such a good deal- Steven didn’t hesitate or take any extra time in between each counter offer, he just responded with the next offer as planned. We had an offer accepted in our price range by Tuesday afternoon, and we signed contracts that weekend. We set a closing date for March 2, and worked on our financing with the land bank in the mean time (we had about six weeks between our offer being accepted and our closing date).

February was crazy- we had Livy’s birthday and birthday party, Henry’s baby shower, our niece’s baby shower in Dallas, and Steven’s Granny’s 90th birthday/ birthday party all on the weekends, so our weeks were a little bit of a haze getting everything done for those, on top of getting documentation to the bank, and other things done, like appraisals and inspections. At some point during February, after I’d spent what felt like every day digging up some important information and getting it to someone, we finally had everything in and were just waiting for final approval, and I felt like I didn’t know what to do with myself when no one needed anything from me daily. We got the green light around the third week in February, so then it was just a countdown of days until our closing and everything would be official!

On March 2, we left Steven’s hometown after a weekend of celebrating Granny’s 90th birthday, and headed about 2.5 hours east to our future hometown for closing and by 12:00, we were the proud owners of the Red Bank Creek Ranch! We went out there right after lunch and just walked around trying to soak it in– we are honestly still a little in disbelief when we are there that it’s really ours!

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Since closing, we’ve spent about every weekend out there, other than the few weeks before Henry was born, and any weekend Steven had to be on call at the hospital. It’s so nice because it’s about an hour from my parents and two from Steven’s, so we’ve gotten to see our families so much more being up there, and we’ve already had so much fun spending time together on the land, and exploring the area (and we’ve already found some fantastic food!).

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The Red Bank Creek runs through the property, which is where we came up with the name Red Bank Creek Ranch (the previous owners called it something else), and we plan to add cattle and other animals in the future, expanding into Red Bank Land and Cattle, Co. So, if you’ve been here before, you may have noticed a little rebranding and a little remodeling- this site is now www.redbanklife.com and my plan is to share more about life on the ranch and our transition into moving out there as we finish up fellowship. Join us for the fun– it’ll be a lot of dirt, as many sunsets as we can get, and plenty of good food!

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