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Is this post really about the ranch? Yes and no. It speaks to who we are, so yes. Maggie May was our oldest dog. Our dogs are like children to us. She was spoiled to the core. Her daddy’s little girl.

Maggie loved the ranch. She loved the smells. We have two other dogs, and she was by far the alpha. We took trips to run at the ranch, and as the house was nearing completion, they came along as we worked. Her health was terrible at the end. She was suffering and we along with the vet, decided it was time to stop her suffering. As all true dog lovers, the end is so terribly heartbreaking. We have continued on, but she will always have a place in our heart. All of these pictures of her are at the ranch.

Mike and I noticed in the fall of 2019 there was a large amount of monarchs on the property. We didn’t really think anything about it. The next couple of years, we started to see more of a pattern. Mid to late September the monarchs counted into the hundreds. The only logical explanation was that they were stopping at the ranch along their migration path. It is so hard to describe and hard to capture with a picture. If you get too far away, in a picture they just look like leaves.

The monarchs seem to like the mulberry and pine trees when they are passing through.

I knew I wanted bees and I love honey. I did a lot of research and dove into a Flow hive. It is basically the same thing, except collecting honey requires no additional equipment. I purchased bee nucs from an Amish company. They rode to their new home in the back of my SUV. Long before we lived there, generations of bees came and went.

I read a ton before I got bees. In hindsight, I didn’t put them in the best place. After winter, we will be moving them. Not sorry that I bought them. I just admit that it was too soon. Our state bee inspector wrote about the ranch this year in the American Bee Journal. I was a hot mess that day from pulling weeds. She was so impressed with the native flowers we planted in the garden for our pollinators. But, that is what we do at the Red Tail Ranch.

The Potting Shed was never meant for a frilly life. I work in there. I store certain things there that I need for the bees and the garden. It is nice, but now after few years working (read the Potting Shed) it is a wee bit dusty.

I stenciled the floor of the shed. There was no running water there at the time. That was tricky. But it turned out okay and adds a little bit to the overall look. I have always looked for great pieces for a steal. I already had the drafting table legs, the door, and the barn wood table to add. The cubby was so heavy. That was not an easy feat hanging with just the two of us. The dresser stored clothes at one time (pre-house) so that I could change after work and start work at the ranch.

There are two pictures in the Potting Shed. One is my grandmother and the other is my sister. Both made me who I am today.

These pictures were taken on year one. There is more shoved in there now and it is much dustier! I use it, and use it well.

We love the unique, the old, and the things that tell a story.

When I was cleaning out 4 feet of old aluminum cans, decades of junk, trash, opossum carcasses, mice poop, rotten wood, glass bottles from one of the old sheds, I got to bottom. There dirty, sweaty, and stinky I looked down at the most beautiful sight. Two hand hewn posts. Clearly from the original porch. If you look back at the post about the house, you can see, that somewhere in time, they took down the gingerbread trim and changes to post style completely. You can see in the corner of the shed that I did find some other small treasures to keep, but I knew immediately those posts would be table legs.

I reached out to a local man who I had seen posting pictures of tables he had made. He thankfully accepted the challenge. Jonathan Fox did an amazing job.

The top is solid walnut. It took a handful of family to get it moved in. In love with it, every single time I look at it.

I could make a million posts about the process of building our house, but I won’t bore you with each little detail. The takeaways are what I will chat with you about. We saved every penny we could in this process. There are a few things we splurged on. We built the house during a pandemic. That didn’t help a thing. We overpaid for too much, due to shortages. If we could do it ourselves we did.

We started late winter 2021. We had no architect, no detailed plans, but a simple plan on graph paper and a great builder. Chris Cunningham and crew did the big picture – the shelf, subfloor, and framing. We built a barndominium with a twist. We have a crawl space, which most barndos do not have. It is a hybrid. The layout is simple. We drew out on graph paper what we wanted and it went together perfectly. We build it for “us”, what we needed and wanted.

I drew out this exterior image, never knowing that later on it would be published in a magazine (will talk about that later). I sure would have done a better job had I known!

We paid for really good windows, that our little dogs could see out of. We paid for good insulation, sold exterior doors, solid wood interior and trim, and good flooring. We used every rebate and were good at taking back what we didn’t need. I cleaned up and organized after the crew every day. Mike did all the electric, and I was the lovely assistant. I put most of the kitchen cabinets together, and Mike was my lovely assistant. Mike hung doors, closets, just about everything. We were our own general contractor. That meant we were either working at the house or going to get supplies.

The never ending decisions, trips for supplies, late nights, and utter exhaustion came to an end just over a year later. We had Christmas in our new house. We still wonder how we did it. We still pinch ourselves to make sure this dream is real.

People in our area were so interested in what we were doing. Traffic on our road that goes pretty much nowhere, drastically increased. We were fielding questions about what we were working on now, and how in the world we had accomplished what we had. One of the editors of Illinois Country Living came by one cold early winter day and interviewed me.

You may remember that I made a comment about the sample drawing I had done for what our finished house would look like. I gave them permission to pull from our social media, and when were sent an early issue there it was. Good grief! It is always scary when someone wants you to tell them your story. Will it be accurate when it comes out? But the article was amazing. Colten Bradford did a great job.

We gained even more followers to our Facebook page and people have stopped us to tell us they saw the article, and loved our project.

We were able to save one part of the old house. In the seventies the concrete porch was added to the house. I wanted to save it and use it in the garden. For the longest time it was where we sat to cool off and rest. The garden was designed around it. It sits behind our house now in the back. The soil was rough. It took hours and hours to sort through the crud for clean soil.

The after is amazing!!! The chairs were made by high school students. I bought the lumber and they did it as a project.

Before we had a house, we had a Potting Shed. Mike designed it for me and surprised me with it. Now truth be told, it was all a ploy to keep my stuff out of the way of equipment! But, I love it none the less. We bought it from a local builder. Where the enormous house once stood, is our beautiful garden today. At the back of the garden is our Potting Shed. It took a huge amount of dirt work to get it where it is today. We had top soil from the farm pond dig was perfect.

The huge shed you see in the background did come first. That is where we stored our equipment. We weren’t living there for a few years, so we did what we could to protect what we had invested in.

The stone pieces that mark the entryway into the garden from the drive were on the property when we bought it. They are old and found in random places here. The flower medallion is only on one side, so they face the same way. The raised metal troughs were mostly free. The thought was that those would be the vegetables and everything else would be flowers. We made the arches out of cattle fence. I will share more about the garden and the inside of the Potting Shed later, but you can see how it started to come together. This is now our back yard, behind our house.

Not only did we tear down the huge house (see The House) we also had a few other structures to tear down. If they were solid and good we wouldn’t have, but the were well past their prime. Just the two of us, tore down every single structure on the property. We sorted good wood out and recycled all of the metal. We only hauled off one dumpster.

A one time resident was quite the hoarder. Each of these structures were full of junk. We kept what was worthy and junked the rest.

I don’t think there was a level spot in any of them. You get an idea of the size of the big tree in this first picture too (The Beast). This also was NOT how it was when we bought the property. These pictures reflect months of clearing that Mike and I did, just to see these structures. Also not the huge rocks!!

There was once a beautiful old tree on our property. It had seen several decades go by. We loved that old tree. If you take anything away from this post, let it be that if the tree could have stayed, it would have stayed. It was massive. We noticed that big chunks of the tree would appear underneath it. I would clean them up and then there would be more. It got so bad, that Mike didn’t want me under it. It was one of the tallest and oldest trees on the property. It was a BEAST!

We had someone come look at it. The outcome was that the tree was mostly dead. It had to go. The tree would be directly in front of where we were hoping to build one day. The tree would have cost several thousand dollars to be removed. In the Mike and Cat way of doing it, we did it ourselves. One day we pulled in to work and Mike announced he was taking the tree down.

A. I was scared to death. B. So scared, I didn’t even get video. He simply walked around it with the chainsaw and moved as far as he could. Seconds later it was on the ground. What we saw made it clear, we had definitely done the right thing.

It was hollowed out rotten. We later learned that only the bight exterior rings were alive. The rest of the center was actually dead, just not rotten out yet.

Then came the clean up. You have to understand that at this point we had already cleaned up thousands and thousands of limbs.

I asked Mike for one thing before we wrapped up that day at the ranch. I wanted a slice of that tree. I knew it would make a beautiful, one of a kind wall piece. Tired, sore, and slightly grouchy, Mike cut that slice. I wasn’t sure how my vision would become a reality. You will have to read The Beast in it’s New Form to read and see how it turned out.

In our plan all along, was to put in a farm pond. During the summer of 2020, we had several people come out and look, give an estimate, and weigh in on whether it would be successful. It is an expensive gamble. Absolutely no guarantee.

This was the first service that we paid for. They started digging and before too long they had a pretty deep hole. We decided on an acre ish size. As they continued to dig down, water started bubbling up. Soon they were pumping water out of it so they could dig.

One thing we did to save money was keep the soil on site. We build a berm in the front and a berm in the back. An acre pond equals a whole lot of dirt.

Once we called it done, the prediction was a year fill. Much to our surprise it was filling pretty quickly. Then we noticed, visible bubbles coming up. We hit a spring! Within three months it was full.

It has stayed full, give or take during dry seasons. It brought a fantastic increase in wildlife. It is the only substantial water for miles. It was a lot of money, it was moving dirt around for a couple years after, it was nerve racking, and it was totally worth it!

One of the things that we loved from the very beginning were the rocks. Really big rocks. We knew there were a lot. Four years later, I can say that we had NO idea how many were on the property.

Rocks are always a topic of conversation to new visitors. These rocks were not here originally. The area is not that rocky. We found old ledge and diary entries that indicate one of the family members had a thing for rocks. We saw entries for visits to quarries and notes that he had asked someone to deliver boulders.

The rock wall may have acquired rocks from people dropping them off, for no other place to put them. Every single rock on the front rock wall was moved, mostly by hand and mostly by the two of us. After a rock went through the tractor mower, we knew we would have to do something different. There were giant boulders elsewhere on the property. Those were moved by our trusty backhoe. Now each boulder on the front wall weighs tons and won’t move anywhere.

For the longest time, our project was about the house. It actually became a little irritating…Awe, you couldn’t save the house…I though you would restore it. This should clear it all up. Unless you were a billionaire there was no restoring that house. The last heirs gutted out fireplaces, fixtures, windows, and the stairway and sold them. It was then left to rot and decay for decades. Trees had grown into it, decades of weather had taken its toll, and hundreds of mice, rats, and misc. wildlife had ruined much of what was left.

With that being said, there was some value to what remained. More sentimental than monetary. We saved what we could and what we thought we should. Blowing the whole thing up would have been much easier. Instead, we painstakingly put our hands on every piece. We recycled metal, and sorted pieces down to a half inch.

It was one of the most gorgeous houses for miles. Nearly, 200 years later, it was rotten and ready to fall in on itself.

The saving grace to our ability to move forward in this project was our backhoe. We bought it used – still expensive, but we would have had to pay someone to remove all of the stumps. When I say all of the stumps, I mean hundreds and hundreds. At this point we hadn’t paid anyone for anything, and just the two of us had done the work. This is how we roll. So we bought it. I thought it was kind of silly, but I can honestly say that we would never have made it through the project without it. It did even more for us than we were expecting at the time. I love the picture with the sunlight beaming down. That was pretty much how it was. Without that backhoe – we would not have the Red Tail Ranch. Her are just a few pictures of her in action.

You can imagine that a property that had been left untouched for so long, would be full of treasures. Well, this property did not disappoint. We had mountains of rubble to go through. The two of us did it by hand. From jail cell doors, to bottles we had driven over with the tractor or backhoe dozens of times, we pretty much found it all. In all the digging, we never found human remains or money. The latter would have been appreciated.

We used a lot of what we found when we built our house, but that is getting way ahead of myself!

One thing that made us love this property is the history. We both love history. We didn’t know very much originally. The house remained in the Perisho family for generations. They were the first family to head west and take a claim to the land. There was one other owner prior to us purchasing the land (our friend that we bought it from). We, nor our friend, are related to the Perisho family. We cleared the drive and front half of the property through fall. For every tree that went down there remained a stump. They were all for the future. But we did an amazing amount of work those months. The best part, we did it ALL by ourselves. We were sore and exhausted when winter came, but winter is a time for rest. That is exactly what we did. We talked and made plans and tackled a whole other level of hard work as spring 2020 rolled around. The Perisho family owned the property for about 190 years. We are beyond fortunate to have photos that date to the Civil War Era.

The couple in the picture is the son and his wife, of the original builder of the home. We know more about it, because a relative came and brought us this family portrait below. The infant on the left was the grandmother to the man who came and visited us at the ranch.

People in the area started making trips to the “old Perisho place” to see our progress. Traffic increased by 500%, I’d guess.

We had so much excitement and enthusiasm that summer. The property is long and rectangular. You 100% could not see into the property. It is hard to believe now. Our goal was to get in. With a tractor we already owned and a bush hog (a heavy duty chopper that pulls behind a tractor), we went in. Bush hog first. We didn’t officially own the property yet. We believed from the very beginning it was our destiny. We worked for over a month not owning it. Sunrise to sunset on weekends and every night after we got off work.

We cleared the drive and front half of the property through fall. For every tree that went down there remained a stump. They were all for the future. But we did an amazing amount of work those months. The best part, we did it ALL by ourselves. We were sore and exhausted when winter came, but winter is a time for rest. That is exactly what we did. We talked and made plans and tackled a whole other level of hard work as spring 2020 rolled around.

Back in 2019, on the weekends we would drive around the back roads. We were looking for that dream property. We had looked at a couple places that were just not “the one.” When you live in farm country in east central Illinois, a plot of land with trees rarely comes up for sale. One of our friends posted on Facebook that she was regretfully selling a piece of property. My husband quickly sent her a message that we wanted it, before we ever put eyes on it. This picture is me putting my eyes on it. I had no idea that Mike was taking this picture. I had been playing with my hair, twisting it into a braid on the drive. If I had of known, I would have at least tried to look cute and skinny (don’t we all do that…). But the truth is, I will 100% take this picture. It is wunderlust. It is dreamy. It is a crazy woman having NO idea what was ahead for her, and it was a husband that wanted to make this woman happy. I will totally take that any day, over cute and skinny. We walked the property and bought it. Two crazy people with a dream for a country life. Void of a clear understanding of what it would take to get there.

This picture is our current driveway. You will see it in the future, first full of trees and stumps, later water and mud, later – rocked and the most amazing view.