Home Base - Jim N Trish Dot Com

After we both retired in 2008 we sold our house, moved all of our household goods into storage, hooked up the 5th wheel and hit the road for a year. We had so much fun, met some wonderful people and saw only a fraction of our beautiful country,

In early 2009 we were in Phoenix and needed to return to Florida for doctors appointments and decided to take that opportunity to find a home base and deal with all of the household good we had put into storage.

At first we thought we would find a small piece of property in a rural area, build a pole barn with climate control for the household goods and then build a campsite for our 5th wheel. So the search began… We found a campground in Washington County Florida with a monthly rate and made it our full time job to find the right property. It took 3 months of searching every day but we found the perfect spot in Jackson County Florida.

We found an old farm house on two acres of land with an established blueberry orchard, pecan trees, pear trees and plum trees. It also had two wells, two septic tanks and 3 old pole buildings. The house was built in 1934 as a 4 room house. It had been added onto twice adding a bathroom – laundry room and the a bedroom, for a total of about 1000 square feet. But it was rough!

We decided to completely gut the inside, replace the electrical and convert it to a one bedroom house with a large kitchen and very large pantry. We started by installing a new metal roof and then gutted the inside. Eight months later we moved into the house and have been here working on homesteading projects since.

Then in October of 2018 Hurricane Michael showed up…

We were up in South Carolina in our rig visiting family and we attended the NHRA 4-Wide Championship when the hurricane hit Panama City, Florida. Our property was in the direct path of this incredible storm. We lost all of our out buildings and lost the roof of of my shop and tractor shed. We have been in the rebuilding mode since. It has been hard but we can finally see light at the end of the tunnel. Our current plan is to finish all of our construction projects by August of this year.

This too shall pass…