Couple bought a homestead for $390,000, spent $13,000 on DIY renovations: Their No. 1 takeaway after a year on the land

In 2023, Sophie Hilaire Goldie, 37, and Rocky Goldie, 50, had just finished converting a friend’s Home Depot shed into a tiny home and were ready to start looking for their own place together.

“If it wasn’t for meeting her, I probably would have ended up in a little shack,” Rocky tells CNBC Make It. “I took a long way to get here but I wanted to be some type of homesteader when we met. She had the same vision and it’s not common to meet somebody who does.”

“He also wanted to be living off the land and homesteading,” Sophie adds. “But he didn’t have this big grand vision of all these buildings. He just wanted something simple.”

The couple started their search on Zillow with a specific list of requirements that included “at least 10 acres of land” and located “deep in rural Kentucky.”

“We love old things and antiques, so we wanted a place with some history. We were actually looking for a fixer-upper that had some history, and we weren’t really finding great stuff on Zillow,” Sophie says.

A local photographer connected the couple to a realtor who found them a 37.5-acre homestead for around $390,000. The property had two log cabins from the 1840s that had been combined to make one 2,200 square foot house — with four bedrooms and one bathroom — and one 200 square foot cabin and two barns.

“I think I had been waiting my whole life to finally come home. There were elements of the shed that felt like that but this place, more than anything, felt right. I knew it would be the last time I was moving and where I’ll spend the rest of my life,” Sophie says. “I knew I wanted to put so much energy into these surrounding acres and this view. Finding home in Rocky and this home felt like I could finally let go of the burden I was carrying on trying to find a place.”

When the couple first visited the property, it was in pretty bad shape. There was poison ivy in the front yard, the sidewalk had cracks, and there was garbage everywhere.

But Sophie felt optimistic. “I knew we were going to buy this house before we even stepped foot into it,” she says. “I saw all of the promise. With me and my husband working on this place full time, in a few years we could transform this place.”

“I knew it looked terrible but I could see underneath all of it,” she adds.

Rocky was less sure but says he was swayed by his wife’s enthusiasm.

“I thought it was going to be a lot of work and that it was beautiful,” he says. “Sophie was always talking about the pros and I was talking the cons, but she convinced me.”

“I think we balance each other out that way. I’m toxically optimistic and Rocky is pessimistic, but I knew there was no way we weren’t going to live here,” Sophie adds, laughing.

Sophie and Rocky closed on the property in early 2024. The couple secured a 30-year mortgage with a minimum monthly payment of $1,790.18 and plan to pay it off in under five years.

Since moving in a year ago, Sophie and Rocky have focused on doing renovations around the house and the property themselves. The couple estimates they’ve spent about $13,000 so far: $9,000 on tools and $4,000 on the interior of the house.

That doesn’t include the hundreds of hours the couple has spent doing things like clearing out old trees and bushes, getting rid of all the poison ivy on the property and getting rid of an infestation of brown recluse spiders — one of two spiders in North America with dangerous venom, the other being the Black Widow.

Sophie says that when she looks back on the first year of living on the homestead, she splits it into two categories: the work and their mindset.

“The first part of the year was a lot of clearing. This place was covered in trash and so it was a lot of trips to the dump. It was a lot of sorting through that stuff before we even took it to the dump. It was also the chaos of having way too many animals and that is completely my fault and I knew it, but I also couldn’t stop myself,” she says.

“I think that first year was really hard and it’s hard to even go back to that place but it was also so amazing and exciting. There was an endless amount of things to do, but it was all fun and exciting.”

Sophie and Rocky have also added new things to the grounds like a garden, many fruit and nut trees and over 30 animals, including chickens, a goat, guinea fowls and cats.

On top of the additions to the grounds, the couple has also started renovations on the house, including redoing the kitchen, the bathroom and organizing the rooms throughout the house.

The two are trying to set themselves up to be as self-sustainable as possible, too. They eat the eggs from the chickens in the barn and use the milk from the goat to make cheese, creamer, and to bake. The hope is to also use the material they get from the clearing to make their own hay.

“We’ve got our own eggs. We’ve got fruit. This will be the first year that we will be canning, which I learned from one of our neighbors,” Sophie says. “One of the rooms we’re redoing to make it into a canning room, which is going to have who knows how many months worth of food ready to go.”

Now that the couple has been living on the property for a little over a year, Sophie says the most significant lesson she’s learned is the impact a person can have on a piece of the planet.

“We came here and now you can see how, as long as there are two people here working on this most of the time, you could take a place that was so neglected and change it,” she says. “Now we see the rapid abundance of all the work we put into it. It makes you think so much more about the impact that we have on the planet, especially in stewarding this one piece of land. It’s a big responsibility because you have a lot of power to do good or bad.”

For Rocky, the biggest lesson he’s learned is who he is outside of his career. He served in the Marines for several years before transitioning to a career in maintenance, which spanned over 20 years.

“He was so tied to that identity and when I told him to quit his job and homestead full-time, I saw the sirens going off in his head,” Sophie says. “Since he quit, I ask every few months or so how he feels and every time his answer is the same, he forgot to even think about the fact that he quit his job.”

“It’s ingrained into you in this culture that people identify themselves with their jobs. The job becomes your identity and even if you’ve got somewhat of a plan of how you want to live like we did, it was still scary to let go of that lifeline,” Rocky says. “When I left, I thought I would probably sit back and think about what I would be doing at work today but it never happened. The only thought that I have now is why I didn’t do it sooner.”

Sophie and Rocky have no plans of ever selling their property, and are excited to continue working on the homestead, growing Sophie’s skincare company, Seoul + Soil, and sharing their journey on YouTube.

“I look forward to the day when it’s not all these huge projects and all the major stuff is one and then we’re just sitting around dilly-dallying and doing our hobbies,” Sophie says. “I always want to keep learning and eventually spend half of my day just sitting here doing a hobby.”

Similar to Sophie, Rocky looks forward to the time when he can simply enjoy his hobbies.

“I love to read and learn something, so I would say my goal would be to get to the point where I could do day on, day off of reading, learn something and then go practically apply it the next day,” Rocky says. “I sit and think about what my goal is but it’s more of a feeling and I kind of already have that feeling where I can sit back and just feel at peace and there’s nowhere else in the world I would rather be. I think I’m already at the destination.”

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