Couple bought a homestead for $390,000: Their No. 1 takeaway

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.