Help us Restore our Historic Home and Keep our Ranch Open

Hi, were the Sowders and were fundraising to help repair our 200 year old historic home and get our ranch off the ground so we can take the best care of our animals as we can and become self sufficient productive members of society.

The house is truly lovely, but being so old it has a lot of problems. But being on the historic registrar it deserves to be treated right rather than have swaths of it scrapped and refitted. We're handy ourselves and have been slowly making progress, but any little bit to help aquire materials to make the home more livable helps.

We bought the beautiful but run down home because it was really the only thing we could afford- but still love and respect it's gorgeous historic aspects and are doing our best to make use of the acre of farm land we have. It is in massive disrepair in some places, from missing window panes and sinks to entirely unsealed rooms effectively exposed entirely to the elements. Not to mention damage from previous owners not caring for the property. It has 36 windows, 3 chimneys with 5 fire places, and 6 exterior doors, all which need some serious TLC.

My wife is a teacher and I am disabled. I do what I can to care for our animals, but our ranch goods haven't picked up yet in the local markets. We keep being hit with tiny disasters requiring big expenses, like a tree falling on fences, entire wire circuits failing, and cars kicking the buckets, limiting our ability to function on our small ranch.

While we have applied to government aide programs, they don't seem to understand how teacher pay is calculated or that she has most of it withheld to pay for the summer months. We only qualify for 50 in food stamps because of this despite our meager take away pay of just over 1200 a month and we were denied OHEP and other energy relief services due to a clerical error but are still not allowed to apply again until next year. You can imagine with such an old run down house, most of our money goes to the power bill, with the rest to other bills, gas (with a long community living in the country), government mandatory insurance, and groceries. We're bleeding money at this point, and only have so much savings.

Besides this, as an LGBTQ+ family we face constant dangers of discrimination. We live in a much safer area than before, and no longer fear for my wife being fired for who she has chosen to love, but it is still a constant stressor and concern given the rural area. It makes everything just that little bit harder.

Our first funding goal is to buy a used van large enough to transport lumber and other repair materials to the house. Our only working car is a very tiny (and cheap) city car that saves us on gas money, but just can't transport what we need to make larger repairs, and delivery charges from hardware stores for 'oversized goods' like large lumber tend to be in the 100s. After that we will be focusing on raising money for various materials to repair different parts of the house or basically quality of life appliances such as a more functional washing machine (ours is 50+ years old and the dryer has to be hooked up on the opposite side of the house) and chest freezer for storing our ranch's honey and other produce.

We have everything we need to take care of our lovely animals for now, but if and when that changes those expenses will be our number on priority. We have a habit of putting their needs above our own. We currently care for two fiber Angora goats, 6 laying chickens, a currently thriving bee colony, and our more traditional farm helpers in the form of a dog and two cats.

Our over all goal is to be able to become more self sufficient on our little ranch. Once weather sealing and other basic repairs have been taken care of we hope our energy bills will lower, and once our house is more functional we hope we will be able to put more energy into growing the ranch's business so we don't have to rely on donations anymore. In the meantime, we kindly ask for you help so that we can stabilize and at least get our heads above water.