Buying and selling a property has always seemed very stressful. Happy to learn you found the perfect place. Better to have sold in 3 days than in 6 months, like my mom's house took to sell. It's a great story about how you didn't intentionally set out to become a homesteader, yet that's what you became. Back then I suppose the term wasn't as popular as it was a hundred years ago and in today's time. When I was a kid, we just called it home. Didn't twice about it. It wasn't until moving to Los Angeles that it became a necessity I go back to the old life, as you said, where:

we never once worried about the naysayers and busybodies who thought us crazy