They left a suburban 1,840-square-foot split-level home to buy a mobile home half the size in northern Minnesota with 0.61 acres needing TLC. Both fell in love with northern Minnesota after visits to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. They previously bid on a Northwoods property in 2020 but were outbid, and three years later bought a fixer-upper near Ely at a fraction of that earlier home's cost. They prefer wilderness life over suburbs and deliberately avoid consumer-driven upgrades like larger homes or SUVs. Shared values, a taste for off-script choices, and long-term planning guided the move.
We have a New Yorker cartoon magnetized to our fridge that features a bedraggled but happy couple crawling through a desert with the caption, "It's nice that we want the same things." My husband's family frequently laments to me, "He never does things the easy way!" without truly understanding that this is my preferred way of doing things, too. Against the grain. Off script. Rarely the easy or obvious way.
So, while our friends and colleagues were buying larger (or second) homes, bigger SUVs, and new boats, we had our eyes on a much smaller prize: a modest plot of land in the wilds of northern Minnesota. We played the long game. We'd been living in a 1,840-square-foot suburban split-level home near the Twin Cities, but had dreamt of moving up north for years.
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