All About Us
You want to know about us? Aw that’s sweet! Well where do we begin? Officially, we are Lesley Boileau, Kim and Jason Orchard, but that’s boring so here's a little more.
Kim and Jason were high school sweeties, who have been married forever. They have 2 brilliant adult children who flew the coop as quickly as they were able, and so far haven’t come back to roost. 25 years ago, Kim met Lesley, when she was a co-op student in a drop-in centre, where Kim was volunteering. They became instant friends.
Fast forward 15 years and many moves, the three of us found ourselves all living in Cobourg at the same time. We were working jobs which were not our bliss, paying mortgages on houses that were too small and too drafty. We spent a lot of time together drinking tea and dreaming about all the things we could do if we had more land, and more time.
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On one of those lamenting sessions, scratch that envisioning sessions, Jason asked the hard question, were we serious? Would we actually consider selling the houses, and start looking for the perfect place to build our dreams? After some nervous laughter, we excitedly said yes. Of course, when we said YES let’s do this, let’s sell our houses and look for paradise, none of us really knew how challenging this would be. We thought it couldn’t be too hard to find a small hobby farm that we could afford somewhere in our beloved Northumberland County, ha! There was nothing available even in our combined price-range, so we started looking for land, and dreaming of the house we would build.
In late summer 2016 we were without houses, but we had purchased a beautiful 7.5 acre corn field in the high hills of Grafton—and the planning could finally begin. We couch-surfed and house sat, we stayed in trailers, and eventually rented a basement apartment (cue Sarah Harmer, although it wasn't the smell of bleach under the door, it was the smell of gas from the sketchy oven, but I digress). Jason taught himself SketchUP, so he could draw up some plans and we reached out to an engineer we wanted to work with, one who shared our values of sustainability and eco-friendliness. We learned a lot about building permits and septic systems, how cold is too cold for the batteries in nail guns, and the volatility of soft-wood lumber prices. We learned how to use fulcrums, pulleys, and levers, and when to use ibuprofen, vs. acetaminophen, or something much, much stronger. To make a long story (a 3 years long story) short, we learned a lot and built a beautiful house!
If you would like to check out our house building process from beginning to end, we are on Instagram @thefromscratchfarm, it’s a lot of pictures and some fun little videos as well. We are immensely proud of how much we did ourselves, we know every board intimately, because it was probably (definitely) moved at least 5 times!
The house being completed is really just the beginning of what we have planned at From Scratch Farm so please read on and check back in from time to time because new adventures are constantly coming to life.