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If you are someone who owns geese, or someone who has made a pandemic-prompted midnight Google search about backyard farm animals, it is not improbable that you would have stumbled upon Kirsten Lie-Nielsen. Her Instagram account, @hostilevalleyliving, has over 34,000 followers, and she has published two books: The Modern Homesteader’s Guide to Keeping Geese and So You Want to Be a Modern Homesteader? It was Lie-Nielsen’s flock of geese, in fact, that prompted her and her husband, Patrick Tracy Jackson III, to move from their home in Woolwich, across the river from Bath, to a 200-year-old, 93-acre homestead in Liberty.

“The geese had such personalities and were a lot of fun, but they also had a habit of sitting in the middle of the road,” says Lie-Nielsen. “We always talked about getting a farm, going somewhere more rural, but the geese in the road was like, ‘Alright, maybe we should really do this.’”

In 2015 they found their spot: a nineteenth-century New England Cape that had been in the same family right up until Lie-Nielsen set eyes on it. “It’s known locally as the old Whitaker farm,” she explains. “The Whitakers were the descendants of a ship captain who came up here in the early 1800s.”

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While it’s unusual that a home would remain in the same bloodline for so long, the downside in this case was the family’s waning interest over the years: the active farm eventually slowed to a halt, and the farm-turned-summer place was abandoned sometime in the 1970s. When Lie-Nielsen and Jackson moved in, the fields were overgrown and completely unworkable. And, while the buildings were in decent shape structure-wise, Lie-Nielsen says the main house was like a time capsule to the 1800s. “There was no electricity—it had never been wired for electricity at all. No running water. There was a woodstove in the kitchen, and that was about it.”

The couple’s back-to-the-land leap was a bona fide one. They prioritized their animals and their goals for the farm, and for the first two years they “camped” in the house. “We had a bed, but our kitchen was in the barn because we got water over there first,” Lie-Nielsen says. They had a bucket for a composting toilet and an outdoor shower that they used even in the winter—that is, when the pipes weren’t frozen.

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In the summer of 2018, after two years of focusing on land management using their goats, sheep, and geese and planting a vibrant garden that could supply the couple with nearly all their food, they set up a large camping tent in the yard to sleep in and got to work on the main house. “The tent gave us a real sense of urgency because, as it started getting chillier, we were like, ‘We have to finish!’” Lie-Nielsen says with a laugh.

Jackson did all the design work, and with the help of a few hired neighbors the house was outfitted with all the modern amenities by the fall. “I have learned so many skills through this project,” says Lie-Nielsen. “Before it was, ‘Oh, you just turn the tap on, and that’s how you get water,’ but now I actually understand how things work.”

In the woodshed, an L-shaped outbuilding off the back of the house, the couple knocked down a wall, put in floors, and added large picture windows and a woodstove. The windows add a generous amount of sunlight, and the stove keeps the entire home warm all winter long. “Now I can have all the houseplants I want,” Lie-Nielsen says. The chicken coop, which they reshingled themselves last summer, has been turned into a gardening shed. Lie-Nielsen describes it as the kind of building most people would just tear down, but like everything on Hostile Valley Farm, Lie-Nielsen says, you just have to squint your eyes to see the potential: “How can we make the old new again instead of just giving up?”