Roger, this sounds heavenly indeed. Congrats on the fixed-up barn, that possibility has been in the back of my mind as a stretch goal but for this next move I think we're likely to be closer to the city than would have many of such properties available. We'll see when we go out and look around.
We've been talking with the in-laws, and there's a reasonable chance they'll be moving by the time their kids hit high school age, depending upon where the brother-in-law's job takes him. Moving to be near someone usually carries that risk. So we're discussing how close we would want to be, and how realistic it is for this to be our last move. Currently, we're thinking that this won't be the last one. We could end up moving again to be near one or both of our daughters, depending upon where life takes them and whether there are grandkids that need some spoiling. There will likely be some amount of compromising going on with regard to my shop space in any case.
I saw a place on Zillow that was a solid 30 minutes away from them that had 3 acres and a barn that looked absolutely perfect. The one thing tho was there was a LOT of grass on the property that looked like it could keep one very busy mowing. What is it with all the houses with the great expanses of grass - what do people do with it all? I much prefer trees myself. Well, except in a suburban setting; I wrote a much larger check to my tree guy yesterday to do a big trimming job than I liked.