Out in Greene County, Iowa

Introducing our new neighbors, the Osbornes, and the amazing story of their moving here

By CHUCK OFFENBURGER
March 19, 2007
COOPER, IOWA

We had a great time last week at our Simple Serenity Farm, hosting a young couple and their son who will soon become our neighbors, one mile south of us on the Raccoon River Valley Trail here in southern Greene County.

They are Rich and Reagan Osborne, 31 and 29, and their 7-year-old son Mason, who plan to move from Loveland, Colorado, to our area in late spring or early summer. They will start working then on their acreage, and hope to move-in permanently by wintertime. But if they don’t get far enough long on their home making in this first summer, they might not actually move in until spring of 2008. In the interim, they will be living with Reagan’s parents, Janet and Steve Moon, in the western part of Omaha.

If you need one more sign that it’s a new era in the Iowa countryside, this move by the Osbornes certainly is one. And the way they’re landing here is a terrific story, even if we Offenburgers do say so ourselves. Let me explain.


Rich and Reagan Osborne and 7-year-old son Mason out front of the 70-year-old barn located on their acreage one mile south of the Offenburgers in southern Greene County. The Osbornes are moving from Loveland, Colorado, after falling in love with rural Iowa during RAGBRAI last summer. (Photos with this story by Carla Offenburger)

Rich Osborne spent his early boyhood in Massachusetts, then moved to the area of Summit, Colo., for high school. Reagan Moon spent her early girlhood in Texas, then moved with her family to Highlands Ranch, Colo., by her high school years. Both have been avid bicyclists since they were children. They eventually met, fell in love, married and settled in Loveland, located north of Denver, south of Fort Collins, along Interstate Highway 25.

Reagan Osborne began doing graphic design and Internet site design in the mid 1990s, basically gave it up for three years after her son was born but recently began doing Web work again. She is also a trained barista who has worked the past eight months at the Circle Moon Coffeehouse in Loveland.

Rich Osborne is highly-skilled in information technology and works as a technical support engineer for Sun Microsystems, which is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, with a major division located in Broomfield, Colorado. He works on major businesses’ computer systems – and he generally does it from home, using both a laptop and a “remote work station” computer set-up.

“Sun has a large corporate initiative to get more people to work at home,” Rich said. “It works out being a lot cheaper for them – they don’t have to have offices as large, and they save on electricity, too.”

There are 10 people working as technicians on the same Sun “team” he is part of, and five of them work from their homes – scattered from New Hampshire to Northern California to Florida to Texas and soon to southern Greene County, Iowa. What does their boss in Colorado think of having his team spread to such far-flung locations? “He loves it,” Rich said. “He wishes he could be making a move to some place in Iowa, just like we are.”

So what lured the Osbornes to their new place on the “Ecklund farm,” a mile south of us?

In the order the story unfolded, 1) they had a terrific experience on RAGBRAI, the Des Moines Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, then 2) they had a chance encounter with a friendly waitress in a restaurant in Waterloo, Nebraska, who listened to their enthusiasm about the big Iowa bike ride and told them her uncle and aunt are RAGBRAI veterans and have an Internet site the visitors should check out, 3) it was significant that the Raccoon River Valley Trail is located immediately adjacent to what will be their new home, 4) it was crucial that high-speed Internet service is available at the acreage, via the Jefferson Telephone Company and the netINS division of Iowa Network Services, 5) a good Realtor in our county seat town of Jefferson went to bat for them, 6) and there are two classic curved-roof farm buildings in pretty good condition on the old Ecklund place, buildings that sparked their imaginations.

The Osbornes, as avid cyclists, had heard all about RAGBRAI, but they’d never ridden it until last summer. When Reagan’s father Steve Moon told them he wanted to make the Iowa ride, they said they’d join him, as would Reagan’s brother Blake Moon, of Omaha. Janet Moon would serve as their support driver. Young Mason Osborne stayed with family friends in Colorado.

“We just had a great time,” said Reagan. “We couldn’t believe how neat Iowa was.”

What really appealed to them?

“The small towns and the people,” said Rich. “The friendliness we found here is just non-existent now in so many other places around the country. Every place else is starting to look the same – the same big box stores, the same restaurants, the same looking neighborhoods, all clustered around Interstate highways. It was so refreshing seeing Iowa.”

They were still talking like that on the Sunday after RAGBRAI ended, when they accompanied the Moons to their favorite Mexican restaurant – El Bee’s in the town of Waterloo on the far west edge of the Omaha metro area.

Their waitress happened to be Beth Ginger, my niece, who is librarian at Creighton Prep High School in Omaha. She has moonlighted for seven years as a waitress at El Bee’s, where she has come to know the Moons, since they are regular customers.

“Beth heard us talking and said, ‘Well, my uncle and aunt are RAGBRAI’ers, and they’ve moved to a place in the country in Iowa along a long trail – you should check out their Internet site,’ ” Rich Osborne said. She told them how to find Offenburger.com on the ’Net.

The Osbornes, once back in Colorado, checked out this site, and one of the first things they noticed was the advertisement from one of our Partners & Patrons, Judy Von Ahsen of Marso-Peckumn Real Estate in Jefferson, offering acreages along the Raccoon River Valley Trail.


The Osbornes on their farm, which Realtor Judy Von Ahsen, of Jefferson, helped them buy.

Von Ahsen is the same Realtor who found Simple Serenity Farm for us when we were looking in 2003. What especially caught the Osbornes’ eye was the line in the advertisement that we Offenburgers think the former Ecklund farm is one of the finest trailside properties in southern Greene County, and that we’d tried to buy it ourselves in ’03, but it wasn’t available then. It was first offered for sale as an acreage late last spring. The three acres include the two very distinctive, large buildings – a “Gothic arch barn” and a similarly-shaped three-story corn crib, both apparently built in 1939. There is also an old machine shed and a very small pumphouse at the well head on the property. But there is no actual house – it was torn down years ago.

During August, the Osbornes talked by phone several times with Von Ahsen, as well as with my wife Carla Offenburger. Lots of e-mails went back and forth. Then Reagan Osborne asked her parents, the Moons, to drive over to Greene County and see what they thought of the property and of nearby Jefferson.

“Mom called us in Colorado and said the buildings on the farm were just great,” Reagan said. “And she described Jefferson as being ‘just like Mayberry,’ a reference to the town in the old ‘Andy Griffith Show’ on TV. Rich and I have always been huge fans of that show, and in fact, we once looked at Andy Griffith’s hometown of Mount Airy, North Carolina, as a place to settle. He sort of loosely based ‘Mayberry’ in the show on Mount Airy.”

The Osbornes, who still had never seen the property themselves, made an offer on it in September. Rich finally saw it first-hand while traveling through Iowa on a business trip in November. Reagan got her first in-person look at it during a Christmas trip to her parents’ home. After negotiations, and after finding financing at Peoples Trust & Savings Bank in nearby Rippey, the Osbornes bought the three acres and buildings in January. They have their house in Colorado up for sale now, hope it sells this spring and are preparing to move to Iowa.

After getting to know the Osbornes well when they stayed with us last week, we Offenburgers are looking forward to their move as much or more than they are. We figure this is going to be fascinating entertainment for us the next couple of years, and very close to home, too!

Entertainment for us?

First, Rich and Reagan have become so enchanted with the corn crib that they have pretty well decided they are not going to build a house on the property, but instead, are going to convert the crib into their home. They’re already “blogging” about this on the Internet, and even are sharing their floor plans for the crib, and you can now follow their thinking and their progress by clicking into www.twobarnfarm.com on a regular basis. (You can also write directly to the Osbornes on that site.)

Second, their goal is to be as self-sufficient as possible – to the point that they are going to try to live “off the grid.” That means they hope eventually they can produce enough electricity with acreage-sized wind generators, and with fuel-powered portable generators as back-up, to provide the electricity they will need for their home, including for their professional computer work. And Reagan, who is an avid gardener, hopes that they can grow most of the food they’ll eat.

Rich said that he and Reagan “have dubbed ourselves ‘high-tech hippies.’ By that, we mean we love to live as simply as possible, but at the same time, we don’t want to give up our high-tech toys – like our computers and our espresso machine!”


The Osbornes are shown here (left) in front of two buildings on their acreage in southern Greene County. One is an old machine shed, and the other is the three-story, curved-roof corn crib which they are planning to renovate to become their home. In the photo at the right, they are standing inside one of the crib building's side areas, where you can see the heavy beamwork in the crib's construction.

They love the arched roofs on their buildings, and they’re awed by the workmanship that went into bending the rafters. They say the corn crib has “a first-floor foot print” of 860 square feet. That ground floor has two side cribs, which would have been used to store ear corn. They say the north one of those cribs will be their entry way. The middle portion will “probably become our bicycle shop, since we have so much bicycle equipment,” and they plan to turn the south crib into a greenhouse. The second floor will include their kitchen, office and their son Mason’s bedroom. A loft on the third floor will include the master bedroom, and an area where they can watch DVD movies on a drop-down screen.

“We’re not TV people,” Reagan said, “but we love to watch movies.”

Of course, there is a whole lot of construction work to do – including a new roof on the crib, all the work on the sidewalls, interior walls, insulation and building out the floor plan. The Osbornes intend to do much of the work themselves, since both are very handy with tools and construction.

They said they will move most of their belongings to Reagan’s parents’ house in Omaha and make their actual home there while they’re doing the building. While on their acreage during the building stage, they will stay in a tent or camper until they can move into the crib.

The large barn needs a new roof, too, but they said their work on it will be secondary to the crib. And besides, they’re still thinking about what uses they’ll make of the barn.

Rich said they look forward to bringing their two wired-hair fox terriers to the farm, and wonder how the city dogs will adjust to country life. “Those dogs are like on fast-forward all the time,” he said. “Maybe they’ll be able to run off some of that extra energy.”

He said he and Reagan have told Mason “that he can have animals, besides our dogs. Maybe a pig. Maybe sheep. But so far all he’s said he’d like to have is a fainting goat.”

Mason, incidentally, spent a lot of his first visit to their farm, and to our Simple Serenity Farm, meandering around with a long weed sticking out of his mouth, “just like real farmers do,” he said.

Oh, this is going to be fun!


You can reach the author by e-mail at chuck@Offenburger.com. You can send your welcome to the Osbornes, or ask them questions, by writing them at Rich & Reagan Osborne.