Gallery • 13 Photos

Andrea Plascencia

One of the family's five cows stands near the hay and waits to be fed.

It’s Monday morning. For the majority of people, mornings are accompanied by the frantic clatter of alarms. Those people reach over in desperate attempts to stop the god-awful ringing. Five more minutes. Too tired. Snooze.

For the Paul family, mornings are anything but ordinary, despite being a family that lives in the city. They have an alternative to alarm clocks: chickens. But the party doesn’t end there. Along with the abundance of chickens comes the racket of geese, ducks and cows.

Not quite a person’s average day.

However, the commotion of farm animals isn’t odd for the Paul family, as they’ve been raising these animals since 2011. Prior to that, they grew up in a relatively traditional household, with only a dog and cat as pets. Back then, the family had no desire to raise farm animals nor did they have any knowledge in terms of how animals were supposed to be raised. It wasn’t until talking to a family friend that inspiration struck.

“I did not have any interest in farm animals,”  mother and farm owner Jen Paul said. “I grew up in Pennsylvania in farm country, so I saw a lot of them. But other than seeing them, I didn’t really have any experience with them. It was my husband who, out of the blue, said ‘I’m going to get some cows, what do you think?’”

The idea of raising animals sprung up in an ordinary home with a backyard too little to accommodate. Jen and her husband, Rob Paul, knew that in order to make their new idea a reality, they would need plenty of extra space, prompting the family to find a new place to live. Rob’s job as a home builder simplified the typically painstaking process of finding a home.

“We found the property [after] a real estate agent contacted me because I was developing the community behind us,” Rob said. “He called me at work to say ‘Are you interested in buying this for work? Because you can turn it into part of the community in development?’ It didn’t work out for that. Too many trees [and] too big a creek. [It was] just too difficult to develop, so we looked at it personally to buy it.”

After making an investment on the five-acre plot of land, a new idea occurred to Rob: tear down the current home to build a new, modern version of a house. He visualized it immediately. His vision challenged him to create a living space to replicate the exact image in his head.

“He brought me here and there was this little house here, and he had this whole vision in his head,” Jen said. “He was like ‘Here’s where I’m going to have the driveway, this is where the barn’s going to go,’ and I’m like ‘I can’t see any of that. I don’t see it.’”

Making their ideal home a reality, however, was no simple task. Construction began during the winter of 2015, a particularly rainy winter. This was frustrating for both Jen and Rob as the rain delayed their plans. In addition to the unfortunate weather, the dirt on the property was difficult to work with as it was too unstable, requiring an immense amount of work on building a strong foundation alone.