For sale here is our current home.

We have just over 21 acres in rural Northeast Riley County in Kansas. Located on Swede Creek (It goes through our yard.), it sits on some of the most scenic land in Kansas! Whitetail deer, wild turkeys, and other wildlife are more then plentiful.



Our home consists of the following: 21+ acres of beautiful land located on Swede Creek Road
Sweed Creek flows through the middle of the property
An approximately 150 yr old native limestone house, 2 story with a basement under about 3/4 of it. An all wood addition is on the north end of the limestone, and a large wood porch wraps around the east and south sides of the rock. The limestone is in good condition, but the wood portion is suffering from some settling. The windows are original and therefore in not-so-good condition. The roof and portch need a lot of attention.


The land was homesteaded by the Toburens. The Toburen family that grew up in this house included 12 children. Some of those children are still around the midwest area and like to come back and visit "the old homestead" once in a while. It's great to hear the stories of how the farm used to look. It is from those surviving members of the last Toburens to live here that we have learned that the house is around 150 years old though they don't have an exact date of when it was built.

The land (and some 700 acres surrounding the house) has been in my family since the early 60's. My father still owns approximately 400 acres of land that adjoins our 21 acres. It consists mostly of heavily wooded pasture and is a hunters' paradise. We have people come from far a wide to hunt here! Some of that land is currently also for sale. I once counted over forty deer grazing in my dad's alfalfa field just across the creek from our house. The wild turkey here are so plentiful that I regularly have to dodge them on my way to work!

My family and I have been living on this land for 13 years and in this house for 5 years. (My grandfather was living in the house before us.) We have been slowly cleaning up the farmstead. What is now our yard was once hog lots and cattle lots! Just last year (2005) we finally removed the last of the cattle lots and are now working on smoothing the land to prepare it for grass. As for the house, we had big plans! Compared to the trailer house we were living in, it's huge! (The trailer hookups are still in the yard, by the way, but the trailer is long gone!) So, we decided to fix up the upstairs of the house "apartment style" with some very temporary plumbing and wiring. We made it just good enough to live in. We were going to completely "gut" the downstairs down to the studs and rebuild it. Then we were going to move downstairs and gut the upstairs. It seemed like a good plan, but two things happened:
  1. We got in over our heads. I'm not a carpenter and the more I tore apart the downstairs rooms, the more I realized that I didn't know what to do next.
  2. We had three more kids! We had two when we moved in and that worked well. Now we have five, and even if the entire house were fixed up I'm not sure we'd all fit! (How the Toburens raised 12 in this house is beyond me except for the fact that I'm sure they didn't have as many toys as our kids have!)

So, the current status is this: We're still living in the "temporary" upstairs with all manner of exposed wiring and plumbing downstairs. We have fixed up one downstairs room in the rock portion of the house as a bedroom for our oldest daughter. We sheetrocked the ceiling and the one wood wall and then smoothed the plaster on the three rock walls. It is a very pretty room, and frankly, it's the nicest room in the house! All the rest of the downstairs rooms are in some stage of gutting. Some are just down to the plaster and ?wains coating? that were behind the paneling, and some are down to the studs. Most of the downstairs rooms are being used for storage and are chock-full of "stuff". The porch is in poor condition as we intended to remove and replace it and thus have done zero maintenance on it. The roof leaks a bit in several spots, and we are in the process of finding someone who can put steel on it.

We are asking $250,000.00 for the land and buildings, but will consider all serious offers. Viewing will be offered by appointment only to seriously interested parties.

There are two obvious choices for the new owner: build a new house, or fix up the existing one. There a couple of locations on our acreage that would be ideal for building!

It should be noted that my father does have a lifetime easement to go across the property in order to access the pasture and farm land surrounding it. However, he seldom uses that right as all of the land and pasture can also be accessed from other locations.

Manhattan, KS, where I work, is 35 miles and 35 minutes away. It's a nice, easy drive down US 77. Marysville, KS is about 30 miles to the north. There is about 4 miles of very well maintained gravel from the house to the nearest blacktop. The nearest gas and groceries are about 11 miles away. Electricity is provided by Bluestem Electric Cooperative. We heat the house with propane and two vent-free blue-flame heaters. Telephone is SBC and is a Blue Rapids, KS number. There are 2 dial-up ISP's with local numbers that I know of. The only option for high-speed Internet is via satellite. Water is provided from a well in the yard, for which we recently replaced the pump. The electrical system is ready to work with a generator, and when a generator is hooked up, it provides power to the entire farmstead, not just the house. The tractor, generator, and other yard equipment that we have here now are not included in the sale.

As for air conditioning: we used to use 4 window units. However, just last year we installed two dual, ductless, mini-splits and they are working great! As mentioned above, the primary heat source is two Comfort Glow vent-free, blue-flame propane heaters, 30,000 BTU each. One upstairs and one downstairs. When it gets really cold, we usually end up running a couple electric heaters back in the "fringe rooms" that are the furthest from the propane heaters to take the chill off of those rooms.

The rock portion of the house consists of four large (15 x 15) rooms on the ends with the stairway/hallway in the middle. The wood portion of the house has 3 rooms each in the upstairs and downstairs. I haven't measured it in a long time, but if memory serves me, the house is around 2200 sq feet, not counting the basement.

Email questions to constable@swedecreek.com

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