Hodgepodge Co-Living House

We are a family of four seeking community members with whom to co-live, house-share, and ideally co-parent in our 3-4 bedroom house in Viroqua, Wisconsin. Annika and Marcus are both 41, Winter is almost 5, and Benji is 3 months old. In 2023, we purchased an 1800 square foot house in Viroqua, Wisconsin – a small town in southwestern Wisconsin with a large progressive community – and we’ve been intensively renovating the house in order to share it with others.

Our current community name is a play on the odd decisions made in the construction of the 1940s/50s era home, as well as our experience that true community is a hodgepodge of different personalities, perspectives, and techniques.

We use one of the three bedrooms, and most of the upstairs has been renovated with new wiring, re-finished hardwood floors, and fresh drywall. Each floor has a full bathroom. Outside on our ¼ acre lot, we have a 37’ x 8’ garden, a number of young fruit trees, as well as elderberry, aroniaberry, and black raspberry bushes. A two car garage is used mostly for storage and as a workshop. There’s a large laundry/freezer room off the downstairs bedroom that also has its own entry to the outside, and we have plans to eventually convert it into a 4th bedroom and move laundry to the basement.

Viroqua, Wisconsin is a unique small Midwestern town because, in addition to a sizable conservative population – many of them farmers living on the outskirts – it also has a large progressive culture, centered mainly around organic farming, local food, and the multiple alternative schooling options in the area (Waldorf schools go from 4k up through college, Montessori schools goes from preschool through high school, and a forest school that currently goes from 4k to the third grade.) From our house you can bicycle or walk to most of the schools and daycares, the food co-op, farmer’s market, various parks, and the downtown strip.

We first met at a wilderness school and intentional community called the Teaching Drum Outdoor School. There, we’ve both done extensive wilderness immersion training, such as Teaching Drum’s “Yearlong” course, where we lived full-time for a year in the woods with a small group of people (Marcus twice), in addition to having been teachers for shorter term wilderness immersion courses. Both Marcus and Annika spent much of their 20s and early 30s living in various communal living arrangements, including as live-in staff at Teaching Drum. While we hold on to much of what inspired us about Teaching Drum (close-to-the-earth living, tight knit daily community, and letting nature have her play as much as possible,) we ultimately ran up against entrenched power hierarchies and manipulative dynamics (common in most organizations) that led us to leave that community in 2016 after having spent much or most of our adult lives there. Nevertheless, those experiences still inspire our own values more than anything else we’ve come across.

Our Greatest Values:

-Encouragement of a child’s intrinsic worth, fostering their own path to development and self-trust instead of manipulating and shaming to control, this also includes nursing/co-sleeping/elimination communication

-Having an integrated life, meaning both being more involved in the means of life (growing/harvesting/hunting the food we eat, making/fixing/understanding the ‘things’ we need) and also having our life happen together as much as possible, rather than in compartments of work/school/activity

-Trust that people, given the right care and guidance, can gradually drop the crutches of isolated living and work through conflict to come together

-Honest communication, rather than letting conflicts and tensions fester

-Connection with and protection of nature

-Adventure and learning/trying new things

Currently, Marcus works 3-4 days per week, Annika 1 day per week, and Winter attends the forest school 3 days a week. While this is not our ideal dream of a completely integrated life, we appreciate that it’s better than us working full-time and sending our kids to school full-time. Due mainly to the cost of acreage in the current housing market and our area, we compromised last year and decided to buy a house in town. While this has benefits, such as being in biking proximity to most of our needs and easy access to people, it also means less space to roam and a less intimate relationship with the wild natural world, at least not without driving, or biking a ways. Marcus spends much of his free time working on the house, and has also taken up hobbies like pickup sports (soccer and ice hockey) and sails his 17’ boat on Lake Onalaska. Annika visits with people and goes to events often with Winter and Benji, meets with mom groups, and also works on projects in or around the house. When not at school, Winter has playdates, hangs out with and helps her parents, and does creative play (i.e. swinging on silks, creating her “setups,” and drawing/painting.)

All in all, based on our background, we feel sort of like we’re cosplaying the isolated nuclear family fixing up their house (gotta “build that equity”) – something we’d never intended to become. Ideally, we’d like to welcome a family with children and/or non-parents who want to be deeply involved in the life of the other adults and children in the house. The form of community that most appeals to us is one in which the members have daily interactions and there’s a depth of interdependence more along the lines of family than polite neighbors. What we’re currently picturing:

-Daily shared meals

-Informal shared resources (cars, tools, skills/time, some food)

-Open processing of conflict within the house

-Informal co-counseling and sharing in our challenges, grief, and joy

Shared parenting beyond just childcare (this is a process, of course.) In our experience, dealing with snags in parenting often leads back to issues the adults struggle with themselves, and this is fertile ground for growth and intimacy between co-parenting adults.

Ultimately, if we find the right mix, we could envision ditching town at some point and finding land or a place with land that is closer to nature

If it was ever possible that we had the right mix to unschool/homeschool, that would be amazing

We also know the there is an inherent power imbalance when one owns property and controls another’s access to it. We by no means feel like we have all the answers to that, but want to figure it out as we go the best we can, especially taking into account what we’ve learned not to do (e.g. exploitative expectations that community members work for us, pretending to act as spiritual/personal growth counselors to our renters, grooming members for intimate relationships, pretending the hierarchy is not there, taking on members who have no backup plans or are deep in substance abuse, etc.) We are also not averse to the idea of eventually sharing equal shares in property, although considering how much we have already invested, and how new we would all be to one another, that would likely be a lengthy and involved process.

The first step for us is to start communicating online to see if there’s shared resonance, and then video chats and eventually an in-person visit. You can reach us at: [email protected]