Category Archives: Where to live

Surprise success

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It looks like our search for a building lot is over, and I’m surprised.

Leah and I have been looking for property to build a house so we can sell our current house, which is too large and requires more maintenance than I’ll be comfortable doing much further into the future (like next month). We had narrowed our choices down to four, and then two pieces of property in this general area. Both of the semifinalists are easy walking distance from our house. The closest property is within sight of our mailbox.

The owners of that property had paid a lot for the lot, at least for this type of rural property in this region, so they were asking a lot, although less than their purchase price. We had intended to use the proceeds from the sale of Leah’s parents’ house for the land purchase, but the proceeds turned out to be less than we hoped. We called our neighbor real estate broker and asked him to give the owners an offer anyway. We had an absolute limit that was nearly 40 percent less than the asking price. After a few days, the owners agreed to sell at that price.

We never expected the owners to take our offer; it was just too low. I had already started doing mental site preparation on the second of the two pieces of property. That property could have been bought for less than we had budgeted, so it was easy to make the mental transition.

Now I’m having to make a second transition, back to the original property we considered. Once it’s ours, we’ll walk the property lines and find the center, where we expect to locate the house. We’ll get our level out and see how much slope there is and whether we’ll have to have a basement. (Leah doesn’t want a basement. I’m neutral.) We’ll figure where a driveway goes. There will be much use of a chainsaw and an axe during this period, along with a 100-foot tape measure, yellow tape, and actual, physical marker pins.

Then we’ll start looking at house plans. Once my mother’s house sells, we’ll start construction. We hope to get a lot done, but the rest will have to wait till we’ve sold our current house. At that point, we should have a driveway, well, septic system and a temporary power drop at the new site, plus perhaps the foundation and some additional work. Once our house sells, we’ll move our travel trailer up to the building site and live there while we finish construction.

Leah is not looking forward to this, and, to be honest, it will be inconvenient. To say the least. But it will be a strong incentive to keep the construction moving along.

Right now the broker is preparing a contract. Unless something goes wrong, we will soon end up owning five acres down the street, and we’ll be looking at starting a process that will be long and a little intimidating.

I contracted our current house, and did a significant amount of manual labor during construction, including a good deal of site prep, digging and framing footing forms, moving and packing dirt and gravel, putting in the subgrade sewer lines and acting as the framer’s helper. My brother and I lifted many five-gallon buckets of concrete into a 10-foot-tall form where the wood burning stove hearth is in the basement. I contracted the plumbing rough-in, the electrical work, and the floors. Then with some help from family and friends, I finished the interior: paint, stain, trim, doors, bathroom vanities, toilets, and sinks. So I have a pretty good idea of what the process will be like.

That’s both good and bad.

 

An afternoon on the deck

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One of the reasons Leah and I are talking about moving is that our house requires a lot of maintenance, and I can’t see myself doing it indefinitely.

We have two decks in the back that are about 10 by 30 feet, and a front walk constructed like a deck that is about 25 feet long. They are seriously weathered and I am currently in the process of re-staining them. I bought a gallon of gray for the decking and a gallon of white for the railings. The salesman said a gallon should cover about 300 square feet. I knew I would need more of both, but it’s not going as far as I thought. I have just now run out of the white stain and am about two-thirds finished with the railings on the front walk.

It seems to go on forever

It seems to go on forever

The front walk slopes up so it’s about seven or eight feet off the ground at the front porch. That means I need a ladder to reach the outside part of the railing. The floor of the upper back deck is about 13 feet off the ground at the highest end. I’ll need an extension ladder to reach it. This does not make me happy. The last time I did any staining of the back deck, I fell off the ladder and tore my rotator cuff, an injury that required surgery.

The other part of this task that I don’t like is that each side of every baluster has to be stained individually, and there are a lot of balusters on our decks. That makes it a tedious, repetitious job. On the back deck I’m going to have to do the outside parts on a high ladder, which will be tedious, repetitious and potentially dangerous. So to do the whole deck, I’m going to have to lie on my back, crawl around on my knees, stoop, stand, reach, climb and descend. I will have to swap between brush and roller, and when I’m doing the outside of the railing I’ll have to do that on a ladder.

Painting the roof overhang would be even worse. Not only is it higher, but I decided to go for the farmhouse look, so there are no soffits to enclose the rafter ends. That means a lot of detail painting, done from a high extension ladder. We hope to have moved before that’s necessary.

I mentioned that we will probably make an offer on some land just down the street from us. Based on that possibility, I have been thinking of what a house would look like there. Unfortunately, the lot slopes, so a house will almost certainly have to have a daylight basement, and that means parts of the house would be two stories above ground. We also like decks, so they will be high off the ground, too. I don’t want to have to do this kind of maintenance 10 years from now, so if we get the property, whatever kind of house we build, it’s going to have to be different from this house and its decks.

This is going to take some thinking.

A few updates

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I have mentioned that the longleaf pine I transplanted in the grass-stage was growing into the bottlebrush stage, but that earlier post might have included at least a little wishful thinking at the time. Now, though, it’s pretty clear that it really is moving towards the bottlebrush stage. The clump of needles is pushing upward, slowly but steadily, and the little trunk is finally visible. I had also mentioned that one side of the little tree was showing some dead needles, which I blamed on Zeke using it for a rest stop. I think that’s what caused it, but I think he just hurried along a process that was going to take place sooner or later. The longleaf will shed its needles as it grows upward. There is now a little mat of dead needles beneath the tree, a miniature version of the thick layer typical of longleaf pine stands. This development is very gratifying to me.

Here you can see the lengthening trunk along with the dying needles (Zeke’s work), and the beginning of a mat of dead needles.

new bottle brush

A second development is encouraging in a way, but kind of disappointing as well. I have mentioned how foxes used to visit our driveway to eat food that Leah puts out for the outside cats. The foxes disappeared when some road work was taking place near where I think their den was, and not long after that one was shot by a neighbor who mistook it for a coyote. We didn’t see fox signs for a long time, but in the last couple of months we have been finding what looked like fox poop in the driveway. We were also finding cat food trays licked clean. Then a few nights ago as we returned home we saw a fox run out of the yard. That confirmed our suspicion that at least one fox has returned. It’s not the limping fox; I assume she didn’t make it, but it is almost certainly one of her kits.

I’m glad that at least one fox has survived. On the other hand, I wish it wasn’t eating cat food and pooping in the driveway. But I guess the one comes with the other.

A third recent development involves our thinking about moving. We have reached the conclusion that we need to sell, but we haven’t decided what comes after. I had been talking and doing some minimal research into the northeastern Georgia mountains or some places in the North Carolina mountains. I mentioned our potential plans to a neighbor who happens to be a real estate broker, and he suggested that we look at some property just down the road from us. I tried to walk it a few days ago, looking for a reasonable building site. I found at least one, but it was almost impossible to determine exactly where it was relative to the lot lines. I was using a GPS unit, but for some reason the location uncertainty was too large for it to be much use. But my initial look was encouraging.

This property has some real advantages for us. It would allow us to stay in familiar territory, which is important for Leah if not for me. We could at least start construction before selling our current house, and it would be very convenient to build a house within walking distance of home. We could probably do pretty much all the site preparation, well, septic system, driveway and such, maybe even footing and foundation prior to needing the proceeds from selling our current house. At that point we could probably live in our travel trailer on site long enough to see the new house completed.

I plan to walk the property some more, probably with long string as well as a GPS, to see just what building would involve. If it looks good, we’ll probably make an offer. The biggest problem is that the asking price is far more than we want to spend, given what we intend our move to accomplish. If we can’t reach an agreement, we’ll be back to looking again.

Where should Leah and Mark move?

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I have been trying to retire for a couple of months now. Soon (I hope) I won’t need to be close to Huntsville, Alabama, where I have been working for the last 27 years. With both of our parents gone now, we have been talking about moving away from here in the northwest corner of Georgia.

Back in 1999 I bought the land where we now live. It’s near the top of Lavender Mountain, overlooking Rome to the south and, on a good day, with a view all the way to Kennesaw Mountain, just outside of Atlanta. Over the next five or six years I built the house. I hired a carpenter and one helper, and then the three of us framed and dried-in the structure. My good friend Tom came to visit from New Mexico and helped with some of the work. Other people came around sometimes to help, including Leah and my brother and both of my parents occasionally. My father, who worked as an electrician in his youth, planned to help me do the wiring, but he died before we could start. He did do a lot of heavy manual labor when I was clearing the hundreds of small pines off the lot.

I hired contractors for the work I didn’t trust myself to do. I had an electrician do the wiring, a plumber do the rough-in, drywall hangers do the hanging and mudding, and a floorer do the wood and tile. But the rest, my family, friends and I did ourselves. And, in case you haven’t built a house, that is a lot.

Leah and I got married in May, 2005, and moved into the house. We mostly like living here. It’s quiet and can be quite beautiful. Leah would prefer to be a little closer to the grocery store, and I wish I had cut a lot more trees early on. Winters are reasonably mild, and spring and fall can be very nice, at least for short periods. But the summers in Georgia are brutal. It’s hot and humid and you can’t do anything outside without getting soaked in sweat. Plus the house is too big. Upstairs we have three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Downstairs, which is not completely finished, has a large family room and another bedroom and bathroom. That’s way too much for two middle-aged – no, wait a minute, I think we are already past that age. Oh well, never mind that part. We have a fair amount of money in the house, and we would like to think we could sell our house, buy a smaller house, and then have a little left over.

Anyway, we are thinking, but we don’t have any place in particular in mind. I would like to live some place where it’s not quite so humid, but not really arid. Leah tends to agree with that, with the proviso that it not be too cold or too hot. I think we could handle cold more easily than hot, but I don’t really want a harsh climate. Neither of us wants to live in a big city, but realistically, we should probably be reasonably close to a reasonably large town. Rome is reasonably large, by our standards. There are decent places to buy food, and, if we should get sick, there are two fairly large hospitals. I’m not sure whether we could stand a really dry area. I found on a cross-country motorcycle trip that I suffered green withdrawal when I rode across Utah and Nevada. I was surprised at what relief it was to see green trees when I reached the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Just for the fun of it, back in June I started tracking temperatures in Terlingua, Texas, and Alamosa, Colorado. Terlingua is right outside Big Bend National Park. Alamosa is in south central Colorado, near but not really in the mountains. I used the Yahoo weather app on my iphone. I laughed every time I looked at Terlingua, because the highs were over 100 F every day. Alamosa was also funny, because the lows were generally shown in the 30s. Perfect. Just average them.

The Yahoo numbers don’t seem to track with other weather data, so I checked a few sources online. Based on what I found, the June temperatures in Terlingua were pretty much mid-90s, except for a few upper 80s and a few 100s. The lows started around 68 and ended up around 72. There was a decent amount of rain for such a generally dry area. Average annual precipitation is just under 12 inches.

Alamosa had highs in the 70s and 80s, with lows from the upper 20s early in the month to around 50 later on, with a little over a half an inch of rain. It was a surprise to me that Alamosa has a drier climate than Terlingua. Average precipitation is under 8 inches per year. Still, I have to laugh a little: on average there are only two months without freezing temperature, July and August (usually).

For comparison, in June Rome, had highs in the mid to upper 80s with a few 70s late in the month. Lows were mostly in the upper 60s. Rainfall was about 6 and a quarter inches. Rome gets an average of 56 inches of precipitation a year. That’s just four inches short of five feet of rain a year. We have droughts, but the rain in even our drought years would wash Terlingua and Alamosa completely away.

We are not really considering moving to Terlingua or Alamosa (although if I had multiple lives I might consider living in both at least for a while. Just for the hell of it, you know.)  But we still don’t really know where to move to.

Does anyone have any ideas?