Who's idea was this "housing crisis"?

Wow, seven months since my last post! It has been a frustrating summer on the housing front to say the least. We're still in our house in Andover and searching for that proverbial light on the real estate sales horizon. Just three years ago when we moved here, we had to get up early to check the real estate listings to see if something in our price range came on the market that we needed to jump on. Who could have imagined that in 2010 along with our house there would be 140 (at last check) within Chester and the surrounding towns waiting on the market for a new owner. We knew things weren't pretty when we embarked on this journey, but we figured with all the work we've done and setting our asking price 3% below the assessed value that someone would walk through our door...anyone...hmmmm...

Well anyway, the dream is still alive and we're thankful that our move isn't forced by a job change or whatever. We going to continue to market our house until the snow flies and then we'll take a break and hopefully come back to a better situation next spring. The firewood is stacked in the yard and we finished a new playroom in the basement for the girls, so we'll sit back, evaluate our plans over again, and enjoy the tranquility of our little house on the side of Markham Mountain for a bit more.

5, 6 Pick Up Sticks

I checked on the snow status on Friday and the land was still mostly covered. That allowed me a beautiful Saturday of BBQ and home brews with family and friends and by Sunday morning the snow was mostly melted. It was supposed to rain, but partly sunny skies prevailed and I fired up the chainsaw and got to work cleaning up the mess left behind by the loggers my great uncle had hired to clear the land. All in all, I've seen loggers leave a worse mess, but the task is still large. Our lot is a little over 6 acres and I'd estimate that the area that was cleared was about two acres. It is certainly a larger clear cut than I would have preferred had I been involved, but it is what it is and we have a blank slate. We'll claim room for the house, the waste water system, a vegetable garden, a small yard and the driveway. Restoring some areas to healthy forest and rehabilitating the buffer along the stream will be longer term projects.

Even if it is the tedium of piling up sticks and the abysmal real estate market is keeping us from selling the house we're in, it feels really good to get to day dreaming....I mean work!

Pray for water...shallow water!

The bids are in on drilling the well. They were all about the same. I'm going to go with the low bid by Parker Water Wells from up in Middletown Springs, VT. They do all the well installations for us a work and come highly regarded by all I talk to. All that's left to do is pray for water! One neighbor has a well that is almost 500' deep and yields nothing and another house down the road has a 150' well that yields 40 gallons per minute...anyone know a douser? Hope for the best!

Excavation work goes to.........Butch!

Five qualified excavation contractors bid on the site and septic system work for our new house. The bids were all over the place; with the highest being almost double the lowest. In the end, I chose Butch Wilson Excavating. Butch was recommended by our engineer, helped me out a bunch in the beginning with some preliminary numbers, showed a willingness to get my job done on my budget, and he's from Chester. I even had my second choice of the contractors that bid on the job tell me that if Butch was bidding on the job I should hire him....that makes the decision a bit easier. The snow is still knee deep up on the land and the road is a muddy mess, so we're keeping optimistic that we can get our house sold and get Butch working in a couple months.

Andover Home For Sale

Our nice little house in Andover, VT is still for sale. Winter is obviously not the best time to sell a home in Vermont, but we are hopeful that we can make a deal before the construction season starts. All the information that you could want to know about the home we have for sale can be found at the blog we created for 268 Blanchard Road. Please pass it on!

Tinkering With The Design

Our architect, David Howard, is enjoying some warmer climes for the next few weeks, so I thought I'd work on the plans myself. I'm anxious to work on the construction schedule with Josh and start getting some quotes from some of the trades. There are a couple little things that I'm still contemplating in regards to meshing function with aesthetics, but all in all I like how things are shaping up.

Chester Says "Go For It"

Show them your wastewater permit, draw them a picture of your lot showing that the house won't be too close to your neighbor or the road, promise it won't be too tall, pay a small fee, and bada-bing - you have permission to build a house in Chester. Thanks to the town's planning director Julie Hance our permits to build our new house are all lined up. She even provided me with a laminated copy to post at the property! She'll need to stop by after we put the foundation in to confirm we put the house where we said we would and we'll receive our certificate of occupancy to live at the house.

Draft Plans are Trickling In...

The drawings that I sent to our architect are slowly trickling back to me in the FirstDay Cottage format. He still has some work to do in order to get them to match my plans, but I'm taking this as an excercise in the patience that I'll need to make this house a reality. Essentially this is it though! A couple windows need to be shifted or resized, we're leaning toward a six over six grill pattern for the windows to give it that "cottage feel", and the doors will be full glass rather than half. We also hope to have a shed roof off of the walkout basement to store firewood.

Winter on the Hill

We broke out Aislinn's new snowshoes and trekked around the land today. We hiked from the driveway, across the future house site and up to the rock outcrop marking the highest elevation and the southwest corner of the lot. While much of the brush and stumps are well covered with snow, the excitement at the work ahead and the serenity and beauty of our future home site filled us all.

The Simple Plan Takes Shape.

We met with David Howard today, architect and founder of FirstDay Cottages. He has a great office in downtown Walpole, NH where we met and worked on meshing our plan with some of his ideas for our new house. It is 3 bedrooms, 1 3/4 baths, 1,228 square feet on two stories and a full walk-out basement. David drafts each house plan by hand, so we should have our floor plans and elevations soon. Once we have those in hand, Josh and I can get down to business with subcontractors and ironing out our budget.

On a related note, David was impressed with my drafting abilities (thank you two years of high school drafting class) and grasp on the FirstDay Cottage concept. He offered me some work drafting plans for his other clients and I'm excited to figure out the details with him. Drafting has always been a fun hobby and I'm looking forward to doing it quasi professionally. Plus this house project is going to require every penny we can scrounge up!!