adventures in real estate
Well. 2 or maybe that's 3 months of successive rounds of minor illness later...
I don't journal anymore, do I. Bah. I've read about three books off my giant TBR stacks, a few library books, and a lot of bits out of backyard habitat books. Maybe I should do a review of those at some point, but that would involve taking notes. I have an online css course queued up, which is the major obstacle between me and remaking my website into what I think I want instead of how grauwulf interpreted what I said I wanted and adding a backyard naturalist blog component. Tho it would probably be easier to give up and do a wordpress blog which I hate for amorphous personal aesthetic reasons that are most likely pretty stupid. (Well, that and the lack of lj-style reading aggregations.)
We're working on buying 13 acres of hillside and stream conservation woodland near Liberty Reservoir out west of Baltimore, slowed up slightly by our bank's saying when asked that of course they do lot loans, no problem! up until the final check of paperwork before submitting at which point they say, no we can't do anything without a house on it. Thanks guys. So we're on round two of paperwork with somewhere else and less excellent terms, but we're still on the probably worth it side of the equation.
Dithering has gone roughly as follows:
*Woods!!! I don't even have a mental concept of how huge 13 acres is, and it's full of trees with a very nice stream at the bottom. 100 yr+ woodland, mainly tulip & red & white oak, some hickory & a couple beech trees (by my not terribly practiced once-over in winter) with some deer sign, but also some non-invasive understory.
*also full of invasives, including fields of lesser celandine which we'd have to hire someone who's certified to buy Rodeo (the wetland-safer version of roundup) to herbicide for us some February, ugh. May lose the skunk cabbage when we do that.
*3 or so acres of buildable land on kind of steep hillside at the top. But we could build a house into the hill!!! (grauwulf, thinking of hobbit holes, was skeptical, but I dug him up some more modern earth-sheltered designs & I think we're at least on adjacent pages now.)
*for the short term, we'd be looking at a prefab weekend cabin/writing retreat, with larger building to come later & possible "retiring" to there when the Megatherium gets done with school.
*What kind of idiot retires to a house with no level ground? Almost-40 me is cool with living in a tower. Most likely 60-year-old me will be also, but should I live to 80+, this may not be the convenient place to be.
*It's well above the predicted levels of the sea coming to get us, and if I walk up and down that crazy steep slope daily, I'll be/stay in far better shape than any other future presently on offer.
*There is basically not anywhere more convenient to live than where we are, certainly not this property, in terms of access to everything.
*It's only about a half hour drive from home. Can I do enough good with 13 acres to justify driving back and forth for 20+ years? Nobody else is stepping up to do that good, tho...
*I could plant chestnut trees!!!
*There are entirely unauthorized & in fact illegal 4-wheeler trails down by the stream, so we'd have to address that.
*When we got 2" of ice pellets this week, they got 8" of real snow. But buying here basically means I'll never be moving to where it really does snow in the winters, wherever that'll be in 20 years anyway.
We basically concluded that even if we end up never doing more than having a tiny cabin out there & improving the habitat a little it's worth doing. Probably. So we'll see.
Xposty from dreamwidth.
I don't journal anymore, do I. Bah. I've read about three books off my giant TBR stacks, a few library books, and a lot of bits out of backyard habitat books. Maybe I should do a review of those at some point, but that would involve taking notes. I have an online css course queued up, which is the major obstacle between me and remaking my website into what I think I want instead of how grauwulf interpreted what I said I wanted and adding a backyard naturalist blog component. Tho it would probably be easier to give up and do a wordpress blog which I hate for amorphous personal aesthetic reasons that are most likely pretty stupid. (Well, that and the lack of lj-style reading aggregations.)
We're working on buying 13 acres of hillside and stream conservation woodland near Liberty Reservoir out west of Baltimore, slowed up slightly by our bank's saying when asked that of course they do lot loans, no problem! up until the final check of paperwork before submitting at which point they say, no we can't do anything without a house on it. Thanks guys. So we're on round two of paperwork with somewhere else and less excellent terms, but we're still on the probably worth it side of the equation.
Dithering has gone roughly as follows:
*Woods!!! I don't even have a mental concept of how huge 13 acres is, and it's full of trees with a very nice stream at the bottom. 100 yr+ woodland, mainly tulip & red & white oak, some hickory & a couple beech trees (by my not terribly practiced once-over in winter) with some deer sign, but also some non-invasive understory.
*also full of invasives, including fields of lesser celandine which we'd have to hire someone who's certified to buy Rodeo (the wetland-safer version of roundup) to herbicide for us some February, ugh. May lose the skunk cabbage when we do that.
*3 or so acres of buildable land on kind of steep hillside at the top. But we could build a house into the hill!!! (grauwulf, thinking of hobbit holes, was skeptical, but I dug him up some more modern earth-sheltered designs & I think we're at least on adjacent pages now.)
*for the short term, we'd be looking at a prefab weekend cabin/writing retreat, with larger building to come later & possible "retiring" to there when the Megatherium gets done with school.
*What kind of idiot retires to a house with no level ground? Almost-40 me is cool with living in a tower. Most likely 60-year-old me will be also, but should I live to 80+, this may not be the convenient place to be.
*It's well above the predicted levels of the sea coming to get us, and if I walk up and down that crazy steep slope daily, I'll be/stay in far better shape than any other future presently on offer.
*There is basically not anywhere more convenient to live than where we are, certainly not this property, in terms of access to everything.
*It's only about a half hour drive from home. Can I do enough good with 13 acres to justify driving back and forth for 20+ years? Nobody else is stepping up to do that good, tho...
*I could plant chestnut trees!!!
*There are entirely unauthorized & in fact illegal 4-wheeler trails down by the stream, so we'd have to address that.
*When we got 2" of ice pellets this week, they got 8" of real snow. But buying here basically means I'll never be moving to where it really does snow in the winters, wherever that'll be in 20 years anyway.
We basically concluded that even if we end up never doing more than having a tiny cabin out there & improving the habitat a little it's worth doing. Probably. So we'll see.
Xposty from dreamwidth.