It is now early May, and Spring is finally taking hold. We are disappointed at the "loss" of the house on 4 acres in our town, and do not hold out much hope for our next target. We meet our realtor at 9:00AM on a Saturday. This time, as we get closer to the house that we previously rejected so casually, we start getting optimistic. 8.5 acres; two large detached garages; large farmhouse with a slate roof; same schools for the kids. We get out of the car, and go inside, doing our best to ignore the faded, cracked lemon yellow vinyl siding. It immediately feels "right". We enter through the kitchen which is enormous. Then we go into the "old" portion of the house and are smitten with the wide pine floors, the exposed joists and hand hewn beams. The house rambles with neat features like low ceilings and a cool, currently unused second stairway from the kitchen to an unfinished portion of the upstairs. There is no heat on the second floor, but the baseboard radiators are there to be hooked up. The replacement windows are thermopanes, and they are almost all fogged due to failure of the seal between the inner and outer panes (these windows are less than 20 years old). We love the layout, but there is much to be done to update, restore and reclaim in the house.
There are two large outbuildings too, as well as an old chicken coop. One structure is a 24'x36' two story, 3+ car garage. The other is an old concrete bunker of a bank barn, 20'x30' with two car garage below and a huge work shop above. All the out-buildings need work, but the potential is tremendous. Room for all my cars to live indoors, instead of outside under covers. Big thumbs up for Jim!
OK, so the house is a positive, and the out-buildings are good. Then the realtor takes us out to show us the property. We had no clue what the layout was, so we failed to appreciate the fact that there was almost a quarter mile of road frontage with a wonderful stream running along three quarters of the property surrounded by oaks and huge old hemlock trees. There is also a large garden on a huge section of open, level yard behind and next to the house. We had been living with almost 2 acres of heavily wooded, sloped and largely useless property in our current house. The area around this house was a dream for gardeners like us. There were ancient lilac stands, as well as bridal veil and other remnants of previous gardens. Then we walk up a "road" that turns out to be the access to the upper pasture. Almost 4 acres of open field with trees and stone rows at the property lines. We fell in love with the place that day.
So, after eating crow with our realtor, we made an offer on the house. After some haggling over the price and the work that the place needed, we made an offer with the sale contingency. Now all we had to do was wait for our buyer. We were so excited we could hardly contain ourselves!
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