Ilene,

Hi! I sent you an e-mail. If for some reason it doesn't reach you, let me know and I'll try again. Sometimes Garden Web e-mails go through successfully, and sometimes they don't.

Dawn

Hey, I sent the e-mail with a three-page Word document attached. I realize it's going to take a long time to answer it as there's so much to consider. But if you didn't get it let me know. --Ilene

Ilene - How exciting that you might get more land and the victorian house like you like. I am sure that Dawn can give you some ideas to create the same kind of paradise that they have built for themselves. Good luck.

Thanks! The house is actually is pretty bad shape, which is one of the reasons I needed advice so badly. Dawn and I have been e-mailing, we're still discussing and hashing things out. She's enthusiastic about the place, though. She knows how badly we want to get out of town. We are still checking into things. I will post when we make a decision. --Ilene

Today I took our good friend Quintin, who is in the construction business, out to the farm and had the realtor let him in so he could look around. He looked at everything. We couldn't get the CH/A guy over as he was in the middle of something, but Quintin has a business relationship with him and talked with him on his cell phone while he was looking at stuff.

Now, mind you, we have known Quintin for a long time. He's about the age of our son, and we know he cares about us. His parents are deceased and he is kind of protective over us, gives us lots of free advice. He has a solid reputation for being honest. He already owns a place in the country and so has no motivation to discourage us; in fact, he is motivated the other way as we would be hiring him to do the work that we couldn't do ourselves.

Quintin suggested a lot of options, all of which required a LOT of money, and that would just be to insulate and install CH/A. He pointed out several areas where the roof was showing a lot of wear and there are two layers of composition shingle over a shake layer, which means that putting on a new roof would require tear-off. Removal of the shake layer would require new decking. That would be doable, though. The bad news is that there is not enough clearance between the upstairs ceilings and the roof to allow insulation. And the crawl space is not deep enough under the kitchen and bathroom to allow CH/A ductwork. It would fit under the rest of the house, but he said when it rained if we got water under the house at all, the duct work would get wet and we would end up with mold in our ductwork, making the entire duct system "sick". The ductwork might fit between the ceiling of the bottom floor and the floor of the top floor, but of course that would make the ceilings not very high on the bottom floor. The height of the upstairs already feels "squished". Quintin said, "You can fix anything, as long as you can keep on writing checks." He knows how much we have in the bank and how much our other real estate is worth and he thinks it would take as much to fix these three glaring problems as it would cost to build something new. He finished off by saying that, in his opinion, we should pass on this one. *BOO HOO*

The realtor found out that most of the land is in the flood plain, even though the owner says the house and the rental mobile homes have never gotten water in them.

The two mobile homes that would provide rental income monthly are nearly or just barely over 30 years old and no insurance company will write liability on a trailer over 30 years old. If there was a fire and someone didn't get out, the obvious tragedy would be compounded for us when the renters sued.

We could buy the place for a little less without the rental trailers and the tracts of land they are on, but without the rental income, we would be living on Social Security only, with our inheritance spent on the property and the improvements to the house having to wait until we sold our house and DS's house. If for some reason it took a long time to sell them, or they didn't bring in what we expected, then that would drastically change everything. If they did sell and we ended up having to spend most of the proceeds on fixing the house, then we'd have no "nest egg" and no supplemental income. The thought of that just scares me to death. If we had an unexpected expenditure, I would end up having to go back to work in order to make ends meet.

Quintin reminded me I must think with my head, not with my heart, and DH says that we must be realistic and not be making an emotional decision. He is ready to tell the realtor that we pass, and he told me that he is comfortable here. I suppose if I wanted a bigger garden, I could rototill up the entire yard. And I might. *HONK!* (blowing my nose in a kleenex).

It is true that we have big rooms in our current house -- almost every room here is double the size of the rooms in the farm house. Our CH/A keeps us comfortable, our roof is 2 years old and we have James Hardie siding and new vinyl windows all around the house. It does make me kind of tired just to think about moving into a house and starting all over again. Fixing this house up was such a lot of work. And right now is not a good time to be moving. DH goes in Monday for surgery on one knee. A month later he will be getting the other one done. So there would be a big burden on me if we would be trying to get fixed up and moved in by winter.

But I can't buy any chickens... I don't have a safe room or a garage... And I'll still have my awful neighbor. *sigh*. --Ilene

Ilene,

I am sorry it didn't work out. I was worried about the possibility it might be in a flood plain as soon as you said the word "creek" because sometimes, based on past history of flash floods, etc., a creek can cause an area to be rated as flood plain or wetlands areas. And, as I looked at the picture of the house this afternoon, little alarm bells started going off in my head that duct work might not be doable. (sigh) And the whole issue of liability on rental trailers that are uninsurable just tops it all off, doesn't it. I was really hoping Quentin was going to look at the place and say it was fixable at a reasonable cost.
Well, it will be OK. So, this place had potential and it didn't work out. That does not mean it WON'T work out eventually. We looked for land in the country for MONTHS before we found the place we ultimately purchased. In fact, we almost bought another place, but it was in flood plain land and we decided against it at the last minute. At the time we decided not to buy it, I was crushed, but then, we ended up with a better piece of property and have been living "happily ever after" ever since.

Be sure you let EVERYONE know you are looking for a place in the country. We did and it helped us find this place. A former co-worker of my DH heard word-of-mouth from somebody that the piece of land that is now "ours" was going to go on the market in June. He told us how to find it and we drove by and looked at it and thought it had possibilities. We called the agent who was supposed to be listing it and he said he guessed he could show it to us even though the owner hadn't been in to the office to sign the contract yet. So, we came up and walked all over the 14.5 acres three separate times that summer and had our mind made up we wanted it before it even was listed (finally, in August) "for sale". On the day she was going to sign the contract with him to list the place, he called us and said, "OK, it's gonna happen today." We made him promise he wouldn't show it to anyone else and made arrangements to come see it the NEXT day. So, she signed the contract to sell it one day, we signed the contract to buy it the next day, and a guy up the road who'd been hoping to buy it was frustrated because we found it and bought it before it was listed, and he never had a chance. See, we never would have found this place if a friend of ours hadn't mentioned to a friend of his that we were looking for a place. So, you just never know what path will lead you to your dream place in the country.

Remember the song in the Sound of Music about how when one door closes, another one opens. So, this door closed, but another one will open.

Don't give up on the dream of having a place in the country. There's more than one fish in the ocean, and there's more than one farmhouse sitting out there just waiting for you to find it. Don't give up if the dream of a place in the country with lots of room for gardening and other hobbies is what y'all want. You still can have it---it just won't be at this particular farm.

Dawn