Christmas Letter 2014

The year that is ending was full of excitement, with a few challenges thrown in to keep us honest.  As always, the highlights involved travel, with trips to Hungary, Switzerland, Massachusetts, Maine, Oregon, Montana and Chicago.  The theme of this year’s travels seemed to be family.  We conducted genealogical research, attended reunions and visited relatives, and journeyed to remote places where our ancestors once lived. Our offspring have inherited the travel gene, with one going to Mexico and another visiting Munich and other places in Germany. We always enjoy hearing about their adventures.

When not exploring places near and far, we enjoy the visits of friends and family, experience the sports, music and theater delights of the Twin Cities, and appreciate the diversity that characterizes the city we have called home for almost 20 years. When we think about retirement, something we do quite often these days, we plan to spend the winters in Minneapolis and the summers in Maine and Budapest.  People tell us we have it wrong, but we are not going to stop being contrary now.

Sons William and Nicholas continue to live in Minneapolis, and it is wonderful to have them visit for Sunday dinner.  Peter lives in Portland, Oregon, and it equally wonderful to have an excuse to get to know a lovely and interesting part of the country.  We are very fortunate parents.

We wish you all the best and hope that the year to come brings you delight and wonder.

Louise and Jim

We accepted all the seller's conditions -- except price. She accepted our price.  I am beginning to get cold feet.  What have we done?  (For those of you who don't know me very well, I'm being melodramatic).

Anyway, we emailed the carpenter, asking him to fix the hole in the roof.  We call the insurance company so that our little sentimental investment can be insured -- the owner did not insure the place.  The insurance company informs us that if the inspector sees a tarp on the roof, the structure is uninsurable except through Lloyds of London.  Can't wait to see how much that might cost.

Then, we send the attorney in Eastport all the info. he will need to do a title search.  Normally he operates on Maine time, i.e., not in much of a hurry to do anything.  In this instance, however, he emails back right away:  "I thought you were only buying one parcel, but there are two parcels on this deed."   Huh?

So we get out the schematic of the property map for the town.  There is indeed a large parcel of land behind the house, probably around 10 acres.  However, it appears connected to another house, not (soon-to-be) ours. Of course, the schematic could be many years old and not reflective of the current situation.

Is the owner retaining the other parcel?  Does she even know that she owns it?  Does someone else own it? What do we do?  We don't really want another 10 acres -- we didn't even want the two that we just bought. We just want the house.

We have a call in to the town offices (open from 4-6 pm on Tuesday and Thursday). However, the staff there definitely operates on Maine time.  There was no one in the office when we called at 5 pm Eastern time. So we wait.

Adventures in Real Estate: Context is Everything

How did we get to the point of putting our little all into a pipe dream based on sentiment?  It's a long story that starts when yours truly was 10 years old, helping Dad clean out his mother's house in darkest Washington County, Maine.  The house was part of a family compound that seemed like a lot of fun at the time, with three houses so close to each other that shouting really did work. At the bottom of the lane where these three houses were located was a country store that supported the families in the three houses. There was horsehair furniture, a soapstone sink, gleaming wide board floors, a pump in the kitchen, and an outhouse.  I was told that it was an upscale outhouse because it was in the shed -- poor people had to go outside. There were blackberries and a brook that gurgled as it wound down to the tidal river below. There was a barn with a swing, just like Charlotte's Web.  It was magical.

My mother had convinced my father that he should not own the house.  It's a long way from Massachusetts, she said.  Whether he really agreed I will never know, but the house was sold.  Fast forward a few years to another house in the compound, for sale by an uncle.  Tempting, but the town had just been accidentally sprayed with pesticide by the paper company that owned most of northern Maine.  With small children around and more on the way, we thought that relocating to this part of the world, if only for the summer, wasn't the most sensible idea.

Many more years elapsed, and we went to look at the house in the pouring rain, just for fun while on a very damp vacation for which we rented a nice, brand new house about 40 miles away. We walked around in the wet grass that had not seen a lawn mower all summer, but I got the bug even though the house was not for sale.  This past Labor Day weekend, OLGS spirited me away to look again, because it was for sale.

We got to the house at the appointed time and waited for the real estate agent to show up. After almost an hour, he arrived, angry because the owner no longer had a key. After climbing on the roof, trying to jimmy the shed lock and open the cellar door, we broke a window.  OLGS crawled in, opened the door, and there we were.

It was heartbreaking.  There was a hole in the roof and there was no electricity because Bangor Hydro had cut the wires due to non-payment, according to a neighbor.  There was white mold on the massive beams in the cellar.  "At least it's not black mold," said the helpful agent. The pocket doors had been replaced by some truly ugly see-through plastic.  The soapstone sink was long gone. The porch was falling off the main house, the shed was listing to one side, and there was paint splattered all over, a sign that the owner had been trying to spruce things up.

I left very discouraged. But I've been obsessing about it for 50 years, and am not going to be deterred, although I am also not willing to pay very much for my obsession. We made an offer on it today.

What we learned about the house between our visit and the offer will be the subject of the next blog post.

Something Big, or Adventures in Real Estate

OLGS and I are going to do SOMETHING BIG!  Here's the plan:  we are going to buy this house, deconstruct it, and rebuild it on the water somewhere in Washington County, Maine.   Since we have more money than sense (and not much of that), this should be quite an adventure.  Did I say the house belonged to my great, great grandmother? Did I say it's a dump?   And if the owner does not accept our lowball offer, we will walk -- sentiment goes only so far.


How we do this while working many jobs, taking care of adult children with "issues", schlepping undergraduates to Zentral Europa, playing church lady and feeding Mitzi the cat I do not know.  All I know is that the time is now.

Stay tuned for developments.