Chazoo is selling the Magic Barn...oh no!

"Historic 1770 Farm,built by General Herkimer's brother.Situated on 4.5 acres with an earlier Barn and a 4 room Caretaker Cottage.The Barn is the 'Hall of Fame of Magicians & Clowns'.The contents is for sale, make offers.Perfect for an antique shop or restore to the old Post & Beam home-stead. $169,900"

Maybe the listing's poor grammar and big price will scare away potential buyers. The 2 acres that Charlie (Chazoo) reserved when we bought The Dump are very much adjacent to our new home. (That's the Magic Barn to the left of the new house in the photo at the top of the blog.) Let's hope that WalMart doesn't get wind of this sale! That nice old barn will disappear in a matter of seconds. I only wish we could afford to buy it. It would make a nice home for those goats and sheep and chickens we're thinking about...

The Husband (Eddie Albert to my Eva Gabor) is semi-permanently moved into the new house. Only with no furniture other than what we pulled from The Dump, it isn't exactly home yet. We can only fit so much stuff in the CR-V, and the dogs are usually occupying the whole back seat when we travel. At least, with so many trips back and forth, we are getting a lot of the clutter out of this old house to make it more attractive to all those stingy buyers who don't seem interested in buying right now. We have only shown it twice, and once was to a friend of a friend before it was even listed.

Jim the Builder is doing his best to get us finished up in the new house, but I think he is feeling the pressure from his other jobs and having a hard time giving us all the attention we SO deserve. The code inspector is coming back again on Thursday, and we're keeping fingers crossed that this time it will pass. There are still plenty of loose ends that need tying, but we should be able to meet all of the code requirements by Thursday.

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Rainbows and tall grass

There are often rainbows up here in Big Sky country. When we lived at The Dump, the rainbows appeared over the horse farm across the street. Now that we moved back from the road, they fall over The Dump and our neighbor's farm.

Shotgun Mike is coming this week to mow the fields, all of them. These photos are from last week, and you can probably see that the fields do indeed need mowing. The tall grass and weeds probably contributed to the really nasty fly bites I got while out there FINALLY planting the rest of those baby trees—paper birches to fill in the holes at our property line with the Seamon Farm.

Jesse the Electrician came by on Saturday morning to go over what still needs to be done. He says he will try to make it out this week to finish up his work. We very generously gave Jim the Builder some time off to finish the other house he has been working on consecutively with ours. It is a LARGE timber-frame that overlooks Otsego Lake. Part of me wants to ask why that job takes precedence over ours, when we contracted with him first, but I would rather he take the time to finish ours when he is not rushed.

I initially asked him to finish it by the end of this week. The Husband has finally left his stressful job and plans on moving up there this weekend. The Husband hates when contractors are working in the house...something I don't mind at all. In fact, I prefer to be there so I can keep an eye on The Boys. I have to make sure they do everything exactly the way I want it. Guaranteed, when I am not there, they do something wrong. Never anything too serious, but always something that cannot be undone easily. Like when they closed off the access to the master bedroom closet from the studio. Or when they hung the screen door on the back porch backward. So they flop it for me, but then hang it on the wrong side of the door frame. Now they have to chop up the frame AGAIN, and I am sure they will be annoyed that I want them to move it AGAIN. All because I wasn't there...

Overall, this house-building has gone very smoothly. Once I got past the obnoxious parts—getting the loan and getting online—it was relatively stress-free. It's a cakewalk from here.

Holding up the beginning and the end—rain.

Very similar to last year in June, it has been rainy for the past week or so. Bad weather held up the beginnings of our house, and now it appears to be holding up the end.

I came up last night (nice sky pic) and spent most of today inside because of stormy weather. It was nice to see the garage all framed up and ready to go (other pic), but nobody showed up today to work. I guess they won't do the siding and framing in the rain. I know they can't start the lawn for the same reason.

But they CAN finish up the few things left on the punchlist inside the house! I e-mailed my friend Chrissy, the builder's wife, to tell her to give her hub a hard time about not having my house done almost one year from the start date (July 10). MY hub is planning to move up here next week, and he's not thrilled about having work done on the house while he's here. Personally, I prefer to be here while they're working, but enough is done at this point that I don't really feel the need to supervise anymore.

BTW, the photo quality is not so good because I stupidly forgot—not my camera—but the battery charger and USB cable. So these pics are from my new Samsung phone...

Also: that's the fringe tree getting watered on the front porch. Thank you so much, Miss Janet! All the plants arrived safely. Now I just have to wait for drier weather to plant them. And that cut-crystal bowl is prominently displayed on the island holding a tomato, 3 bananas and a yam. Thanks also for finding that little treasure in my china closet while packing with me the other day.

Old house for sale, new house pics

This whole process has been exciting, start to finish, but somehow having the old house on the market is even more full of suspense. Other than the lovely couple who looked at it before we put it on the market, we have not had anyone inquire about it. This is a good thing, in that it gives me more time to sort out/throw out stuff, but I worry that we won't have anyone looking at it at all. I worry that I will still be sitting here 6 months from now writing blog posts while The Husband is enjoying himself up at Lester's Flat—ya know, milking the goats and picking fresh eggs at 5 am—that kinda fun stuff.

I have a call in to the realtor to correct the inaccurate information on the MLS listing. I am concerned that she is not concerned about the online information being wrong. She says she gets more drive-by business, I say EVERYBODY hunts online these days. The listing says we have two things I consider evil—vinyl flooring and carpeting throughout—and it says the house was built in 1950 when it is really from the late 1800s. The vinyl floor in the kitchen was probably the first to go, much improved (IMHO) with a terra-cotta color ceramic tile. And I spent several years ripping out all the carpeting. It was in every room, including the 2 bathrooms and the stairs.

If I were hunting for a house, I would not even look at this one, the way it is listed.

So let's focus on the happy and post the last 2 pics of the new house. The purple walls are in the studio, the little dormer that you can see on the front of the house. The doorway with the angled top leads into the master bedroom closet. Through some confusion between the builder and one of his workers, that hole got covered up. I asked them to break on through again so I can access the closet space from the studio. I really like the funny opening...builder wasn't so sure that was what I wanted...

Other pic is the master bedroom. As with the rest of the photos, everything will look much better when the real furniture moves up there.

Red room, green room=home rooms

Every time someone asks how the house is coming along, I have to say it is ALMOST done, and so it is. But even with just the furniture and stuff brought over from The Dump, the house is starting to feel like home. I can't wait to bring up all the furniture and stuff from here in NJ. Then I can start figuring out where everything goes and hanging things on the walls. We will probably need to have a yard sale here and another in NY to get rid of all the extra "stuff" we have accumulated. I don't want to just throw all the boxes in the basement and still have to go through it all "some day".

The hardest part is finding time to go through everything here. The more I clean up, the more messes I make. At least we can take advantage of the "anything goes" trash pick-up twice a week here in the burbs. It's also nice to have paper, glass, etc. recycling picked up right outside my door. Once we move up there, we will be hauling things to the Town Garage one bag at a time. And there is no easy way to get rid of the big stuff—other than that yard sale I was talking about...

So, back to work this weekend boxing up and sorting through. This house is up for sale now and rule Number One of staging house for sale: declutter.