When my wife and I married she had a little nine hundred square foot condominium in the San Francisco bay area. When we moved in together it got cramped pretty quickly and we decided to start looking for a house.
We bought a beautiful house in a cul-de-sac with a pool and an almond orchard on one side of us. Because of how beautiful the neighbors, neighborhood, community, and our home was, I remember saying to the pastor at our church “I’ve worked and waited my entire life for this”. It was a perfect moment in life.
Things change. We had some unfortunate things happen in our neighborhood that changed the whole dynamic, enough so that many neighbors moved which further changed things and the whole quality of life in the neighborhood was different.
This all happened at about the same time that we were looking to have both our folks visit more and stay with us so we could spend more time with them in their golden years.
We did get them to come visit, but as things in our neighborhood changed I started to think about moving and having enough property to build a second house for the relatives to stay indefinitely if they wanted to, and I always liked the idea of having more space than a small lot.
First try…
I had found a piece of property in our county that we could still afford (2 acres) and also found a house kit for about $32K (1999 dollars). This was a kit for just a shell, everything else was on top of that but it seemed reasonable and we could save some money finishing it off ourselves.
While I was doing my research I contacted the county regarding permits and asked what I could expect to pay. No lie, $70,000 was the estimate for a new residential home. Saying I was incredulous is putting it mildly. I let them know that we would never build in their county and started looking to neighboring counties. The first thing I looked at was permit costs, go figure.
About an hour away was San Juaquin county, it was only $2,500 for whatever you wanted to build and they had what seemed to be some better priced real estate out there. I started looking for some acreage.
As you probably know, California ain’t cheap. At the time walking into a ready to operate acreage, any acreage, within three hours of the Bay area was expensive. But if you can stomach it, there are things you can do to reduce your up front costs and pay later over time with sweat equity and do-it-yourself labor. The more you are willing to take on, the more you can save, sometimes even a considerable amount.
If you want to save money, you might want to look for a “fixer upper”. When I use the term fixer upper, I don’t mean paint and carpet, but more on that in a bit.
Looking as far out from the Bay area as I was of course meant a huge increase in commuting time (about 3 hours one way) and extra fuel and maintenance costs.
I was very fortunate. I traveled a lot for my job and when I was home I mostly worked from my home office, but when I needed to go into the office I worked it out with my employer that I could stay at a motel during the week and I would travel home on the weekends.
Second shot…
After searching and visiting prospective places, and losing some bids, I asked my wife if I could put a bid on a place sight unseen that was a “bargain” and was seven acres but needed a ton of work. She was hesitant but agreed.
Our first challenge was to even have our bid accepted. We were told that the one owner had died and his aged wife moved in with the daughter and that there were abandoned animals on the farm. We didn’t hesitate and told the agent to write them into the deal. They tentatively accepted our offer.
A little side trail here for a minute. Accepting those animals into the deal, I believe, was the reason we got that offer accepted. The farm had been listed recently and had seen a lot of activity but the real estate agent kept saying to folks they couldn’t accept offers until they figured out what to do with the animals. We were willing to do what we needed to do with the animals and suggested they write them into the deal, this solved their problem and got our offer accepted when no one else was being allowed to put one in. Lesson: Use your creativity and flexibility when searching, and negotiating, to open up more opportunities.
We drove out to check the place over, my wife cried and said she would not live there until I had done what I needed to do with the place.
I’m not sure why she cried? Maybe it was the stench of rotten meat from the freezers that were full and had been turned off, maybe it was the urine smell that almost overcame the other, or maybe the piles of garbage in the house and the graffiti on the walls.
Not sure, but going out on a limb it could have been one of those…or all of it. I assured her I would take care of it…I either had vision or insanity, the verdict still goes back and forth on that point.
We inherited a lame horse, two emus and two dogs with the property, along with twenty one abandoned vehicles (including a dump truck and a 24 foot long boat, all junk). None of which I had titles for. There were also some very dilapidated outbuildings with animal carcasses and piles of trash, a rat and black widow infestation, a sketchy well pump and septic, and oh yes, a barely larger house than my wife’s old condo with no lawn just overgrown weeds. Ahhhh home sweet home.
As the process of closing was taking some time, my wife and I would drive out to our “farm” after work and check on the animals and take care of them. Usually it was getting dark while we did the chores. One night I put a big old pot filled with dog food down for the dogs and asked my wife to come look at something. I turned on the headlights of the Jeep which lit up the dog food pot…all the way around the pot were rats eating out of the pot.
Sorry animal lovers, the rats had to go. This became a bit of a sport for me when I would drive out and take care of the animals. I’d bring my Winchester .177 pellet gun which has near the velocity of a standard .22 and pick off rats that showed up for dog food. It didn’t take long to see less and less of them around.
After we closed…
I took two weeks off to work on the house.
My first night of working on the house I slept on the living room carpet. I woke up the next morning with what looked like the worst case of chickenpox. It only took a minute for me to figure it out…fleas. EEEEEeeeee. Off to the big box store for some DDT (kidding, but I would have bought it had they had it), whatever killers I needed to kill whatever went into my cart that day.
I loaded twelve sixteen foot long stacked trailer loads of garbage and debris out of that place and unloaded them at the dump. This is a tiny house, twelve loads…twelve. Did I mention twelve freaking huge loads of nastiness out of there?
Empty the freezers, this had to be the worst part of this. I imagine this is what it would smell like to work with rotting cadavers. I know I gagged more than once during this part of the clean up.
I spilled a little bit of cadaver juice on the wood deck of my buddies trailer that I had borrowed, not even chlorine bleach and a pressure washer could get rid of the smell completely.
I stripped, washed and patched walls, stripped the carpeting, underlayment and vinyl floors to bare wood, in the bathroom I had to rip out all the fixtures and tub and the whole bathroom flooring to the floor joists and start building back up from there. I had some help with that last one.
In two weeks I had the inside refloored, repainted, refinished, new fixtures and new appliances. In the next couple of weeks I had a friend who owns a painting contracting business come out paint the outside trim and walls. It looked like a new house.
After moving in…
The lame horse unfortunately passed early on, she had foot long hooves that had never been trimmed, no teeth and in spite of trying to give her good care she went colic and we couldn’t save her. We still had the emus and dogs while we had the farm. One of the dogs, Jimmy, even moved to our Idaho farm with us, but that’s another story.
There was a tremendous amount of work that still needed to be done on the property before it could really be used for much, but we just tried to do things as we could. I was still traveling and working and my wife was still working and had a commute as well.
When I traveled she took care of the animals. When I was home I would try and work on projects.
That first year we added some Boer goats to our menagerie and planted a relatively small garden. Nothing happens in the central valley without irrigation so I put drip lines all the way out to the end of the property. I planted some fruit and nut trees around the outer perimeter of the property and put them on manual drip irrigation.
I worked on following the public notice procedure for the vehicles on the property so that I could legally get rid of them. I sold one or two, gave one SUV away to a handyman we would hire occasionally, and called a junkyard to come and get the rest. I think I actually got a few hundred bucks for the vehicles.
The only piece of “lawn art” that remained out there, and could still be there for all I know, was the dump truck which had sunk down to its axles in the field and would probably take a crane to get out.
There was so much junk, trash and overgrowth it was overwhelming at times to think of the work, but again, we just kept going.
One day while cutting high weeds, like over my six foot high weeds, I discovered an old Oliver tractor. I’ll make this a short story, my neighbor bet me I couldn’t get it running, I got it running. I didn’t drive it ever, but I did get it running. I ended up buying myself an old Ford 8N tractor to help me do the farm work. It came with a disc’er which came in handy breaking up the clay clods in the back field.
I seeded and put in a timed sprinkler system in the front yard of the house, along with a flower bed under the windows. We had a beautiful big fruitless Mulberry tree to provide shade so it didn’t take a lot of water to keep the small lawn green and it was a nice bit of manicured greenspace in the midst of dust and dirt on the rest of the property.
Change, change and more change…
The property was coming along, we reaped our first garden harvest, it wasn’t spectacular but it was satisfying. My wife got her feet wet raising Boer goats which was good too.
We were starting to think about building that second house on the property…then life happened.
Change in jobs, then self-employed, then 9/11 happened, and we had conversations with our respective parents who we found out really didn’t relish the idea of traveling to California for various reasons. One of which is that my mom was in another country and it would have cost an inordinate amount of insurance for her to visit and cover her heart condition while traveling.
We started talking about a change again…
This time the conversations were along the lines of “What’s most important to us?” “Then what do we need to do?”. We love our families and even though I had been “chasing the brass ring” it was not as fulfilling as it once was.
My beautiful blessed bride who is amazingly open to these crazy adventures agreed with me that being with family was more important to us than anything else and that we should maybe consider moving closer to them so that we could spend time with them while still here on earth, but, she said, we needed to pray about it and see how things went.
Next…How things went…