November 7, 2016
Cooling our heels in San Diego, living with Mom while Orah
and Jeff take a vacation in New Zealand.
We are looking back with to our search this summer, and forward to the
close of escrow on a sweet homestead in Cottage Grove
We rented an apartment over the garage of a nice family in
the Eugene suburbs through Air BnB. We arrived in the last week in September,
and immediately found ourselves a buyer’s agent to help us- Adam at
Keller-Williams- and for the next few weeks we were out every day looking at
properties we had gotten leads for from Adam and from Zillow, Trulia,
Realtor.com, and Redfin.
We looked for homes with a lot size of at least 3 acres, suitable
rainfall, a house in good repair, some wild area, some area for gardens and
fruit trees, private but not too remote.
We wanted some contour but walkable gentle hills.
Within the first two weeks we worked our way through Adam’s
inventory, and turned more and more to combing online listings for
possibilities, and calling Adam when we found something we wanted to see. We were rotating outward from Eugene as far
south as Oakland, as far east as Lowell, as far west as Noti, and as far north
as Brownsville, as we searched listings that might fill the bill; we had driven
by or walked through about 30 properties, and at last we were coming down to
the end of our possibilities, and nothing seemed exactly right. We had seen some nice properties and some
horror stories, but nothing that we could rate better than an A-, and only one
of those. We did not want to settle, and
it looked as though we might get to the end of our four weeks and still not
have found anything suitable.
Among the listings was one that had been on the market, and
was still listed on Zillow, but showed on the more current sites as having been
withdrawn from listings. We could see
the pictures of the interior that had been posted, and we it seemed pretty
nice, but you never know until you see it, and we did not get a good idea of
the property it occupied. We drove up to it, but the home was situated far down
a tree-lined road festooned with no trespassing signs, and we were unable to
see much without trespassing, so we asked Adam to see what was up.
As it turned out, the property was recently listed by an
agent in his work group, but had been withdrawn because the seller could not
get any offers at their asking price, and they were planning to do some
renovations in order to add to the curb appeal.
The seller was adamant that they would not settle for less than the
asking price of $399,900, and was planning to switch realtors rather than be
talked down.
MM’s interest was uncharacteristically piqued, and when Adam
had not showed progress in getting us a viewing, she told him that she would not
be able to make an offer on any other place until she had seen this one. And so it came to pass that Adam was able to
arrange a walk-through the next day, and we knew then that this was the unicorn
we had been hunting.
Here’s an excerpt from a post I made on Oct 15:
We arrived to
find a perfectly serviceable house in good repair; three bedrooms and two
baths, with huge pantry and a working kitchen in need of remodeling, a large
common room with windows on three sides.
The house is good, with large rooms and lots of light, but we had seen
others just as good. It includes various outbuildings, a yurt, and a hot tub
that may work.
It’s the land that shines. The 11 acres set in
the hills drops about 400 feet from Northeast to Southwest. The house is set
about halfway down the slope, which generally faces southwest.
The top is
covered by tall fir forest with deep spongy duff beneath. There are hardwoods
mixed in- oak, alder, and others, at the edges. There are steep parts and flat
areas that would make good tent sites deep in the forest. Starting a little
above the home site there are scattered cleared areas with occasional neglected
fruit tree saplings- a couple bearing fruit but mostly too young. The cleared
areas are mostly meadow plants and grasses, with blackberries encroaching in
around the edges. On the lower levels there are more sedges and moisture loving
grasses. The lower edges on the western edge taper off into what I assume is a
brush-filled seasonal creek. As far as I could see this creek was not running
two weeks into the rainy season, though there was the occasional puddle. Both
east and west banks are on the property.
The road past our property curves around an
easement on the northeast edge; it is trenched on the uphill side, and the
runoff theoretically runs through a culvert halfway around the edge, into a
deep trench dug straight southwest down the key point in the sloped clearing
toward the seasonal creek diagonally across, passing under the driveway/ access
road that continues to the western edge where there is a right of way to access
the power lines running on the western edge. Again the trench seems to be
mostly dry at this point. The road needs to be planted with shrubs to increase
privacy from our three neighbors up the road.
This hillside seems conducive to making wide swales for fruit tree
guilds with mowable strips in between for hay and straw. Maybe a series of
keyline holding ponds for fish, ducks, water features, and swimming holes. This
will be subject to observation of how the water flows across the property and how
absorbent the soil is. Maybe also the dry creek could be improved with pools to
hold more water and slow it, and stocked with native trout.
There are a lot of downed alder logs and brush
piled up. The small branches when chipped may make good fill for hillside fruit
tree swales, and the logs cut to length can make hugelkultur mounds.
Various outbuildings are there, and more may
be needed eventually. I will need a shop. But the yurt and extra bedrooms are
ready to use for guests. Another mystery building we’re calling the annex may
become a shop with the addition of some garage doors. The property could use a
nice barn, but where to put it?
The lower
meadow as it is could host a large gathering or tent-city for family reunions
or the like. Sanitation would need to be worked out with dry compost toilets or
porta-potties though.
What else? A
small rocket mass heater for the yurt as a learning project. A greenhouse and
nursery for propagating trees and shrubs. A straw-bale kitchen garden for zone 1.
A private garden for the master bedroom. A labyrinth. A meditation garden. A
scent garden. A children’s garden with secret nooks and berry and grape vine
covered tunnels. Bee hives and flowers to feed them that bloom in their turn
all through the spring, summer, and fall. And other things will come to mind.
What ideas do our friends have for us?
Now we need to
figure out how to get our stored goods up here.
First outside
priority- fencing the kitchen garden, straw-bale raised beds for the first
garden; building a tree nursery, and seeding the meadows.
Having put a lot of thought into it in the last three weeks,
I add one more first-tier project to the list:
Measure and flag off contour lines at three foot intervals, to help set
out the trees in swales. My first rough calculations are that I will have room
for about 50 trees if I use both meadows.
If 1/3 are nitrogen fixers, that means that I could plant 33 fruit and
nut trees.
