NOMADICISTA

Mr. Sharkey,
Any news about your move?
Have you been able to put any balls down yet or are they still all up in the air?

Hi Dudley;

I moved this topic out of the Busbarn forum as a matter of housekeeping, but thanks for asking.

The lakefront rental/caretaking property hasn't come through. I seem to have lost track of Jim, I need to hunt him down and make sure that the deal there is dead, but the owner of the place was being reluctant to allow me to set up living in the old homesite and was instead offering bare ground in the middle of a clear cut. Several other property listings came up and I spent my time on the coast the last few weeks investigating a couple of communities to the north.

Lately, I have gone out with the realtor and looked at 42 acres that I had previously decided that I couldn't afford. It's actually a pretty special property, in spite of the current owners having more or less trashed the place with collected junk and half-dead livestock. The asking price is $479k, but I'm thinking of offering them $450k. I would have to finance about a third of this and pay it off when the note I will carry on the place I sold here comes due in two years. A meeting with my accountant yesterday confirmed that I can make this work, but I won't have much in the way of ready cash when it's over. I'll probably have to scare up some jobs to pay bills instead of living on investments.

In all, there is a pretty high level of suckage surrounding this whole situation right now. The buyer of my property went on to craft deals to buy almost all of the other properties on this side of the butte, he basically owns the whole west side of the hill now, and plans on building 20 new homes. I just want to get out before summer, but even if I work up a deal for a new place, it looks like I'll be here a couple of more months at least.

Might as well post this here, as it's part and parcel with the moving experience....

For the last two weeks, I've been hauling stuff I'm ~not~ taking with me when I move to be recycled. Two entire pickup loads of rotted wood last month, 1,260 pounds of scrap steel last Tuesday, and 471 pounds of aluminum from the bus yesterday, probably that much again in insulated copper wire and brass.

The part I have been dreading is the old Rambler parts in the bushes that I had stashed there from way back. I did haul out all of the body parts, doors, fenders, bumpers, etc, last summer, but leftover was a spare engine, rear axle, and a 30 gallon fuel tank from the Housetruck that I removed years back because it started leaking. I also had a second rear axle that I removed when I put a new 'dead' axle in my utility trailer a couple of months ago.

Yesterday, I drained the gear oil out of the trailer axle, which was a big old heavy Ford pickup truck differential. (The scrap steel yard won't take anything with oil in it.)

This morning, I started on the fuel tank. The scrap yard also won't take fuel tanks, or any tank for that matter unless it has a nice, big hole cut into it so it won't explode on them. I used my pneumatic chisel to cut a slit all around one end of the tank, removing the entire end in one piece. That should be a large enough hole for them. The inside of the tank was stinky with the smell of old gasoline. There was about a cup of green sludge, leftover gas from 15 years ago. The smell was obnoxious, so I decided to do something about it.

What I did was stand the tank up on some bricks, wad up a couple of sections of newspaper and throw them inside, then put in a small armload of dry sticks. A section of expanded metal screen covered the opening, and then it was time to throw in a lit match. Not much of a dramatic flare up, but after 15 minutes of burning or so, the paper, the sticks and all of the smell were consumed. Since open fires aren't allowed inside the city, I was, uh, "playing with fire" as far as code compliance was concerned.

Before lunch, I used the tractor to yard the old rear axle out of the berry vines alongside the driveway where I had "stored it for future use" 15 years or more ago after it broke an axle. A few minutes with a sawzall and ratchet wrench and I had it broken down into basic pieces (it was an old "torque tube" design, and resembled a huge "T" with cross bracing, way too much to handle and get into the trailer for recycle). Drained out the few remaining drops of gear oil and then it was off to lunch.

Mowed the lawn, trimmed around the solar collectors, took a short nap, then it was time for the real fun, the engine.

The engine was something that came out of a freebie car that I was given over 20 years ago. It was complete and probably ran at one time, but I now have no use for an AMC 196.7 cu.in. in-line six cylinder gas engine. Off to the scrap yard with it. Pulling it out of the bushes and up onto the driveway wasn't much trouble using the tractor and a chain, skidding it along a couple of timbers to keep it from digging into the soil.

Once I had it up on the driveway, and after it puked a bunch of dirty oil al over the ground, I had a problem. My little VW diesel engines are easy to move around using the hand truck, but this thing probably weighs at least 400-450 pounds, and the hand truck was useless against it. I needed to get it over to the car shed where I could get a come-along on it and lift it off the ground to drain the oil and put it into the back of the utility trailer for it's last trip. Dragging it further with the tractor was out of the question, as it would tip over and spew oil all over again (I tried that...). What I needed was a way to lift and transport the engine.

Never having been short on ingenuity, I fabricated a lift boom in the bed of my pickup bed utility trailer. An 8' 4"x4" was placed in the bed, sticking out over the tailgate. As the bed of my trailer is rotted out, and normally covered by a lay-in sheet pf plywood, I was able to chain the front end of the 4x4 to the frame underneath. A stout long chain was attached to this and run along the top of the 4x4, terminating in a carabineer at the end of the timber. The come-along was hooked to this to lift the engine.

I connected the trailer to the back of the tractor and backed it up to the engine sitting in the driveway and hooked the come-along up to the chain on the engine. It all worked pretty well, right up until the trailer started taking the weight, at which point the back tires of the tractor left the driveway.

Switch to "Plan B". Substitute my old Turbo Diesel Ranger for the tractor. This time, the engine was lifted just enough to clear the roadway and the back of the truck stayed on the ground.

Almost that is. When I tried to pull away, there wasn't enough weight on the right side tire to provide any traction, and it just spun on the grass. I needed more weight on the back of the truck. Fortunately, in my pile of "useful one of these days" junk was an open-top 55 gallon drum in very good condition. Putting this into the back of the truck and filling it 3/4 full of water did the trick.

Here's the set-up after I cleared the side of the driveway and before I pulled into the car shed to set it down:



Tomorrow, I'll see if I can cause the roof of my car shed to collapse under the weight when I put the come-along on the roof truss to lift it for oil draining...

Well, it looks like this awful property search is about over for me. I made an offer on a coast range property yesterday, and the listing agent indicated that it will be accepted after we submit an addendum with some minor changes.

I went back to see the place again yesterday, and it land itself is about as good as I could ask for. There will be full sun in the winter (on sunny days, of course), there are multiple fruit trees, varieties of berry vines, a good sized strawberry patch, bamboo stands, vegetable gardens, ornamentals, roses, and more that I haven't discovered yet. The privacy is about perfect, and the creek is pretty. The house is a dump.

The price wasn't so pretty. I offered $450k with $325k down, the sellers will carry the remainder at 8%. The addendum that we sent in today increased the price to $460k, but lowered the interest rate to 7%. I know I'm paying about $70k more than the properties actual sale value, but if it had been reasonably priced, I wouldn't have had a chance at it due to the competition in the market. My hope at this point is that with some fix-up, clean-up, and increase in value over time, I can sell it for at least as much if and when I decide to move again.

For now, I'm feeling relief that I have an end date in sight. The sellers want 60 days from closing to pick up their crap and move along. The addendum requests that after 30 days, I can begin moving my own crap to an out-of-the-way corner of the property so that I can get a jump on moving before Fall.

Last night I didn't sleep much or well, fretting about whether it was the right thing to do. I have to concentrate on the 42 acres and how it feels and not the money. When it's all over, I'll still have enough to get by and probably build a shop. I'll just have to keep working for a while to bring in additional income to feather the nest egg.

That's the report for now, more as it transpires.

VERY cool Mr. Sharkey! I'm sure you are relieved to have that uncertainty behind you. Sounds like a great place. Hey, the house doesn't look THAT bad, at least from the outside. But I'm sure a handy guy like you will get it fixed up! It's gonna be SO peaceful out there. More pics coming, I hope!

Best,
Phil

I'm very happy for you sharkey. It is nice to know where home will be. We just bought our first last night after being evicted (rental) because the landlords want to cash in on the oil money in the city and develop our cute little house downtown into a duplex . Anyways, it sounds good for you. - Richard

It's a Done Deal. I went over to the coast today with a cashier's check for $320,690.95 and signed all the papers.

Last week was hell week. The Independence day holiday knocked a big hole in the week, and my realtor was out of town Monday, the 3rd. The "Rules" (whoever made those up) of home buying say that the Buyer and Seller have three business days from the delivery of the last inspection to complete negotiation. That left Wednesday and Thursday. I can't remember what we did on Wednesday.

Thursday, it all came to a head. We had previously insisted that the Sellers compete a property line survey and acquire any necessary easements from neighboring properties due to some confusion over exactly where the property line was in relation to the fence line. The Sellers had agreed and arranged for the surveyor to come out Friday and begin the work.

There were also the matters of the "secret easement" that a neighbor has to use the driveway to access his property which neither the Seller or his agent had disclosed before accepting my offer. There was also the results of the full home inspection, which showed that the "new" roofing had been improperly installed, there was significant settling in the north third of the house, and that there were a few spots of dry rot under the house. Add to this the fact that my VW Rabbit won't go up the steep part of the driveway because it needs grading and compacting, and some other small issues, I was ready to negotiate a lower offer to help pay for some of the repairs.

We wrote up an addendum requiring the property line issues to be part of the contract, and set the new purchase price at $430,000.00. Apparently, the old man who owned the place nearly had to be resuscitated after he read that part. They sniveled and whined and complained, asking what did we expect from an old house?

What I expected was a lower price. I reminded them that my first offer was lower, but when they held out for an additional $10k, I coughed it up without complaint. Then they told us about the easement that they'd been hiding. Well, I wanted my $10 grand back. The house easily needs $20k worth of structural repairs, not to mention a $30k make-over to be even close to habitable.

In the end, I think that the listing agent got the idea through to them that if this deal fell through, they'd be back on the market late in the season, with the easement exposed, the home inspection required to be disclosed, and some potential property line issues.

The bottom line was that they'd accept the price only if I dropped the requirement that they work out the potential property line issues. Since no one else was pushing this issue, I relented. Actually, if any of the neighboring property owners wants to make a fuss, I'd invite them to litigate. Courts have traditionally found in favor of 90-year-old fence lines and normally declare them property boundaries when in question.

As it stands, I get possession on September 10th, but we are offering them a bonus of $25 a day to get out before that. The Sellers are financing $105k at 7% for two years, at which point I pay them off when the Buyers of my old property pay me off.

It's been a lot of effort, but now the real work begins....

Wowzers to you! What are all those roofs down in front of the house? Are they outbuildings or vehicles? Looks like great land even if the house does need some work. All those woods! How close is the ocean?

Phil

Stillphil wrote:What are all those roofs down in front of the house?....How close is the ocean?

Decrepit vehicles, rotting-off-the-frame travel trailers, old boats, piles of scrap metal roofing, goat sheds, rooster roosts, you name it, it's there, or it was when that photo was taken. The escrow company is holding back $10k of their down payment money against all that junk being taken away, or at least the big pieces and any titled vehicles I could get stuck disposing of. It also stipulates that they have to remove all livestock from the property in order to get the money. They had quite a menagerie, including two ancient sway-backed horses, two mangy goats, peacocks, ducks, geese, chickens (mostly roosters from what I could see), and many, many black cats. All of them are feral, that is, none of them can be approached or handled. My realtor wanted me to keep the goats, but I'd rather start fresh with my own and train them to be friendly rather than run away if you look at them.

The people who owned the house had basically barricaded themselves into the small front yard and carport to keep al the animals at bay. There were (are) old pallets, sections of broken picket fencing, hog wire, dimensional lumber, etc all stacked up like battlements across the front of the carport and yard to keep the horses and goats away (you can see this in the photo of the front of the house, above). The fowl come and go as they please as do the cats. As you can imagine, there is a lot of 'manure' all around the front entrance to the carport, as all the critters hang out there unless chased off. That's all going to change, I want to be able to drive my car into the carport and get out under cover like a civilized person when it's raining.

The property has been cross-fenced, but it needs repair. I'll keep my horse in a reasonable sized paddock and let her loose in the rest of the property during the day.

This place is 12.5 miles from town, and about 8.5 miles from the ocean as the seagull flies. Far enough inland to be out of the fog, wind, and corrosive salt atmosphere, but close enough to moderate the heat of summer and cold of winter. The owners have tomatoes in their garden, so they obviously get some heat during summer, it's not possible to grow them along the coast.

Just counting the days until I can bail out (58 as of this morning).

Mr. Sharkey,

Congrats on the new Digs!
Isn't it odd (read as annoying) how all these issues pop up at the last minute? Oh well at least you can put one ball down now. It sounds like it will be beautiful after you "tune it up" a bit. I bet with all that fertilizer the grass will be real green! Best of luck with your new project.

Dudley

I bought some 4/0 on the internet for $374/ft for 50 feet + $18 shipping. A lot cheaper than anywhere else.
I saw Sharon Sweet at the OCF. She was amazed that I had just seen you. The first thing she said was. We're going to get wifi. What a sweetheart..
Let me know when you are going to be over there and we'll hop on the beemer and go for a cruise. AND if you need a good mind and a not so good body( help ) let me know.
I just ordered Satellite internet (HughesNet). $299 installed after $300 in rebates. $59 a month, soon to be cheaper I hear (and hope). I will build the tripod and other things for mobile use. I've got a few months to get it together.
See Ya
Jerry

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Jerry

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Nothing's new and everything's different.

Last Sunday, I took the first load of stuff over to the new property. Not a lot, and nothing all that important, my mostly-dead 1987 Ford Ranger turbo diesel pickup truck, my completely dead E-20 GE Electrak, some scaffold frames and some odds and ends of steel.

The best news is that the sellers have found a new place, six acres, and have gotten a bug up their butt to move out and into their new digs. It looks like they may be completely up and out by next weekend. This gives me the ability to begin taking things over that need shelter and security, tools, etc. It also means that I can have some professional cleaners give the dumpy house the once-over before I begin moving my home theatre and other non-housetruck possessions in.

The bad news is that the steep part of the driveway is worse than ever. I had to really flog my old diesel pickup to get it up the rutted track, and I doubt that any two-wheel-drive passenger vehicle could make it without the same abuse. I'll be taking the next few loads out in my 4x4 Ranger, but the road situation is going to require a fast repair, as I won't beat my little VW Rabbits that way to get them home.

Sunday was the first time I've been able to spend a little quiet time on the property, and I have to say, the quiet is deafening. Aside from some normal domestic sounds from neighboring properties and a couple of cars out on the road (I counted four cars in six hours, unless I missed some), the only thing to hear was the breeze in the branches of the trees and a soft trickle of water from the creek. I never once heard an aircraft of any sort, and of course, no sirens.

Home (here) on the other hand is weirder than ever. The crews working up above the property installing water and sewer for the new lots that will be partitioned out of my former property worked until just a few minutes ago (13 hours today), and the old people across the street had the paramedics over for a visit again today, complete with the sirens and flashing lights. 23 days until I am completely moved away, I can keep from freaking out for 23 more days, right? Maybe.

I have a cabin out from town and when I go to work on the place I end up sitting on the porch for the first hour just listening to the quiet. It's mesmerizing. Of course, at night the frogs start up and it's loud as hell! But the firefly show more than makes up for it.

Phil