Catskills - Sullivan County - Ulster County Real Estate -- Catskill Farms Journal

One of my favorite customers, who bought Cottage 6 way back in like 2008 is David Cross. I throw his name around when I'm showing prospective customers around more often than proper or seemly. Then I follow it up with 'what about Gavin McInnes? And Albert Hammond Jr?" I always get the appropriate and due respect following. Well, David strikes again I found out when I went to see the new Muppet Movie with Lucas over the weekend. David plays the wicked agent or something like that, and puts on a pretty good show. Thing is, back in 2008, when his East Village type fans were giving him a hard time for doing Chipmunks 1, he really threw us a bone by saying he needed the money for his 'catskill cabin'.

But you know, life really never lets up, and the next year there's the landscaping project (and Chipmunks 2), and the next year is the house in Costa Rica (Chipmunks 3), the next year was face lift and botox (Chipmunks 4), the next year was to hire a lawyer to fight about the profit and loss accounting from Chipmunks 1 and 2 (Chipmunks 5), and then the grand-daddy and probably the motivation for his participation in this sequel - besides the obvious geniousness of it - was his engagement to Amber (Chipmunks 6). Her rock is HUGE. Bigger than a chipmunk. I had a lot of appointments over the weekend. A lot of appointments. 4 on Saturday, and 2 on Sunday. And all real live buyers. We ended up selling Farm 18 and getting an offer on the Shack, which we are negotiating forthwith. I snapped some photos to show off our fans - Chad and Tiffany, potters, love the area, and love the Shack!

Doug and his wife, just married for 6 months, came up from the Queens and really liked Cottage 35. Doug works in theater tickets sales.

I doubled them up on the tour with Matt and his wife from North Carolina - they just got married as well 6 months ago. He's in finance, she's a kindergarten teacher.

And Jamie and Terry, tech whizzes from the west coast rolled up in their fancy ride (actually, everyone had fancy rides), and fell head over heels for Farm 18. Came and saw it again in the morning and the rest is real estate history. The deposit check is in the mail. Janice, turn the listing sign to 'under contract' please.

Farm 18 is a real beauty and is modeled after Farm 1, our very first 2003 creation. Tons of porch and a great floor plan - it's 400 ft smaller than the original, coming in at 1500 sq ft, 3 bedrooms and 2 baths.

And here's one of our outbuildings the New York Times made famous last week. For all you SEO gurus, I'm sure you will sinfully covet that hyperlink they provided directly to our website. Hello organic search engine results!!

Jamie and Kerry brought along their pretty cool English Spaniel who acted very put off she had to sit in the back of my new car (in the cargo area - it has carpet, even!), and specialized in the 'old sad eyes'.

Sunday was another big day, hangin' with Lucas, and having the Farm 18 deal meeting at 10, then a scheduled appointment at 11 with two 'wished to remain anonymous' folks - very a-list movie star of them. So we go traveling around, knocking on the doors of the homes we just completed, surprising the occupants for sure I'm certain. But what the hay, when they were buying we did the same to some other poor unsuspecting homeowners. The one house I don't do it to is Gavin's house (the founder of Vice), cause that guy is just too crazy and I have no idea what he will do or say, except that it will be wholly inappropriate and counter to the picture I'm trying to paint.

Joe and Katie at Farm 16 have some little girls that Lucas was impressing with his dinosaur knowledge and noises, so I just left him there and continued the tour down the street. I picked him up an hour later to a bunch of protest, etc...

All in all, a pretty fab weekend, and I hate the term 'fab'. 6 meetings, 2 offers, 1 accepted deal and I met, like always, a ton of great people. For 2012, we have two deals set to close in January, we have 2 other deals entering contract, we have a spec house cottage going up in Stone Ridge, starting tomorrow. Plus we got Barn 5 under way, and we have the Big Barn going as well. With any luck, we just might make it through another year.

Ok, when you're hot you're hot - and today baby we are too hot to touch. NY Times high-falutin' design magazine "T", did an article named "Me and My Man Shed" and did a nice little thing on our writer's shack at Barn IV. Congrats Emily and Sean. We are outfitting most of our new homes now with writer's sheds, potter's barns, or in the case of the couple who signed up for Farm 18 this weekend (that's right, bye bye baby - more on that later), a 'drunk tank' for her twenty-something brother. We are building them out of scrap construction materials left over from the main house.

One of my tasks today was to tackle this top draw mess of my desk. I mean, if you look closely it's a varied assortment - the standout being the 1700 british pounds that Gavin gave me for a job at his house - I kept refusing it, and then he frickin' showed up at my office and threw it on my desk with some exaggerated claim of how good of a deal I was getting considering the exchange rate, etc.. yawn... It's the end of day, and the drawer still looks like that, so it'll have to be a task for tomorrow (or the next day). Our main server crashed today so that's always fun. Janice in the office is really sweating it because it was her job to manage the installation of the duel backup system we have in place. I guess it's progress that we have a duel off-site backup system place, when you come to think of it. Actually, the fact that we have a server is progress as well. Here's Lucas using the handrail to come down some big steep steps with his cute cousin Sarah at Thanksgiving.

And then we headed over to the train museum in Strasburg, Lancaster County, PA. Quite an assortment of old and new trains. Lancaster, where I grew up, is an interesting place where all the yards are well-kept and the people all industrious.

Below is a version of the train snow plow, working hard to keep your tracks clean.

And then when Lucas and I went to Natural History Museum, NYC, we ended up hangin' outside the building for awhile and before you know it, wallah, he's got a friend, leading him around by hand.

Kid's are a funny lot for sure. Dinosaurs, trains, playtime, nap time - it's all one big adventure for sure.

I know, I've sworn I was going to take it easy and let a few things breeze past me instead of catching everything in my net, but then my friend David puts this house on this website as a 'good deal' and I couldn't help but look into it further since it was dabbling in our new old house style. I'm not too concerned about competition these days since what I have learned is our competition always gets something really wrong (like the overall interior and exterior design and details) but it is always interesting to see who is nipping at our heels. And ending the real estate listing with this doozy - "...You are so smart- no "old house blues" for you!" Seriously, telling someone they 're so smart in my experience means that you are telling them they are clueless, and I'm just always flabbergasted at the carelessness of the agents and brokers to approach a sale like this. I mean, if they are 'so smart' they don't need to be told that. And if they were so smart, they wouldn't be looking at this sorry excuse for a 'new old house'. I mean, I tried to find some redeeming characteristics that forced a 'nice try' out of me, or 'you almost got it right', or '"A' for effort' or 'nice college try'. But this house doesn't have any of those attributes. it's not really that nice of a try with a lacking kitchen, the 'til death do we part' Navajo white throughout, baseboard heat, the wrong color spindles and a terrible honey glaze floor.

That's without wondering where the dining/living room went, or how bad the bedrooms must be to not even be shown. 1x4 floors, tiny trim at the doors and floors, probably hollow core doors, Home Depot lighting, ranch trim, etc... Look it, everyone is entitled to their own fallacies, fantasies and day dreams - but to get a house sold you got to understand what a buyer is seeing when they walk in the door of a house - old country charm is not what is apparent here, regardless how many times the agent says it. It's the lake rights across the street. Hey, I don't mind if someone wants to insult the intelligence of their buyer - it only reinforces our efforts when potential clients stumble onto our website and/or offerings. I can't tell you how many times I have heard the big sigh of relief when clients realize we can actually make this new old house thing work for them. Anyway, no offense intended - just refreshing to see other 'builders/designers' not getting any closer to hitting the right pitch than they were 5 years ago.