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

Sure, some of you doubting Thomas' might say I'm only hyping Nest cause they pay me for advertising on my website, but I'd say that has it all backwards.  The only reason they are allowed to advertise on my website and gain a foothold with our 100 families across 4 counties is cause the do it right.

Eric - the owner, and father of 3 girls under 10 - stands behind his word  -you know you aren't going to some befuddled country runaround if you have a problem.

So, he's making a play into lawn and gardening services - a natural expansion from his property management platform.

You know how it is at the end of the winter and everything is so blah blah and the leaves you piled but never gathered are now killing your lawn (see above for real life example) and that momentum you had last fall just isn't there after an ass kicking winter.

So, I call Eric's team, and within a week I had the sharpest, neatest, tightest, leaf free lawn cut property on Crawford Road.  It was a good service, and if you want to go from blah blah look at my crappy property to bling bling look at my styling, I'd call Eric.  He's also segueing into gardening (hopefully with a hottie gardeness doing the designing and overseeing) and a bunch of other niche tasks and chores.

Here's my Neighbor Theresa Pagano (I'm sure her first real mention in a digital fashion, and this blog post will now define her online profile so I better make it good since she has helped raised lil' lucas (who's reading now) since he was just a little babe. ) She also doubles as my site manager when I'm not home and things are happening around the grounds.

I get a lot of 'your neighbor was down' from vendors working on my property - meaning she was pointing out something that wasn't up to snuff or prioritized right.

And Billy cutting down some dead big trees so we can plant some weeping willows.

And the end of the day for me, on my back deck.  It was a little weird - the lawn guys, the tree guys and the cleaning woman (who makes notes to me like '2 expired yogurts' , 'ant season - no food out' and arranges Lucas' stuffed animals animatedly on his bed) were all working on the grounds on the same day and I had to just take a step back and say 'who am I?'

Mud season is upon us.

But no better way to watch the seasons change than on the Hudson River.

And then the Spring thaw.

And Lucas always playing around.  $10 bucks I can't find that umbrella when I need it next.

So busy, so good.

Our Country Living Home in Rhinebeck is going swimmingly.

El;ectric finally - after building the whole damn house without it.

Nice light helps a photo.  Simple advice but oh so easy to poopah.

You know, we build pretty good homes - we put a lot of power 'under the hood', be it the spray foam insulation, the on demand hot water heaters, the high efficiency furnaces - all just part of our standard build specifications.  It's pretty uncommon.  I think our clients just expect us to be doing this - since we don't get much arguments like - 'can we use batt insulation and save $5,000 today so we can spend $50k over the next 10 years in wasted energy costs?'

But the metal really hits the road when they bring the post-build performance tester in and they perform a blower door test to test the efficiency of the structure.  This isn't a wink and a nod pre-construction theoretical exercise.  This is a test, and the results are black and white.  Most towns don't require it, but it is code and law - but since just a few builders can actually pass the test, that I think most friendly code enforcers don't want to be chased from town so they choose to ignore that part of the code/law.

So, up above, where it says 'Results' and then '1.8 ACH -50' - that means 1.8 air exchanges per hour - which is 3x better than energy star (the sought after level) and more than 5x standard construction.

It's serious business and means direct savings.   Plus its a validation that our typical and assumed standard practices are far above when other companies try real hard.

And like I think I've said about our clients over and over, they get what we are doing and how we are different in our seriousness of approach to aesthetic and functional details.