Cottage 29 Goes To Contract
This is a fantastic little home with a very unique and niche floor plan. Like many of our homes, you just won't see anything else like it, no matter how far and wide you travel.
This 2 bed 1.5 bath Cottage on almost 8 acres is 3 miles outside of Eldred, and 3 miles from Barryville. It's one of our only finished homes that is (or should I way, 'was') for sale.
It's most unique feature is the open wrap-around stair case. The wrap-around snakes around the chimney, which is stone from the base to the roof. We used a lot of salvaged wood in the wainscot area, as well as all the posts and beams for the staircase.
It's an interesting house. We furnished it to help with the visualization, but to be honest, not many of our clients at this point need help with the creative side of the process.
We build a lot of homes, and a lot of them are started and sometimes finished without a reserved buyer. But we never hold onto them too long - someone always comes along who finds the home speaks to them personally, privately and sincerely.
Finishing Up, Punch Lists and Great Insulation
That's James up above, in our Ecotech Spray Foam booth. All of our homes now come with spray foam insulation, high efficiency gas boilers and a lot of times, on-demand hot water heaters. We thought spray foam was so great that we went into the insulation business - and now serve the entire Hudson Valley region with our soy-based, 47% renewable insulation. Like a dummy who left his brain in the Big Easy, I forgot to snap a pic of the exterior of Cottage 34, which is closing in 30 days. But I did manage to grab a few shots of it as we start the final push towards completion.
Our process is pretty thorough since our clients are pretty picky - we go so far as to cleaning the house thoroughly before asking the painter to come back in to do his touch ups - that way he doesn't need to deal with dust or dirt or accumulated dirtiness. Here's the guest bedroom with a sliding barn door that looks out over the steps, and out the back side of the house (yes, I said back side for all you immature readers).
And the other bedroom in the 9am light.
From the stairs through the house - note the reclaimed posts, the cable rail and early american floor stain.
And the duel bath with duel sinks and duel built-in medicine cabinets - I was asking Bryan the future owner which sink he was going to use-
For all you frequent and long term readers, you may remember this floor plan from Pedro and David's Cottage 23 - we just enlarged it a bit, and of course tweaked the interior design and palette per Bryan & Heather's aesthetic. Funny story about David and Pedro, who live behind me off of Crawford Road. They used an ingenious technique to extricate themselves from a tricky situation when their car wouldn't budge from the ice they were stuck on - they peed around the tires and melted the ice. I mean, I didn't go into detail like how long or how many pee trips they had to make, or if they had to keep going inside and drinking water and coffee.... And Farm 15 in the mid-morning sun. Rails on, lights hanging.
A lot of guys in the kitchen, hooking the gas and electric up for the stove, running the water for the dishwasher and refrigerator, punching a hole through the wall for the range vent and then hooking up the electric to it, finishing up the tile for the kitchen (with the fancy racy black trim tile).
It's always darkest before the storm, as the above photo shows. Thru shoot of living room, dining room and kitchen. This house was inspired by the Halley Farm 12, which was inspired by Farm 6 over in North Branch.
Fireplace leading into the Study.
Tito loves working with me so much he's all smiles. That's a pretty common emotion, - just ask Deborah my book-keeper of 6 years.
Welcome Back from Vacation
There is nothing worse than writing 3/4 of a genius blog post only to have it mysteriously disappear like it did last night- I mean, I'm on my 4th year of blogging - over 450 insightful, intelligent, witty, cutting-edge posts. It has only happened to me a few times but boy does it smart when it happens - one minute it's there, the next second it's gone, gone gone. I mean, posting takes some time - you got your pics to organize, upload, story to tell, story to write, flourishes to conjure. So anyway, I'm over it and up above is a photo from the archives I came across. It's on Lucas' first birthday party, where I arrived with a new Lab puppy I picked up at an Amish farm on the way down to my Dad's, where the party was taking place. And down below is Lucas at the aquarium.
...and Lucas on the shores of the Mississippi, curving around the City of New Orleans...
...and then this picture below that doesn't exist is of Lucas and family at the Insectaturium (or Bug Museum) because I went around snapping photos with a camera whose memory card was left behind in the computer in the hotel room. (non-existent photo slot) I came home, and I conquered, with a good weekend of $1,150,000 of sales signed up - a great renovation on a a lake for Scott and Erica, an awesome Barn house on 12 acres (and lake rights) for Bruce and Cindy, and a Mac-Daddy Cottage/Cabin on 15 with lake rights for Matthew, Sarah and children. Now all we have to do is reel Daisy and Mike in with some tempting offerings, and Gabriel who has been lurking around Cottage 29 and we are really rolling. And it's only February 28. Here's Cottage 35, coming along nicely with the exterior siding up and a lot of the interior taking shape. This house is for sale for $285,000, sits on 5+ acres a few miles outside of Narrowsburg, has 2 bedrooms, 1.5 baths, full basement and a lot of cool details like a wood burning fireplace and super open floor plan. Should be good.
The first floor, below.
One of the bedrooms...
And the Shack - will be interesting to see who buys this little piece of glory - 500 sq ft with a lot of big sky.
We did a little IKEA in this one, playing with cool norwegian lights, kitchens, vanities and toilets. It's going to be a great getaway for someone, with a woodstove that will heat the place easily (and if not, it's fully equipped with a heating system).
I like the above the toilet cabinet, with a "C" for Chuck, or Catskill Farms.
The bedroom is nothing to sneeze at, with big windows and plenty of space for 2 (or 3 if you swing that way - just kidding, this is a clean act around here and we don't stand for stuff like that in our homes.).
Farm 15 motored right along in my absence, and we are getting the water tested for potability and applying for the certificate of occupancy before too long.
Here's the mudroom, cat area, closet area, 1/2 bath area that should come in real handy.
A shot looking through the house, into the study.
And ol' Cottage 34, turning that final bend in conjunction with Farm 15 - bringing 'er home for Bryan and Heather. In another stupid twist of fate, I can't find the newest pics of this house that I snapped over the weekend.
Well, as you can see, I got a bit of 'vacation brain' still going on, losing shit, erasing shit, forgetting shit - but I'm sure it won't take long to morph back to the Gladiator pose I prefer, kicking some serious real estate butt and building the best the little houses this side of the Mississippi.
New Orleans
I can't go into much detail cause the wife is on me to 'get going' and Lucas keeps playing with the greasy chain on my rented bicycle and then touching himself and everything else with his greasy hands. But I did want to post, since we are digging the Big Easy, for sure. Today we have the Aquarium, City Park and Imax, then Lisa I have a big date on Frenchmen Street tonight, a little off the beaten path where hopefully the music and food we seek shall be found. I rented a bicycle - more on that later - and cruised the city areas hit by the flood. 250,000 homes had water in them. Some, like the ones above and below haven't seen their owners since - whole blocks of deserted homes, overgrown grass, with the haunted symbols of search on the front of the homes - That's the levy that breached on the right, car fenders and mattresses in the fore.
Here's a rickety drawbridge that crosses the canal that breached - Mississippi in the distance.
A 'double shotgun' cottage, with separate residences on the right and left. Called shotgun cottages cause you could shoot a shotgun from the back to the front, a design intended to skirt the real estate tax laws that said any room with a hall was not a separate room, and taxes were formulated from the number of rooms. Funny how no one ever has liked paying real estate taxes, or I guess taxes, period.
A house in the middle of the block, nearly deconstructed.
The house front symbols of search and rescue, 5 years ago.
And then some new homes - these modern homes were super cool, kind of placed in the midst of the abandoned chaos of destruction. They looked brand new - with multiple colors and simple modernist twists of architecture.
I mean, even the grass is green and manicured, which was not common from what I saw in the 9th Ward - and right behind it, and abandoned overgrown field.
And then on the other side of the Clairborne Highway stood the Hope Homes, which is somehow funded or directed by Brad Pitt and his organization. What struck me about these homes was not just the style, or the fact that they were there, but the simple act of bulldozing all the abandoned decrepit homes made a big sky difference - the clutter of debris and broken homes littered the streets and avenues elsewhere.
It's amazing to me these trees still stand - I mean, they had 25' of water and 100 mph winds - the saying should not be 'strong like bull', it should be 'strong like tree'. Life continues as the post man passes. There was a lot of construction in this 8 sq block area, mostly these modern Hope homes, but like much positive economic activity, it propelled and motivated other homesteaders.
I haven't reached this project yet, but I think the homes are intended to go to the original inhabitants, or ones like those. Obviously there is some money behind the project because the buzz of construction was steady, organized and even the yards were finished prettily.
It's funny that even these homes 8' of the ground would have been flooded -
The River to the Right, the new homes to the left.
I covered a lot of turf on my 3 speed girlie rent-a-bike, got a flat tire, met some homesteaders, talked to a guy who was just finishing renovating his mother's home that was flooded in the storm, saw a funeral procession for one of 6 men/boys murdered over the weekend, and had a martini at the Napoleon House, built as a refuge for Napoleon after he was exiled from leadership- A lot of history for sure.
