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

Building a house is tough.  Everything about it - finding the land, being sure the land is what you think it is, designing a house, selling that concept to someone, compiling all the info for the build permit, going through 6 months of trials and tribulations, inspections and appraisals, and finally reaching the finish line and needing that final piece of paper, the Certificate of Occupancy.

Now, imagine doing that in 6 different towns with 6 different processes and 6 different inspectors and 6 different set of rules, where the minorest infraction can set you back time and money bigtime.

They are such innocent pieces of paper -

The unassuming building permit -

And the little more sexed up Certificate of Occupancy.  2 pieces of paper that mark the beginning and the end of the road of home building.

Had a closing yesterday on Farm 19, a closing tomorrow on Cottage 39 and Farm 21 next week or the next.

Breaking ground on now 4 new ones right after Thanksgiving.

Closings are always nice and it's actually a main reason we are in business.  In fact, it's one the things that separate our company from others in our line of work - we sell what we build - too often it just sits on the eager-eyed balance sheet of some poor sap who thought it's a good idea to go build houses that no one pre-signed up for.  

But that's how we make our livelihood, and we do it pretty well.

So like I was saying, we had a closing a couple of weeks ago, and now we got 3 more coming up.  I was noticing a lot of my website pics were WAY outdated, so I'm working hard bringing all the homes up to date.

Farm 19 is a winner - awesome floor plan, 10 acres, right outside Narrowsburg NY, selling for less than $400k.  Should have it wrapped up next week.

Then Cottage 39, inspired by our very first cottage back in the day, 2007.  It's on 5+ acres outside of Eldred NY.

As part of the deal, I agreed to put a screened porch on for them.  Everyone loves a screened porch.

Always crowded the last few days of the job.

Then, wallah, it's empty.

Here's a Cottage up in Woodstock NY.  This is pretty neat house, long on detail and modest in size.  Probably almost as much porch as house.

Here's a beauty - Farm 21 (fnaanc - "formerly known as arts and crafts).  No, I mean it, it's a beauty.

Nother pic of the casualty from the Storm.  Boy, if that doesn't loosen up the old bowels I don't know what would.

Have a nice weekend.  I noticed as I was writing this it will be my 666th blog post.

It's always great to see a bully get their due, and no finer moment has been recently seen than on election day in Narrowsburg when Ned Lang defeated Andrea Reynosa (and the The River Reporter) for Town Council.  Like a stake through their lily-livered self-righteous, self-idolized hearts, Ned - the antithesis of the rabid my-way-or-the-highway attempted 'liberal' thought leaders of this small community - dealt a heavy blow to both the idea that you can fool all the people all the time and the idea that they (The River Distorter) are the only conduit to disseminate information.


With the help of their alarmingly shrinking weekly newspaper, The River Reporter tried to stack the deck in favor of their favored candidate - editorials, political influence, lack of coverage of Ned's continued and consistent contribution to the community.  And they lost.  The people - old, young, red, yellow black and white - rejected the baloney that passes for news in that paper.

I always love it when people underestimate the intelligence of their customer.  It's always a great opening for a competitor.

So, if you see a River Reporter, buy one - even if it's to get a fire started - especially during this holiday season when charity is at the forefront of your mind.

Below are some pictures of the community projects spearheaded by the Tusten Town Council, funded by our local assembly woman, trumpeted by our local paper and specifically spearheaded by the Council member Ned defeated.  It cost over $14,000 of taxes.  This is Narrowsburg's Community Garden, its defining taxpayer funded triumph.  It's very easy to mistake the good guys for the bad guys and the bad guys for the good guys.  Believe me, I was fooled for years.

By all the mimicking, mirroring, copying, imitating, stealing, borrowing and all the other words out there to describe the flattery of being followed in our design and business approach - I must have colored myself a lot less original and smart than other people color me - but that's the advantage of coming from Lancaster PA, a modest place of unassuming hardworking God fearing folks.

Here's the post from 15 months ago, reflecting on the impossibility of Chapin Estate offering Cottages for $275k.  What I said then was 1.), it is impossible to build and sell a nice 1500 sq ft home for $275k, and 2.), underestimating your clients intelligence and coming up with 100 reasons why, well, actually, it's not really $275k but $350k does not work in this buyer's market and is a great way to lose a sale.

Well, according to the Sullivan County Democrat, Chapin is now offering 1500 sq ft Cottages for $375k.  So my point was obviously well-heeded, and the truth of the assertion remains - honest dealing rules the day and don't underestimate (insult) the intelligence of your buyer.  It's a hard lesson for these slick salesmen, but eventually the reality of depressed sales levels forces a 'come to Momma' moment, when ego is forced to bow and concede the race to the reality of business survival.

So you take a builder of multi-million dollar log cabin homes with scarcely a sale over the last few years and evolve into a proud builder of cottages.

I love small homes.  We build them cause we love them.  We have been enterprising, nationally-recoginized, lovers of small homes.  I wonder if they can say the same thing.  I wonder what it will like to be a 2nd class citizen in this Sotheby's Development.  I just can't imagine many of my clients, who are quite established, and successful wanting to be 2nd class to anyone, especially to the Gold Coast of Jersey.

And one more thing - my neighbor Bryan was making some snarky comment about my grammar in my posts, and a lot of "too"s are "to"s, 'thens' are 'thans' , spellings that the checker doesn't catch and a lot of other simple grammatical errors.  let my point out that I am aware of this, I'm not some grammar neanderthal, in fact I take great pride in my knowledge of the rules and usages.  However, I'm busy, yet still come up with the time to blog creatively, and rarely do I reread while writing - it's a stream of conscious thing, which I think adds to the blogs value.  And when I do reread it's typically on my phone, while waiting for something else, with no easy ability to edit.  it's a rule of mine to not rewrite a post after it's been posted for the simple reason that would probably increase the likelihood of retracting or rewriting the previous night's thoughts - believe me, there's been plenty of post I'd of liked to take down.

But thats the whole idea - to capture a moment of my mind's wandering in terms of the nexus of my business building, my challenges, and life that gets woven through this all-consuming upstate design and build journey.  To rewrite it to (ha ha, just a joke - TOO) carefully would turn it into the perfectly polished pitches we are bombarded with daily -

And seriously  - who really needs another perfectly polished pitch?  It's so lame and so yesterday.

Or, as Fergie would say - 'that's so 2008, and you're so 2 thousand and late'.