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

Driving along the road the other day home from Farm 20 which is coming along just fine with floors going down and interior doors and such, I drove by Cottage 14, finished and sold in January 2009.  Sharp looking house, sharper looking scary scarecrow out front.  

We suffered electrical outages and lack of internet and a lot of trees are down.  Here is the Corner in Eldred preparing for the storm.  NYSEG seemed to hit Narrowsburg and the Barryville areas first, which was really nice for me personally and for a lot of our clients who have homes there.

Here's a shot of Lucas's toys in the yard after the storm.

And a bunch of trees down and a porta john casualty at Cottage 39.  Glad no one was in there, but then again, if you are in a porta johnny during a hurricane, you probably have bigger things working against you.

Here's an ingenious rigged cord that Bryan over at Cottage 34 rigged up.  Take your standard generator, rig up a cord that plugs into your dryer outlet, turn off the main electric, and back feed the house's electric power needs with the portable generator.

During our 'no electric' days, I tackled a project long overdue.  Reorganizing my house plans.  Considering we are 100 homes and ten years into it, it's quite a few plans.

And the pictures on the walls tell the same story - lots of homes designed and built.

And the keys in the box tell much the same story - lots of homes under our belts.

Pretty serious out there.  We weren't much impacted until I started hearing stories about gas stations closing because the gas was being diverted elsewhere.

It's amazing how quickly things can go to shit.  What did it take - 5 days before panic and gas shortages set in?

For all of our clients (and others) that have been displaced by the hurricane, and find themselves without electric or internet at their upstate home, we are offering our offices which is warm, and the electric and internet is back up and running.

If you need to catch up on work or whatever, give me a call.  917-838-5342.

Please circulate this post.

Thank you.

Charles Petersheim
Owner, Catskill Farms.

Here comes the storm, right?  Seems like a big one and we will see shortly.  What sucks about it is that I have 3 perfectly scheduled houses to finish up and close and another 3 to start and having a week of uncertainty and then the cleanup time post-storm, let's just say my money may be on the street a week or two longer, depending on what happens to the appliances deliveries, bank inspections, punchlists, subcontractor availability, etc...

Barn VI - a really great adaption of Barn V.  We used a vertical cedar siding, metal roof and what we call a 'horse rail' for the porch system.  Pretty sharp house.

I especially like this view of the large dining room windows and the back porch.

A very modern and traditional take on the barns we like.

The painting and carpentry crew on the last day of the job.

Kitchen with lots of symmetry.

Front door, open stairs, bath straight ahead hidden in a cove, and a bedroom off on the left, behind the front door.

All light, all the time.

Above and below are pictures of the first floor bath, with a sharp stainless steel vanity.

Salvaged barn wood at the top of the open treaded stairs.

1st floor bedroom.

2nd floor foyer.

A  bedroom with salvaged wood and a hand built barn door.

And the 2nd floor bath with tub and shower.

And the 2nd bedroom.

And Tito, pretty good guy who keeps our houses looking good.

Barn VI has left the building and will soon be a home.  Now we have Farm 19, Cottage 39 and Craftsman 2 to get closed before Thanksgiving.

It's not like it's news to me - my entire business proposition and marketing revolves around the fact that busy urbanites need a place and time to recharge.

Thing is, so do us county guys, it appears.

This year has been busy, and busy isn't just that 'moving forward kicking ass' experience we all love to reach on occasion for all our effort,  But it's also the busyness that keeping it all from derailing, especially businesses like I run, where we are always pushing the envelope in terms of effort and growing the businesses - it's never a dull moment.  It's constantly like a rapidly spinning machine where the pieces of the machine are always in danger of just breaking, flying off,  and disintegrating spontaneously.

Perhaps its evident to everyone else who runs a business but it's something that I always assumed would not be so difficult, even in the face of 10 yrs of counter-evidence, but the management of people, their issues, abilities, good days, bad days, etc... is a lot of frickin work as you grow a business, especially true as you grow one in where the talent pool is shallow indeed.  So a lot of my work this year is putting together a new team, and making a commitment to retain those people who are in these positions now.  As the owner of a business who needed to keep things going, I've taken one for the team for years in terms of working with people who didn't gel with me, or my style, but they got the job done to some degree and the fear of chaos was much greater than the fear of being irritated on a second by second basis.

Turns out I was totally wrong - you got to surround yourself with complimentary people - in style, personality - every company has a culture, and people either fit or they don't.  And to think that my general emotional well-being was less important growing a business was just an amateur calculation to the core.

The more rested I am, the more energized by those who surround me, the better our business is and after all the fights, struggles, wins and losses on the personnel front over the last 10 yrs, nothing is so sweet as fitting the right people in the right slots.  All of sudden, it's like magic - the businesses just explode.  I've been driving them all around, but when you hit that perfect RPM where the companies just fire effortlessly (yeah right, keep dreaming Petersheim), that is a reward like no other (besides maybe an unexpected happy ending after an in-house massage by an unexpectedly hottie masseuse).

So, what I'm realizing is that after a lot of stress and hardwork this year as I reinvent my companies once again, and as I got screwed out of my long anticipated vacation at the last moment by friends of mine, and are closing on 5 houses in 6 weeks, and have grown all 3 businesses by at least 40% each, I've pushed too hard.

And as I now regain my balance and humor and patience and general emotional and intellectual geniusness (boy can I hear the ex on that one as I write it - in fact, pervertedly, it's almost why I wrote it), I am reacquainted with something that is so obvious -

Everyone needs rest to perform well (that's what she said) - and to ignore that simple fact is to miss an important truism of business.

And miss to many of those truism (hello Henning of Henning's Local) and you won't be around for long.