Catskill Farms - International Headquarters.
That's right - I bought a 2000 sq ft garage with 25' high ceilings that served as the school bus repair garage for the past 30 years for the Eldred High School. While I can use the 3 acres and the 2000 sq ft, I'm not sure if the 'heavy duty lift' will come in too handy. Sounds dangerous, especially to a mechanical moron like myself.
What a beautiful picture - Good Ol Yeller beside the ghetto bus garage. Note the avant garde paint scheme of poop brown on bad white.
Inside is wide open - this pic shows the framing for my 2nd floor office that'll be the dope - casement windows southernly swinging out, metal roof, big phat screen tv for me and my clients to check out pictures, audio, security, internet - space and permanance. I mean, really, I call an internet vendor I use and he has 7 addresses for me over the past 2 years. That ain't an easy life to lead, and even harder to sell to the lady. But my good looks and country charm have enabled me to wiggle through not completely unscathed, but at least undaunted.
Great picture from my upper floor office looking down on all the god damn furniture I own. Seriously, that's all furniture - bought over the years while we were furnishing houses that no one would buy (only because the realtors were too cheap to invest the commissions they were making off me in good advertising - but that's another topic and another story for another day.) I got like 7 couches - macy's, lazyboy, ikea - chairs, dressers, antiques, mirrors, rugs, pictures, art, mailboxes, boxes, armchairs, rocking chairs, broken chairs, typewriters (too many too count - i collect them).
And below one frickin' pile of lumber, windows, doors and siding that we have accumulated over the past 4 years of construction and until we bought the ghetto bus garage (thank you Jeff Bank), it was scattered all over the county.
There is at least $10k of material down there, and everyday we stop by and pick up this or that and it is glorious to a cost-conscious sort of guy (just ask Lisa about my audits of her credit card and my empty threats to 'cut her off' if the liquer store bill gets any higher regardless of her claim that it's 'all for you'). Construction is about managing waste, and to use all this extra material up is just like a dream come true - easy money.
Swiss Hill Farm Part 1
On a back pretty road between Jeffersonville and Bethel, NY lay a beautiful and dilapidated tiny little farmhouse and 2 barns on 30 acres. Even though I was past my eyebrows in debt, and owned a dicey business with a good idea but no assurance of short or long term success, we had tired of full-time living in the Rock House, our 600 sq ft house in Cochecton, NY - so I bought it.
Now, it's always interesting for a designer/builder/contractor to put the other shoe on and become a home improver - and now that I have done it a few times, I think I am a believer that every builder should build something for himself and his wife every few years just so they can remember the stress involved by home improvement/home builder participants - financial stress, decision stress, relationship stress, animal stress, did I say financial stress?
The thing about decisions is that the bigger they are, the more intractable and unchangeable they are. You can change a light fixture you don't like, but you can't shrink the house once you put the foundation in, you can't change the kitchen cabinets once they are ordered and installed, and you can't improve a piece of land that can't be improved.
Here's where started:
And with an empty wallet and many stories, some jubliant some sordid, here's where we ended -
Farm 9 Feedback
A nice note from Mr and Mrs Carr - our first guest blogotorial.
"Home is where the heart is-
The day we found our Catskill Farm property, I was pregnant, we did not know it until our second visit when Chuck and my husband Stephen shook hands on the deal.
It is so interesting to me how both our baby and our home are so inter-connected. They say babies bring luck!
We would come up from the city nearly every weekend (I know every bathroom stop on the way) to collaborate with Chuck and check the progress. It was an incredible process because it was pretty effortless, Chuck got where we were going with everything and helped make our vision come alive. As the weeks and months passed the race was on to see which would come first the baby or the house. They were neck in neck all the way.
Our due date was March 28, but our beautiful daughter Hadley decided to arrive on March 4, funny enough our house closing is hopefully going to be scheduled for
March 28 (I say hopefully because although the building process was as fast as the speed of light, the banks are tending to take more time these days, in a way building the house seemed faster than applying for the mortgage).
We would like to thank Chuck and everyone involved in building our home and we mean everyone! We will spend many years raising our daughter there, tending to the organic vegetable gardens we plan on planting and cherishing all the memories to come.
Our new home will be called Canterbury Farm (It is lovely tradition in England to name your home) named after my husbands beloved family townhouse on Canterbury Road in in London where some of his fondest childhood memories took place.
Cheers to everyone at The Catskill Farms!
Christine, Stephen and Hadley Carr"
And we're off!
Turkeys are coming out of hibernation and pecking around again. This batch reminds me of a few vendors I use (not talking about you Mike M.).
Foundation walls of Cottage 8 being stripped of their forms. Just like jello-mold (or a jello shot, speaking of Jello), masons 'form' the concrete walls with aluminum forms wired with rebar and pour the concrete into the forms. After a few days, the forms are removed and wallah, a foundation. Next comes the waterproofing of the foundation, then the footing drains to keep the basement dry, and then we push the dirt back against it. We will only push the dirt 1/2 way up until the wood frame is sitting on the walls to ensure we don't put too much pressure on the new walls.
Mason's old school truck.
Footings for Cottage 7. The foundation will sit on these footings, hence the overused cliches 'you gotta have a good footing' or 'you gotta start with a good foundation'. The 'rebar' sticking up from the footings will be tied together with the foundation walls for extra strength. Foundations take over 28 days or more to reach full strength.
Pretty good weather for March and we are off to the races.
Friday we close on Modern Cottage 3.
