Inspections

While Junior and I have been playing in the sun on the lakeshore, Hubs has remained home to wrap up the closing on the house we sold and also to be present for the inspections at the farm we are buying.

Before you think I am some sort of self centered lazeabout, let me explain my current state off relaxation. Normally I wouldn't take off for paradise and leave Hubs alone at home to do all the remaining grunt work, but this trip was planned last winter before we sold our house.  I would have cancelled but there were two other families involved and without me they couldn't have come. The timing just basically sucks. Plus, Hubs is getting his first ever baby free week, so in a way he's in paradise himself.

About the inspections.  Yes, plural.  On Monday we had the four fireplaces and the irrigation system inspected.  Then on Wednesday we had the regular house inspection done.  As to be expected with a twenty nine year old house, there are lots of little maintenance things to deal with,  but nothing big.

Great news!

Since all is well,  we are now trying to move up our closing date to shorten up our current state off homelessness. Very exciting stuff!

Below: Me, Junior & Hubs.  Last day at the old golf course house! Our dog Bourke was in the photo until he chose that moment to "clean" himself. Cropped!

Not much of anything

After all the crazy packing moving stress I am very happy to report that (while I'm temporarily homeless) I'm not doing much more than this...

Garlic!

I have harvested and braided my first ever garlic crop! My yield is small compared to what most "real" gardeners grow. That is mostly because I had to plant mine in containers, and I planted several different varieties. Some of which didn't grow at all.

My grand total was 12 garlic bulbs. 12 whole bulbs. That should last me a couple month's before I run out. I am not totally sure it was worth the effort, but I have learned a lot, and plan on putting that experience toward next years harvest.

Originally I had grand visions that every single garlic clove I planted would develop into a bulb and I would have garlic to spare so that I could replant said spare garlic cloves. Given my small yield though, I think I will just cook with them and purchase some more to plant once we have moved into our new home.

Here is what I did:
Purchased "seed garlic" last August - September. I decided to try out a couple hardneck varieties as well as softneck garlic. I planted porcelain hardneck, chesnok red harneck, and a softneck garlic (not sure what the variety was). Because I knew we were going to be listing our house for sale the coming spring, I decided to try planting them in containers instead of the ground. So, that september I planted them all in cloth containers pots with about 6" soil. I planted the garlic 2" deep and then put about 2" compost mulch over the top. I proceeded to ignore them for the winter.

In April (still winter here) I was delighted to see greens sprouting, despite the snow. Come spring/summer I watered them when the soil got dry.

Garlic in the back and on the left, everything else is onions or shallots.

I waited anxiously for scapes to appear. Apparently, it required that I go out of town for a week for this to happen. I was ecstatic upon my return. Then I gleefully harvested them and added them to salads and soup for the next week.

Garlic next to 2 year old for scale, right before cutting the scapes.
I was really surprised by how tall the plants get.

Garlic scapes! Crazy little buggers.

Then of course we sold our house, so I had to harvest the garlic about 1 - 1.5 weeks early.

Harvested garlic bulbs. Ready to dry out for a week.

Despite the early harvest, I got decent sized bulbs. Of the three varieties I planted, the porcelain harneck did the best. Almost all of those cloves grew into bulbs. I got a few cloves of the chesnok red, and only two tiny pathetic softneck garlic bulbs. They were so tiny, that they weren't even capable of being added to the braid.

Hardneck garlic, braided.

Because I like braiding things, and because I don't currently have a horse to pointlessly torture braid, I decided to ignore the naysayers of the internet and farmers markets and go ahead and braid my hardneck garlic. Guess what? They braid just fine. I now see no reason to ever try and grow softneck garlic again!

Garlic success!

Well Tests

One aspect of living on a farm (or any land outside of city limits) is that your water comes from an aquifer somewhere below your land as opposed to a treated city water plant. It turns out that there is a lot more to a well than just how many gallons per minute it produces. We already know that the well is 180 ft deep and that it gets more than 15 GPM, from the official well log.

So what are we testing for exactly and why? Because the water is isn't coming from a treatment facility, it could be better than typical city water, or worse. Before "buying the farm" one should test the well water quality during the due diligence phase. Indeed, one should regularly test their well every few years because these levels can change depending on what is happening underground. The yummy things tested for are nitrates (bad stuff...ie. blue-baby syndrome), e-coli, chloroform, and fluoride. Our dentist told us to test for the fluoride. Apparently it is naturally occurring in groundwater, and sometimes there is too much, which can be bad, especially for babies.

Armed with my sample jars that I picked up last Friday, we headed out to the property early Sunday morning to do the well test (and also to poke around some more and take room measurements for flooring quotes). To get my well samples I took the screen thingy off the kitchen faucet, bleached the heck out of it, ran the water for 10 minutes, and then filled up the little jars. The next morning we dropped them off first thing (they must be tested within 30-hours for the chloroform test). Lickity split, they ran the test, and emailed us results today.

Cost of nitrate test $28.
Cost of chloroform & e-coli test $28.
Cost of fluoride test $28.
Peace of mind that my baby won't turn blue or develop brown spotted adult teeth...priceless!

Indeed, all is well with the well!

Organizing all The Things

I have been furiously getting all of the things new farm sale related organized. Today's short list included confirming inspection appointment, getting closing date moved due to later inspection date (sucky), taking Junior on a "field trip" to pick up well water test kits from local SCARY BACTERIA LAB TESTING PLACE, and scoping out different reclaimed hardwood flooring samples at multiple different retail locations. Before I did all that, I put in a good 4 hours of actual income earning workload. Thank goodness for my nanny!

I digress. Buying a farm has a lot of unknowns, and of course you want to cross every t and dot every i before you actually "by the farm". I am sure that saying exists for a good reason. Regardless, we are feeling very positive about everything thus far. Hubs even spoke to the president of the HOA board today and got "warm fuzzies". I never thought I'd ever hear that come out of his mouth in the same sentence as HOA in my life. There is a first for everything I guess.

So, what's next? On Sunday we are meeting at the property with our realtor so that we can do the well testing and also to measure the rooms in the house, so we can get actual quotes on material for flooring changes. Then we will actually put in a preliminary order for materials, so that we can get the new flooring in ASAP once we take possession of the property.

Yep. It was installed in 1985, no joke.

Because, yeah...those carpets have to go (especially in the bathrooms)!

About the Property

I thought it was time I told you a bit about the property that we have under contract!

First off, a side note about buying instead of building:
I am sad that we aren't building from scratch. However, I am also happy that we aren't building. Those sentences are oxymoronic in nature, I know, but the reality is it would have been a HUGE stressor to build. Especially right now, with Junior at the age he is. I have been involved in the building of a house before, and even under the best of circumstances, everything suffers for it. I was prepared for that, and we would have gotten through it. However, life has just recently gotten somewhat easy again, now that Junior is two. For instance, I now shower at least 4 days a week in private and use words like oxymoron again instead of just staring blankly at people due to a sleep deprived haze. I don't need nor want things to get hard again. So it is a mixed blessing that we found this farm when we did. Now fingers crossed everything goes well with the inspection process.

House, Garage/Shop, Barn viewed from the pasture.
Snow covered Spanish Peaks in the background.

About the farm:
It consists of 5 acres, 30-minutes from downtown Bozeman (but closer to skiing), with beautiful 360º views of the Spanish Peaks Mountain Range, various foothills, and Ted Turner's Buffalo Ranch. There is an existing 3000 sf house (dated, but clean and turn key), very large 6 car sized man cave garage/shop, 1500 sf pole barn with insulated & heated tack room, and smooth wire fencing that is in pretty good shape but needs top rails, hot wire, and some TLC. The landscaping is also very dated but irrigated, and there are some existing fenced vegetable garden beds that I can't wait to clean up. At the barn/drylot area there is an existing automatic horse waterer that I hope still works, and room for a 100x200 arena in a couple different locations as well as a 66' round pen.

If that all wasn't just awesome enough, it gets better. It turns out, I may not need to build an arena because the subdivision has an outdoor arena in the 15 acre community park, 1/2 mile down a gravel road from the farm's driveway! There are also riding trails and a creek in the park. Once I get bored with all of that, it is a short drive/haul to Forest Service Land. Shockingly enough, we didn't even know about the park/arena until after we had made an offer on the place. Happy accident indeed!

The Counter

The seller's of the farm we found last week made a counteroffer, which we expected to happen. It just took them the entire weekend to get back to us. I guess the date/time limit on these contracts is more of a "grey" area than I realized. Anyway...what we didn't expect to happen was for their offer price to be the exact total we were hoping that we would be able to negotiate to, which we needed it to be in order to actually buy the farm. Please humor me while I let the 13 year old horse obsessed little girl out for one second...

OMG! Sqee! I am so friggin' excited!

Alrighty, now that I got that out of my system, back to adult reality. Given that the number is where we needed it to be we have decided to omit further haggling and have accepted their counteroffer. Now we are moving onto the exciting area of inspections and due diligence. After that is all done the property is all our and we close on August 7th. Woo Hoo!

I will have more juicy details, and finally some photos later this week. But for now, my 13 year old self will leave you with...OMG! OMG! OMG!

Just Maybe...

We really liked one of the properties we looked at yesterday and have decided to make an offer. I don't want to give any details about it just yet, so as to not jinx it. Once we are under contract I promise to share all the juicy details. Anyway, the next 24 hours should provide us with a lot of excruciating torture while we wait on the response from the seller. Wish us luck!

Smooth Sailing

We just got news today that the appraisal on our house came in and was all good. I'm sure it appraised higher than the selling price, as I've mentioned before. However, we will never know.

The seller generally only sees the appraisal if it comes in too low and the buyer (their bank) uses that to re-negotiate the price. We ran into that issue when we sold my old condo a few years ago. I think we had PTSD over it (we lost a lot of money on that condo...thanks to the great recession) as we've been really paranoid about it happening again. Not this time however. Smooth sailing. Yea for the buyers, but an eternal lifetime of wondering for us. Well not really, I'm sure once we've moved and start building the new house we will forget all about it. But for dramatics sake I give you...

WE WILL NEVER KNOW!!!

Now the buyers just have to have all of their financing approved by/on Friday. Then after that there really isn't anything aside from an act of Mother Nature that can kill the deal. It's all really exciting. But more exciting is that we are looking at a couple pieces of property with our realtor tomorrow afternoon. Yup, it's all happening!

Frustrating

Shopping for land is frustrating.

Well, at least on a limited budget it is. It seems like every time we find something that we like, there is some major hurdle that kills it (like $50k to run electricity down a road) or someone else has just snatched it up. The latter is the one that has me the most frustrated. I could go on and on about this, but I won't. It is just really frustrating, and at times it seems like we will never find land. I remind myself that something will eventually come along. The problem I have with that is the eventually part. Just how long is eventually?

Getting Closer to Closing

We were away last week for vacation. That is kind of an amazing statement for me to make. Vacations haven't really happened much since having Junior. It was a nice time away, especially now that Junior reliably sleeps all the time. However, Hubs still had to work most of the time. Definitely a perk (lots of vacation whenever you want) and a drawback (having to work on said vacation) of being self employed. So the week away was nice, but it has taken me all week (4 days) to catch up from being gone. Ugh.

At any rate, the vacation worked out to be very well timed. While we were away the house got inspected and appraised. Luckily we were smart enough to go to the extra trouble of making it show ready before we left. Of course a few fiddly things came back on the inspection report, but nothing big and deal-breaker worthy. We've yet to hear anything back from the appraisal, so we are hoping that means all is well. I wouldn't be shocked if our house appraised much higher than the sales price we agreed too. It is a rather nice house and the market is on fire right now. But, that's all part of the real estate guessing game.

Now that we are feeling pretty good and secure about the house sale, we are starting to seriously shop for land. Tomorrow we will be driving around a bit looking at a few different 5 acre parcels that we've been keeping an eye on. Stay tuned!