The curio cabinet

I spotted this glass case curio cabinet on the street last week. It was being thrown out and I nabbed it. I think it would look great painted, a perfect place to store fabric and supplies in the new sewing room in Connecticut. Stay tuned for the progress!

Winter Freeze

Well, it's now January and I had no offers on the house. Super depressing but I sort of saw it coming. With the holidays there was absulutely no action at the end of the year. On the suggestion of my broker Lillian, I've decided to put the sale on hold, a freeze if you will. That way in a couple of months, say end of February or beginning of March I can put it back on the market as a 'new' listing. I'm hoping that by then people will want to start thinking about a second home so that they can be in by Memorial Day. That's the hope anyway. I'm very stressed out that if nothing happens by mid April then drastic measures might be in order, like say, selling Dogwood. But let's see how things shake out. It's going to be a VERY long winter waiting this thing out...

How low can you go?

I got the first offer yet for the house in Sag Harbor over the weekend. It was low. VERY low. I currently have the place priced at $2.399M, lowered from the initial price of $2.795M at the outset. That's $400K lower.

A couple from the city has come to see the house THREE TIMES. The first time was at an open house. They stayed for 40 minutes. They then went to see the house for sale next door, Sue's house, and stayed for maybe 5 minutes. No surprise, it's an ugly house, a split ranch that has no 'Sag Harbor charm'. "Can we go back and look at the other house?" they said. So back they went for an additional 20 minutes to wander around. A week and a half later they made another appointment to see it on Black Friday. Again, they wandered about for quite a while. Lillian, my broker, said "I'm positive we will get a bid, a fair one". So the next morning we get the bid: just $2M. And here's the kicker, the wife is a broker working on her own behalf. I have to pay her two and half percent of the commission as well! So add ANOTHER $50K to the price. Not good. I thought about it all day and discussed with Scott. I decided not to counter. I wasn't going to honor such a comically low bid. FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS LESS? No way. Not gonna happen. If they really like the house then they can put a real offer on the table for me to react to. I heard back that they were "disappointed there wasn't a counter". Whatever. Come back when you really want to negotiate. I've put it out of my mind after I finish this post. I'm gonna assume it's over. Finis. Bye, Felicia.

Stumped

There was an annoying tree stump in the backyard that was really upsetting my view of the backyard. It wasn't a large stump but I consider them so white trashy looking. It had to go. So I brought my table saw from Sag Harbor last week to get the job done. You make sever cuts into the top of the stump and more perpendicular to those. This makes it easier to cut it down in layers with the reciprocating saw. It's not as easy as you'd think. Holding both saws is hard on the arms. It took several layers of cutting to get it down to (almost) ground level. But it was worth it. It now blends into the rock that it was near and will continue to detiriorate with age. Here are two BEFORE & AFTER shots of it.

Joist in time

One of the things (among many) was some problems in the basement crawlspace. There were several rotted wooden joists that had become damaged over the years from a low window moisture problem. There was also an apparent leak in a waste pipe. Once my contractor Richard was able to get in there and asses what was going on he found that the pipe was ok but that the joists really did need to be replaced. It wasn't cheap ($2600) but it was far cheaper than the credit I got from negotiating with the sellers after the house's inspection. They gave me a $5000 credit, so at least on this one I came out ahead. Here are pics of the new joists in place:

'Clark Park'

We worked like demons in the yard the last few days. Well, mostly it was Scott, but I certainly did my part. He really had a vision for clearing even more brush from the periphery of the property off to the left near the street and going back a ways. He also wanted to shear the huge rhododendron bushes up along their trunks a bit, to get the lower limbs up off the ground. His hope is that more grass and pachysandra will fill in the cleared ground. He loved his handywork, he said 'it looks like a park!'. And I called it "Clark Park" after his Jack Russell, Clark. I lost track of all the wheelbarrow loads of yard debris that I hauled to the back of the property. Thank God for that ravine, I don't know how we'd get rid of all that stuff if we didn't have a place to dump it.

Bed & a backup

Since we've started camping out here at the new house we've been sleeping on air mattresses borrowed from my broker in the Hamptons, Lillian. They were fine for the first few weeks, a little squishy to sleep on but 'beggars can't be choosers', right? But I ended up wanting to make things a little more livable, so I bought a new mattress for us to sleep on. The primary bedroom is quite sizable, I decided to splurge on a king sized one to give us more room at night. The size is really conducive for two men and a little dog who insists on sleeping with his dad! I'm still testing out the firmness. I went with FIRM because my mattress in Sag was feeling a little soft and I've been suffering from backaches (or is it just old age??) A little more support was called for...but I'm still waking up with pain, ugh. So the next step is to try a mattress cover with padding. It could be the softness I need with the support underneath. I still have a few more weeks before I'm committed to this mattress so stay tuned.

This past weekend one of my 'must' tasks was to learn how to turn on and operate the electrical generator. We hear that from time to time the power goes out in this neighborhood and having this system will allow us to weather the storm so to speak. It would keep the fridge, furnace, internet going for about 12 hours on a small amount of gas. I looked up how-to videos for the make and model the previous owners left us and I was able to start it up. It's relatively easy thank God. Now I'm sorta prepared for the first outage *fingers crossed*.