I didn't get the log cabin I wanted, but I did get another home
 

Some of you may remember I asked about log homes back a few months ago. Because of covid, and lumber prices, and supply, we decided that the log home just wasn't in the cards. So we started looking for a quiet home with acreage, and trees, away from neighbors. That is a pretty tall order in the real estate market right now. I guess God smiled down on us, and a property became available after months of hunting and 3 dead ends on other homes, I think we found the home for us.

When my wife saw the listing she said to me "I think I just found our next home". It's an old farm house as you can see from the pictures, it checks all the boxes we had as far as requirements, and it has red metal roofs. One of my pet peeves is green metal roofs, I hate green roofs, actually I hate green anything, except money, and vegetation.

Maybe you can see it has an oversize 3 car garage, and a huge pole building, plus at least 10 out buildings. Four acres, next to a creek, and a bunch of mature trees. I think we'll be very happy in the new location already dubbed, "Indianhead Acres", after my successful T shirt venture that we pursued from 2005 to 2012.....:D

The road we're located on comes off the main route at the corner of my property and goes about 1/4 mile past the only other house on the road, it then changes to dirt road so no traffic to speak of, and only one neighboring farm house. We're surrounded by farmlands on all sides. No neighbors at all, no one looking at every thing I do, no village watching me, and peace and quiet.

I'll have more garage space than I know what to do with, and scads of storage space, no more renting a storage unit to put our extras in. I'm pretty happy with our new (to us) house. Far from new, it was built in 1900 according to records, and it's of course not perfect, but that's to be expected in a 120 year old home. We just had a property inspection done yesterday and no major problems in the inspection report.

Picture of the house, notice off to the right the garage and pole building.

https://i.ibb.co/Mftwrv6/edf5a8f98c2...1024-h768.webp

Here is a picture of the 6YO pole building with front porch and swing.

https://i.ibb.co/RpQSq5b/edf5a8f98c2...1024-h768.webp

Picture of garage and pole building side by side.

https://i.ibb.co/Czw6cMS/edf5a8f98c2...1024-h768.webp

Picture from the entrance of the horseshoe driveway from the road.

https://i.ibb.co/z8m8JQC/edf5a8f98c2...1024-h768.webp

This picture is taken from the corner of my property, where our road intersects the main highway.

https://i.ibb.co/q9ttNg5/edf5a8f98c2...1024-h768.webp

I know that no one usually lives in their garage, but you could if you wanted to......The 3 car actually has a living space attached to the rear of the building on the left. Unbelievable how much space is under roof on this property. The guy was somewhat of a hoarder, they're having a auction to sell off all the accumulated possessions of the former owner, which passed in December of 2020, his widow survives him.

Pictures of some of the out buildings. in the last picture you can see the living space added on to the back of the 3 car garage and the garage door. I'll probably just use that addition for storage space, eliminating any need for off site storage at all. I still have a 20 foot enclosed truck body at my current house to move there, and a 6X10 enclosed trailer, from the T shirt business, and an 14 foot enclosed van body with power tailgate on a C3500HD chassis. That truck is going to come in really handy for moving all our stuff to the new house.

There's also the original barn that isn't visible in any of the pictures that is supposed to be as old as the house is, if it's not as old as the house, it's fairly close. It's in pretty rough shape though, not sure what I should do with it, tear it down, or fix it?

https://i.ibb.co/vPf8sQr/edf5a8f98c2...1024-h768.webp

https://i.ibb.co/rs4Pwtg/edf5a8f98c2...1024-h768.webp

Now all I have to do is move in......that's going to be an entirely new adventure......;)

Congrats! Looks like a great "car guy" property!!

Love it!

Nice spread - congrats!

Looks like you will have a great time living there.
Bob C.

Awesome place! Congratulations!

You done good! My wife and I are on a similar search for a little acreage off the beaten path that we can build on and maybe turn into a mini farm. Hope your new home turns out to be a real blessing.

Very nice. Would love to get out of the neighborhood, but the wife needs peeps to talk to.

Outstanding purchase. I hope that you and the missus will enjoy many happy years there.

I like it too! Ohio I assume? Get some central air up in there! Probably got a big ole honkin oil boiler in the basement.

Congratulations, looks nice.

I am happy for you. My next residence will either be the nursing home or an urn! I have all I want where I am. A nice home and a shop on 1.5 acres.

What a fantastic find! Congratulations!

Looks great. Lots of space for cars.

Nice Find for sure!!!!!

South Vienna/Catawba Ohio, about 5 minutes north of I 70. It has a heat pump, and A/C, backed up with propane for really cold weather. It's about 15 miles NE from our present home.

All the wiring has been replaced with a recent 200 amp service box. The former owner has spent a lot of money, and time to update the house and make it comfortable.

The former deceased owner had put an oil fired furnace in the pole building, it may have come from the house originally.

I'm pretty excited to get everything moved into the new place, get the shop set up. I had a new 30 X 40 pole building when I lived in PA, that got sold when I got divorced in 2001. I've wanted to get another place ever since I had to sell that one. God finally decided it was in his time, so I have a great wife, and partner that is along for our life journey, and supports me fully in anything I set out to do.

I'm currently going to look for a used skid steer, because I have some other things I want to do to the property. Some of the out buildings have seen better days, and will be taken down if they're too bad to repair.

If you look in the one picture of the back yard, they even saved the old outhouse, :eek: but it's really in rough shape.

Awesome!! Congratulations! I always enjoy looking at the space you guys in the US have, soo much free space. Makes for excellent living!

Awesome!
 

That is the best part to me. My house was built in '42 and after being here for 20 years I'm still doing upgrades.

The new joint looks awesome, congratulations!!!

Sweet!
Gotta suitable mower? ;)

Awesome place. I'd LOVE to have those outbuildings on my property...even ONE of 'em. Love that 'front porch'

50 inch zero turn Ariens, 21 HP Kawasaki powered. I bought that 2 years ago in anticipation of owning a larger piece of property.

There are swings located throughout the property, I guess he must have done his best thinking sitting in a porch swing.

Nice place, all those out building would turn me into a hoarder as well. Nothing like open space to store junkyard gold, have fun filling it up

Sounds awesome. Congratulations!
Anyone have trouble seeing the pics? There’s a blank box where pic should be which is a link to IMGBB.com. I can see older pics but none of the ones in the original post? I tried on IPad and IPhone. Thanks

Love those old farm houses....nice find! Congrats.

Looks terrific! Nice find, congrats!

Eric

Thanks Eric, I think we'll be very happy with the extra space, and peace and quiet that we don't have living in a subdivision in the village we now reside in. Ever since I moved into this home I've sporadically had issues with the village idiots that run this town because of my car hobby, plus there just isn't enough property to have all the vehicles I currently own.

Having had a 1200 square foot shop, on 1 1/2 acres in the past, and having to condense down into a 2 car garage on 1/3 of an acre is tough to do.

My wife loves wildlife and birds, so she'll be happy out in the open spaces. Plus, she has her workspace at home, and having kids outside screaming, and playing isn't conducive to working efficiently for her. We have a lot of young families that have a lot of kids nearby. During nice weather it can be distracting for her to try to talk on the phone for her job.

One other nice thing is we don't have to have our house sold before taking possession of the new place, so it can be a move that isn't going to have to be done in one day. Twice I've had people sitting outside waiting for me to get our stuff out of the house so they can bring their stuff inside, that's not going to happen that way this time.

She is a certified RN medical care manager for a major health insurance company, so she talks to her clients on the phone most of the day. They also do many face to face tele health connects which can be challenging with excessive noise outside. We'll be eliminating that source of aggravation.

We'll have possession on July 14th, so I have time to get all my ducks in a row.

To say I'm envious would be an understatement. Properties like that just don't exist within a reasonable distance of where I and my girlfriend work. Congrats!

After months of looking, I didn't think that they existed either. I would say it was a God thing, and we have prayed for this. My wife saw the listing within an hour after it was posted. Our realtor got us in there at 11:00 AM the next morning. I immediately put in an offer $25,000 over the asking price with another $25,000 reserve to bid. We didn't use all the bidding allowance up, but we wanted it, and got it within 3 days of viewing it. Fortunately the asking price was pretty reasonable for the current market, much better than many of the properties we've looked at. I've already lost 3 properties for different reasons, but not one of them was anywhere near as good as this one is.

Unfortunately in this stupid real estate market you have to be aggressive, or you'll lose your option to come out on the top of the heap. I really hate how this real estate market is right now, but it doesn't show any signs so far of returning to the times when if you paid asking price, you owned it.

I was able to negotiate leaving the two air compressors and lines in both of the garages into the deal also, maybe an extra $1000 in my favor. Not a big deal, but at least I got something.

Congratulations on your new homestead. When you find that special house that checks off all the boxes, you just have to go for it like you did. The current market is just crazy and if you had waited a few days or made a low ball offer, someone else would be moving in. I moved to my present home about 5 years ago and it was on the market 4 hours before I made an offer at asking price. By the end of the day , it had 2 additional offers. We paid too much for it but it had almost everything we were looking for and we had been looking for over 2 years. Looks like you have a great set-up there and plenty of projects to keep you busy and out of trouble. Perfect place for someone who knows how to do things. Enjoy.

The market is nuts, glad you found such a gem!

The 80 acre farm field very close to me sold. Then subdivided, and the smallest lots are 5 acres. One super energetic guy moves onto the land with a RV type camper even before the closing, puts in a driveway to said camper. Flagpole. Chicken coop and necessary fence for said critters. Shipping Container. Shed. No electric, but many nights of the entire neighborhood listening to his harbor freight spec generator screaming its guts out.

POOF! He's gone. Even takes down the flagpole, the mailbox, nothing left but a shed. Word has it that he found he didnt have the money to build, so they took off even more quickly than he arrived. I'm working on finding the real story. I kind of assumed that if you can pay $200K for 5 empty acres, you'd have done your homework on the cost of a house.

Odd.

Have 10 remote acres here in NW Montana. Bad road and higher (snow) elevation dictate summer use. But remaining 10 acre parcels have sold like hotcakes, to out of staters wanting an escape property. So one of the newbies, he did the same thing. Except instead of a camper, was a construction trailer. To live in. Big flagpole. Behind his back we call him The Soverign Nation of Scott. He proudly proclaimed he was going to winter like that, until he built his cabin. He did succeed in mooching off a couple cabin owners to bum couches, I guess a tin box in arctic cold was too much. The dreamers are coming. It is like the dust bowl, or gold rush. Head west with dreams.

And to Sirrotica, good for you chasing and getting your dream. Beautiful place. I have a 110 YO house and I love the old tanks. You confirm the Real Estate scene, it is crazy many places. Here too. House sales are auctions now. You were smart, want it, play hardball. I just finalized my new land in New Mexico, and thinking I am nuts, tackling an infrastructure / dwelling project at this age. Yours is beautiful, enjoy!

Great place. Now you need small kubota, a two post lift, welders, oxy/acetylene and plasma cutter, big air compressor, blasting cabinet, and a couple of big tool chests full of tools. You may have all of this stuff already.

Congrats! You did better than good in this market. Nicely acquired and hope you settle in and enjoy it as you envisioned!

Going to buy a skid steer, and am currently looking for a used one. A two post 11-12,000 lb. asymmetrical lift will be installed shortly after we take possession. After 50 years of building race cars, and twisting wrenches for a living, I have every welder, and cutting outfit, and tool I need. I have my own air compressor currently, and I worked two air compressors that are on site into the deal when I bought the property.

I also have a 2 ton IH wrecker that I need to get completed, and on the road. But now instead of working in a overcrowded 2 car garage, and in my driveway, (wrecker won't fit in a 7 foot door in my current house) I can have everything under cover now.

There is a chicken coop there too, my wife would like to try her hand at raising chickens. They're also good at keeping ticks down, which we have plenty of in this area.

It will be an adventure, once we get into the home, I'm looking forward to it.

I would have been happy with one building, but got an unexpected bonus of two, and many outbuildings beside. This is why I was ready to pay up, and was determined to get the winning bid. Properties like this one don't come up very often, there is a reason we lost out on 3 others we bid on, God had other plans for us. I'm glad we didn't get the others, none would hold a candle to this property.

My real estate saleslady asked me how many garage doors were on the property after we toured it, I told her I had no idea :noidea:, there are a lot of them......;)

I'll count them when we get moved in.......LOL

Beautiful find, almost exactly what we are looking for.. Wonderful lawn, property and buildings. I'd find myself spending way to much time manicuring that lawn instead of working on cars.
That's the kind of spread that the descendants will fight over :)

I have the same issue, but don't have the blank box. Apple Laptop.

But it sounds like a great place. Congrats!

Brad, I'm envious....a garage AND a pole barn. NOT fair....

Now you know why you couldn't get me on the phone, I've been looking for this type of property for the last 6 months. The real estate lady's number is on speed dial......LOL

She's showed me some really less than desirable homes, (not her fault though) that looked fine in pictures, but were crap when you got to see them in person. They're not cheap, even though they're junk, people are paying a lot for crap properties.

We've looked at 1 or 2, and sometimes 3 properties a day for months. We had 3 deals that fell apart after we were the high bidder, but when we had them inspected, there were major problems that the owners wouldn't negotiate on repairs. All 3 properties are still on the market, and haven't closed a deal yet.

This is my fifth house I've owned, I have never seen the market like this, or even close to this level.

Not sure how this is all going to shake out. I'm somewhat surprised to hear the market is like this all over the place, I thought maybe it was more of an issue near the big city tech-hubs. COVID has changed things in what I and many others feel will be in permanent ways about where/when/how people work. All these big tech companies have thousands of feet of expensive office space in the downtown core but once people started working from home and found out they can actually make the business work like that, not only are the workers really liking this but the companies are looking at no longer having to maintain as much expensive office space in the very expensive inner city. I think it's very likely that many of these jobs will become more-or-less WFH full time now with maybe reporting into an office or an office hub somewhere for in-person meetings & such once a week or so.

All of a sudden, all these developers, engineers, researchers, middle and upper managers, etc. etc. that make good money are thinking "why the heck do I want to live in a condo in a crowded, crime infested city when I can live in peace and quiet in the suburbs?"

BAM! Housing prices in outlying areas take off while in-city properties and condos start losing value. Add in the crazy situation with lumber and you're not even going to see new housing taking off to try to meet demand.

Brad - you scored man, congrats again.

My girlfriend and I decided last year that we wanted to make the commitment to live together and started making plans to sell our properties and buy something together. She owns a small inner-city condo in a high rise that she is renting out and lives in a townhouse in a newer development on the North end of Lake Washington that her dad owns. I have a small post-war "box" just outside the city limits (actually it's own little incorporated city). Last year it would have been easy to sell her place but the bottom has suddenly dropped out of that market - no one wants to live in her building any more and the place is emptying out and the units that are going up for sale aren't selling. She gave notice to her tenant back at the beginning of the year that the lease wouldn't be renewed when it comes up in July as she's going to sell the place.

At least I'm lucky in that my property is very desirable and has also shot up in value. the big problem is that the values of the properties where we're looking have just absolutely skyrocketed to levels that are beyond reasonable. If we can't sell her condo for a decent price, we're sunk, even with my place coming in well above where I expected it would at this time last year. We need a 4-bedroom (she has two teens and an elderly father) and lots of room for parking as we have nine vehicles and a boat between the four of us.

We're constrained in where we're looking by her insistence that her son attend a specific high school and her commute into downtown Seattle. Since I work in service and go to where the work is, I don't really care where we live in terms of a commute, so I'm leaving that up to her. We both want privacy and space around us so we're looking at 1/2-1 acre parcels or if smaller, situated such that we have green space or are otherwise not staring at our neighbors when looking out the windows or hanging out in the yard. In the areas that work for us, there just aren't big farmhouse type properties with lots of outbuildings at any kind of price we can afford. A 5 acre undeveloped parcel (if any still exist around here) would sell for more than we could afford. There are properties like that further out, but we just can't live out that far right now. I'm hoping after we retire we can get the hell out of here to somewhere somewhat more affordable. My hope is that our seriously over-inflated property values here will at least stay above other areas that we might want to move to in the long run and allow us to buy something nice to retire in after her kids are gone.

Update on my 5 acre failed neighbor - got the back story. First quote by the builder for the house he wanted at the time of land purchase (a few months ago) $360K. Builder updated the price last week due to current lumber prices, $485K. A For Sale sign went up on the lot yesterday at 8am. PENDING by noon.

Brad, your hard work and diligence paid off handsomely. Its all part of the master plan.

Dave, that's why I abandoned the plan for the log home. Vacant property is also subject to this crazy price escalation, and then the price of lumber and timber went crazy too. Builders are booked up through the summer already, and people that can assemble a log home are highly specialized, and I would have been well into next year (2022) before I could even book someone. In the mean time who knows what the prices on materials and labor are going to be in a year. I doubt that I could have come in under $500,000 dollars, and I just don't have that kind of money lying around.

A few years ago I could have probably bought land, and had a log home, and out building built for around $300,000, but not anymore.

You're correct, it's part of the master plan.

I've been reading about the lumber situation and one thing that surprised me is that the price of raw logs is actually really low and there's a glut of them in some areas. Lumber is expensive because the demand is way up and the mills can't significantly increase their output, but there are plenty of logs laying around waiting to be turned into lumber. The mills are the bottleneck.

That makes me wonder if maybe the price of a log home wouldn't have risen as much as a traditional framed house?

The housing market around here had been on fire for several years...pre covid. The only way to buy a house is to the see the ad right when it comes out and bid above asking price with no contingencies.

Eric

Eric, and Mike are roughly a half hour from me, so we're roughly in the same market. Dave (Mr Anonymous) probably within an hour of me.

This market is unbelievably rough and tumble, my attorney told me that Springfield OH/Clark county, is third in the country of property sales per capita this year.

I looked at two houses the day we put the contract on this house, the other house was on a crawl space and had 2 additions that I could tell added on to the original home. The floors were all twisted and slanted badly, so there was something going on under the house...:noidea: But I looked on the realtor dot com site, and it sold in about 4 days.

My realtor told me some of the buyers are waving property inspections just because they're desperate to buy something. That could cost you a lot of money in the long run, but people are pretty desperate to buy homes, and no one is building new homes around here on any scale to supply the demand right now. There are some new homes starting, but not enough.

The one house I lost because of structural problems had no pole barn, and I got an estimate for the pole barn. The salesman said that unless he had a deposit within a week he couldn't guarantee a quote on materials, that's how fast lumber is rising in price.

I heart felt "congratulations!!" is sent your way.

In my opinion you're a lucky https://media1.tenor.com/images/474e...65f2/tenor.gif

lol

Update!!!
 

We closed 5 days after the estate auction on June 17th, so the closing was on June 21st. The family of the widow were slow to get started on cleaning out the hoard. It was worse than anyone estimated it was. I originally estimated it would be 5, 40 cubic yard dumpsters or 200 cubic yards, I was way short with my estimate..... There have been 13, 40 cubic yard dumpsters hauled off the property, :eek: and we finally got the keys yesterday afternoon after an inspection.

There was an estate auction which removed most all of the items that had value after a week of hauling out the items purchased at auction the fun started. They have had dumpsters delivered every couple of days since then to get rid of mostly worthless items (hoard), 13 dumpsters @ 40 cubic yards per dumpster comes to 520 cubic yards of trash. Those dumpsters cost $425 per load, glad I wasn't paying for them!!!

So now I get to start on all the things that a 120 year old farmhouse needs to be comfortable and current. Every yard of carpet vinyl and laminate floor in the house are in need of replacement and updating. Lath plaster has cracks in it and I've already had the sagging floor reinforced and floor jacks and I beam added to level the floor. Septic tank have been pumped and inspected. We'll keep plugging away till we get it the way we want it, then we'll move in. We're thinking maybe late September, fingers crossed.

I'm going to take some pictures of the now empty garages to have a record of what they look like empty, before I start moving my stuff in. I'll try to post them later.

This is a big undertaking at my age, but I'll get through it......;)

The one thing that struck me the most about this thread is when you mentioned the outhouse. My mind immediately went to wondering if you had plans to dig it out? I would in a heartbeat! Never know what treasures are there waiting to be found!