Review of old farm houses for sale::How Much Is an Antique Cream Separator Worth
Review of old farm houses for sale::How Much Is an Antique Cream Separator Worth
In 1993, I became divorced and with my eight-year-old son, I began looking for a house to purchase. The house we rented for the previous 14 years sold and we had to move. For 20 years, I wanted to buy a home, but my son's father did not want the responsibility of home ownership. Because I did not make very much money at the time, I qualified for a government-housing loan for low income and first time homeowners. Thus began the process of looking for a house to buy. This was to be one of the hardest experiences of my life. I was not only newly divorced and a single parent, but I had no experience what-so-ever with buying a home. Because the government loan had very specific guidelines, and I had very specific needs in mind, finding the right place that satisfied both turned out to be a challenge. Every place we looked at in the county we were searching, was either too large for the guidelines, too small for the price, in the wrong setting, or just plane ugly. Time was running out and I was in danger of loosing the loan if I could not find something soon. Then we came upon this house. It sat on almost three acres, enough room for the dog kennel and us, not too big, the right price, and the house was only eight years old. I went for it. However, like in every home buyers' nightmare, they found a lean on the property the night before closing that stopped the sale cold. This was our last chance. My time was running out on the loan. Then my realtor, bless his heart, worked with the bank and a government representative to put the money in escarole. The bank foreclosed on the property, and put it up for auction. I over bid the bank by $100.00 dollars, and the loan went through. On February 2, 1993, I was the new owner of the property. I could hardly believe it. I actually did it on my own! Well, as in every new home purchase, there is a lot to do. Holes in the walls needed filling and painting, and all five rooms needed a good cleaning. Now the work began. With help from friends, we painted, scrubbed, fixed, and moved in. My life long dream of owning my own home was a reality. For three months, things were fine. I was beginning to get things organized. Neighbors began to introduce themselves, and my son was exploring the property, finding new places every day. Then reality set in. That year we had a 2 1/2 inch blizzard in March, followed by ten days of heavy rain. I noticed that much of the property was very moist, to say the least, and under the 100-year-old Sugar Maple, 10 inches of water filled the depression. Mosquitoes were not only monsters, but came in by the thousands. Well, after all, the land did border a stream in the back. I just did not know how much water flowed through the yard to that stream. However, I was about to find out. After the rain finally stopped and the vegetation began to grow, I noticed how wet the back was becoming. The rest of spring that year was very dry and I really did not have any idea how wet the land was until in early May. I went down in the basement and discovered four inches of water covering the concrete floor. It had happened over night because that water was not there the night before when I put laundry in the washer. I then went out the back door to stare to an acre-size lake filling the middle part of the property. Oh boy! Now what was I to do? Obviously, the water had to go from the basement, but how to do that was going to be a major problem. I called the police department, who directed me to call the fire department, who directed me to call the town government, who finally directed me to call the town building inspector. He came out to asses the problem. He told me I had to dig another ditch around the house and put more drainage piping around the foundation to direct the water away from the house. Well, that was not going to do anything to alleviate the lake in the back. He came several times over the next two weeks and saw the water level slowly rise. It was not going to go away by itself. That was when I had to make a major decision. I had to drain the property somehow. The building inspector declared a sight of emergency because the water was threatening to flood the neighbor's septic system and leach field. If that happened, sewage would drain in to the wet land, and I would be responsible for cleanup because the water came from my property. (Oh boy!) At this time, I had qualified for another government loan for very low income to put a furnace in the basement. This house, like some others built at the same time, was all electric, and my first electric bill for the first two weeks in February was over three hundred dollars. I was in the middle of qualifying for the loan to put in a furnace, when I requested an increase for money to drain the property. Because it was an emergency situation, the loan with the increase in funds came through. I then hired a local construction business to bring in their heavy equipment to drain the property. I asked him to dig three huge trenches to drain the water out to the back wet lands. The property had been a pasture for dairy cows and was part of a huge farm. For three generations, cows grazed on this part of the farm, and kept the grasses down to allow the water to drain. Each summer, the farmer hired some high school kids to clean out two small ditches to keep the water flowing. There is a pond in the back acre that watered the cattle all summer. That is now grown in with water-loving grasses, but still floods after every rain. The grass grows tall, thick, and very fast. One of the first things I needed to do was to have a concrete pad put down for the dog kennel, since the huskies stayed outside all year. I walked the contractor through the yard to where I wanted the pad, and made sure to point out how moist the ground was. I told him that if he thought it was going to be too wet for the heavy equipment, I showed him another location closer to the house that was more firm where he could but it instead. He told me it would be no problem. And, so work began. They carried the concrete to the back with a bucket loader and dumped it in to place. The pad went in and so did the bucket loader. It sunk four feet in to the soft soil and he had to bring in his bulldozer to pull it out. He was not a happy camper and lost money because it tied up two of his huge machines for several weeks. I did not own a camera when I first moved in and could not take a pictorial record of the events unfolding. The trenches were huge. The excavator that dug them was half as long as the house, my five-room, one-story ranch, and almost as tall. The top of one of the treads stood over 5 feet from the ground. It was huge. The first thing he did was to drain the lake. The water used a natural spill area that led in to the wet land, and this is where he began the first trench. He began the first drainage trench at the point where the water drained in to the stream through the trees, and kept opening up the land until he came to the point I thought the drainage pipes were located; four, 4" pipes that channeled the water from around the foundation of the house. I watched as the last scoop dug into the land, and the water rush out. The flow of the backed-up water was so strong and so fast that it actually swept the 2-ton excavator back in to the trees from where it started. The driver had to pull himself up out of the flow using both the scoop on one end and the bucket on the other. I really did not think he was going to make it. But he did, and when he came out of the cab, he said he had never seen so much power from so small of an area when he opened up that last bit. It seemed that the water was backing up for the entire 8 years the house sat on the property. I did some research on the sale and building of the three houses put on this section of land, and found out that the developer removed all the top soil, something that is no longer allowed by state law, and had collapsed the underground water drainage systems by bringing in tons of gravel to replace the tops soil. The water began filling the property as soon as the underground drainage collapsed. The part of the farm that was once the pasture for the dairy cows, sits in a spoon where all the land beside it is higher on three sides. All the ground water coming from the surrounding hills passes directly under this part of the land. That is why this was such a good pasture because the grass grew so much faster than the sections used for growing feed for the cattle. When the excavator opened up the ground, I could see the soil structure of the land down six feet from the surface. It seems that this land consists of two feet of gravel lying on top of four feet of thick heavy clay. This is an ideal situation for ground water to stay just below the surface and flow through the gravel to the stream out back. It is a self-watering system that keeps all the vegetation thick and lush all summer long. When many of the lawns in the surrounding homes dry because of the lack of rain, ours is lush and thick. We are the only ones mowing when all the surrounding lawns are brown in mid summer. The trenches remained open for two months to allow all the backed-up water to drain. Some of the neighbor kids, including my son, made use of them by playing army war fare. At least they were getting better exercises then because they were actually doing the moving and not just looking at a screen and pushing buttons on a controller. The only problem was, they were knocking much of the soil back in to the flow. I had to put a stop to it. When I finally closed on the loan, I had two of the trenches filled in and the top of the soil leveled and planted. I did, however, leave one of the trenches, the one where the pipes open from around the house spilled into, to make sure that I had fixed the drainage. This turned out to be both a great idea and a nightmare. The old grass soon began growing and within a month filled the sides and bottom of the opened area. This blocked the water flow and it began backing up in to the basement again. For the next couple of years, I had to go into the bottom and dig out the grass, which was no easy feat, twice each summer to reopen the flow. The opening was over 300 feet long and the roots of the grass went into the ground for 6 inches. They were deep and tough, and it was back breaking work. Then in 2005, I decided to kill off the grasses at the top of the opening and plant perennials to have a beautifully landscaped stream running down the right side of the property. What a challenge. It worked and with much work, that is still going on today, I have a beautiful stream flowing surrounded by flowers, shrubs and ornamental grasses. This was only one of the problems with water in the basement. Over the next 15 years, we ran into several other problems, stories of which I will leave for another time. Even though I had major problems with the property shortly after moving in, I am in love with this place and over the years, have developed it into a paradise we enjoy all year long. |
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