Tony got home from a two-day work trip and did something that sounds unscientific but is actually the gold standard of forensic odor analysis: he walked into the farmhouse and took a deep breath. Two days away is long enough to reset a nose, and a reset nose cannot be argued with. It is the only honest witness a 100-year-old house has.
The verdict: the distinctive odor is gone. Ripping out the carpet, and the cleaning that followed, was the right call. We’d like to thank the carpet for its service and also never speak of it again.
We’re about two weeks’ worth of overnights into life on Hudson Road, fully moved in, and the chaos is mostly managed. Emphasis on mostly. “Managed” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, and it has not asked for a raise.
What do we even call this place?
So far the house has had plumbing work and electrical work, and we’ve learned it will need HVAC work too. Plumbing and electrical have run about $2,500 so far. HVAC is still a mystery novel, and we’re a little bit scared to find out who did it.
All of which has made naming the place a real debate. Friends have been generous with suggestions: “the farmhouse,” “the money pit,” and “the fire hazard.” That last one came about while Tony was telling friends about the sparks in the drain pipe. Sparks and drain pipes are two things that probably shouldn’t meet without a chaperone. We haven’t picked a name. In fairness, the house hasn’t asked for one. It has only asked for invoices.
The part where all four of us overthought a trench
Now the development phase begins. Two new lots will need water and electric service, which means a trench, which means a question: where does it go?
We had opinions. We had a lot of opinions. We debated expected challenges. We debated what it might cost. We debated rocks, specifically rocks we had not seen, might not exist, and had already decided to be mad at. All four of us overthought it, which in this group is saying something, because two of us do it professionally.
Then the surveyor, a man with a license, a tripod, and exactly the amount of common sense the four of us had failed to produce, set us straight. Stop focusing on the paper, he said, and get the trenching company to tell you the best place to dig. We own all of it now, so we can dig wherever makes sense. Once the trench is in the ground, he’ll make the paper match.
All four of us face-palmed. Simultaneously. If anyone had been filming, it would have looked like a very small, very sad stadium wave. Cart, meet horse. We had been drawing lines for a trench nobody had dug yet, when the smarter order was to dig first and draw second.
Why the paper can wait (the plain-English version)
The survey that carves our 30 acres into three lots is the document that will go on record. Whatever trenches get dug to carry water and electric across the land will need to be recorded on that survey as easements. An easement is a recorded right for one piece of land to carry something (here, a water line or a power line) across another. Since we own the whole property right now, the order is flexible: dig where it works, then have the surveyor record it.
The Dam
Of course, “dig wherever you want” comes with a catch, and it’s about 50 feet long. We call it “the dam.” It’s a stretch of our driveway where one side is a neighbor’s pond, and that driveway is our only way to the outside world. No pressure.
Any trench near it has to be planned so we don’t end up helping the pond take out the driveway. Waking up to find we’d accidentally turned our property into an island is not on the list of rural experiences we’re hoping for. So we’re getting multiple opinions. One trenching company came out this week, another is coming this weekend, and we’re collecting bids and perspectives like they’re baseball cards. An engineer is looking at the dam too. We’ve also opened diplomatic relations with the neighbor, because it’s the neighbor’s pond and our driveway, and talking first seems better than a surprise.
Lots of work is still going on, on the house and on the ground. We’ll report back, assuming the driveway is still there.
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