Starting an Orchard

Part of the dream of homesteading is being self-sufficient as possible, right?  And part of having a blank slate of acreage is to create the vision, right?

However, the reality that comes along with digging six 3-foot holes in shale to plant an orchard is quite tiring and painful.  This is how we spent a handful of hours one spring afternoon -- digging holes, slamming the shale bar, and remarking at how beautiful that day was.

(The wheelbarrow is so old but the trustiest one we have.  Even the wheel is metal.)

Placement for these trees was also something important.  We had to take into consideration the slope of our back acres, where the water flows, and wind direction.

We got three kinds of apple trees, one apricot, one plum, and one pear.  We also got semi-dwarf trees so that we will be able to manage fruit collection (one day) and get fruit a bit earlier than with a traditional root stock.  I like to call it the future orchard, but I've been criticized that six trees don't make an orchard.  

Meh, I don't care.  If one day I get fruit from these babies, I will continue to call it an orchard.  If I end up killing all six trees, then we will pretend this never happened.

(There really is nothing quite like a flowering fruit tree.  So pretty!)

The Search for a Property (Part III)

When we arrived at our closing, after it being postponed three times, we were bursting with happiness.  We got there early because we stopped over at the property to quickly do a walk through and leave one of our cars there -- our timeline was so incredibly tight that we had to start moving in immediately!

We finally properly met the sellers after dealing with them through lawyers for months.  They are an older couple in their seventies.  The husband grew up in the house and the couple still lives next door.  So, essentially we met the sellers and our new neighbors in one fell swoop.

The closing went smoothly -- the closer arrived, gave us a mound of paperwork to sign, our lawyer (a family friend) made sure everything was good, and we walked out of there with a collection of keys and a garage door opener.

Over the next 24 hours we made dozens of trips between the homestead and the condo (where we were temporarily living).  It was also raining.  We rented a big uHaul truck and packed it to the hilt, after clearing out the condo and also getting a lot of stuff from my mom's house.

It was a day to remember.  I'm pretty sure Mike hit a couple of things with the huge uHaul truck.  We moved all of our belongings by ourselves in the rain on a weekday (having to work the day before and the day after moving), and we nearly got into a fistfight over getting the couch in the front door.  It's the only new piece of furniture we own, and it's awful to move.

Four days after moving, we celebrated our first wedding anniversary in our new home.  Cheers to us!

The Search for a Property (Part II)

Truth be told, my father-in-law first showed us the property listing at least six months before we went to see it.  I vividly remember saying something to him like "what do you think we're rich?  We can't afford that!"  But the price of the property dropped dramatically in that six month time period.  So, one chilly Sunday morning we found ourselves looking at two houses on five acres with a huge garage and partially collapsed tractor shed.  The place wasn't exactly a complete mess (in our opinion), but it certainly needed TLC.  One saving grace of the situation is that both houses had been rented to tenants for a few years -- that kept all the systems running in the houses and people inside to notice when something was leaking/broken.  After looking at a lot of vacant and foreclosed houses in our property search, we learned that an occupied house is the safest house.  That Sunday morning, we fell in love with the place in all its fixer-upper glory and endless possibilities for the land.

After talking over the property with our parents and crunching some numbers, we drove out to the realtor's office after work the following week, put in an offer, and within thirty minutes we settled on a price with the seller.  Wow, that's was easy! we thought.

Then the real work started.

First off, we scheduled the home inspection.  For reasons mentioned in my previous post, we love our home inspector because he really protected us from buying a damaged house.  Also, he's a fun guy and knows that we are a little nutty.  There was nothing that turned up in the home inspection that was extremely detrimental, but there was a list of repairs we would need to take care of, including the septic system.

The next step was getting a whole bunch of paperwork in order to obtain a mortgage for the property.  This entire process took us five months.  Seriously.  I had bought a condo back in 2007 and because of the housing and mortgage market crash, buying a property had become much more difficult.  The mortgage company wanted everything they could get aside from a DNA test.  And we had a mortgage broker who was a complete idiot, lost paperwork we sent him, and pushed our closing date three or four times.

It was also a particularly a tough deal because we did a 203k FHA building loan rolled into our mortgage to account for some necessary repairs, like a new septic system.  Not only did the building loan make the mortgage process more complicated, it also raised our closing costs considerably.  The other really nerve-wracking aspect of doing a 203k FHA loan is that the property had to appraise for both our purchase price and the building loan.  It was a nail-biting, phone screaming, micromanaging kind of situation.  I spent countless hours on the phone with the mortgage broker, the bank, our lawyer, and the realtor.  And then I had to spend a lot more hours on the phone with family members to talk us off the ledge.

Let me quickly break down why this deal was so tricky:

1.) Some things took a long time because the sellers are in their 70s, have no cell phone, don't "do" email, and take long trips.  A lot of times it was difficult for the realtor or their lawyer to reach them.

2.) There was a partially collapsed tractor shed on the property.  You can't have partially collapsed structures around with an FHA loan, but we expressed that we wished there was a repaired tractor shed.  So, we were able to negotiate that the sellers (with some of our labor) demolish the tractor shed and then give us the insurance claim check at closing.

3.) The cost of a new septic system for this size property was so exorbitant that we wouldn't progress with the deal unless there was an agreement met for the sellers to contribute money to the new system.  The lawyers handled it and made it work and now I know more about septic systems than I ever thought was possible.

But as I said before, five and a half months after settling on a price, we got to show up to the closing.