Improvements

I’ve written so little this year, even with plenty of Covid imposed time on my hands. But in the last few months so much has happened that I want to record. As our fourth winter here was winding down and our plans to move to California for two years were taking shape, we came to the decision that it was time to sell Sunnyhill. When we come back from California we’ll be 75 (or nearly that in Jay’s case) and the prospect of winter here at 75 is not as appealing as the prospect of winter in a snug little house in Cooperstown. We considered renting the house out while we’re away, or even keeping it vacant just for visits, but in the end, the best path seemed to be selling it now if we could find a buyer. So we listed it with Nancy. She had been the seller’s agent when we bought it, and we’ve stayed in contact with her and become fond of her. She’s helped us find tenants, and she handled Jay’s purchase of #6 Walnut in Cooperstown, even though we had made a basic agreement with the seller on our own the day we saw it. She listed Sunnyhill for us in mid-March, and brought us an all cash offer, just under our asking price, in mid-April. Historically, property around here moves slowly and barely appreciates, but Covid changed the rural market greatly to our benefit. So while we had contingency plans if Sunnyhill hadn’t sold before we wanted to move, we ended up needing to make plans for getting ready to go sooner.

We’ll be moving into the house in Pleasant Hill that Jay inherited from his father 33 years ago. When a tenant moved out this winter, Jay’s property manager found a new tenant willing to take a six month lease, understanding that we were planning to move back in. The lease isn’t up until July 31, but the sale of Sunnyhill closes June 11. Homeless for seven weeks, with a cat and a dog. We considered various options, but renting with animals isn’t easy. So Jay scoured the web and found a good motorhome for sale in Eureka. He flew out on a Friday, drove it to Pleasant Hill on Saturday, and flew home on Sunday. His tenant agreed to swap us the space to park it next to the house in exchange for a reduction in rent and our taking over the utilities. It’s a win for all of us, since our two year clock starts as soon as we put the utilities in Jay’s name and have our mail delivered there. The two year stay in Pleasant Hill allows Jay to sell it as his principal residence, not as an investment property, and it makes a big enough difference in taxes to warrant the move. We have other important reasons to want to be there – time to be close to the youngest three grandkids while they’ll still want to spend time with us, time with family and friends, and ending the chapter of owning that house. For Jay, there is also the prospect of a couple of years of working, and ending his career, which had been cut short by the car accident, on his own terms.

We were a little stunned by the speed of the sale and the speed of the closing – fewer than two months is unusual here, where closings are conducted by lawyers and where title companies are notoriously slow. But with a cash buyer and a pretty recent abstract of title, the sale can move quickly. The buyer is also buying much of our furniture and a basic complement of kitchen necessities – most of which were here when we bought the place fully furnished. It makes for a lot fewer decisions about what to do with our stuff. Our tenant in Cooperstown agreed to let us store things in the basement, and when it turned out we couldn’t get some things down the basement stairs, he gave us space in the garage too. I hired Mike’s girlfriend, Laura, who is a whirling dervish, to pack the things we were storing there, and she got it done in a day. Mike and his friend Mark did the moving. Sunnyhill is a little bare with all the art work gone, and a folding table in place of the Stickley dining set. The freezer is gone, and so is my loom. Our bedroom furniture is gone and we’re sleeping on a chest bed we had bought for one of the apartments in Laurens that the tenant didn’t want.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been gradually packing up the house, trying (mostly successfully) to leave out the things we’ll need until the move. So there are boxes of office supplies and archival records, boxes of things we store in the bathroom but nearly never use, boxes of pantry items we can do without for a few weeks, and boxes of less often used kitchen items. But my little work pales beside the work that Jay set for himself. He expected that he and Mike would have the whole summer to finish the barn floor, pack the tools and stuff in the garage, finish some cosmetic work – mostly painting, finish the refresh of gravel on the road and level the parking pad in front of the barn, sell the Honda CRV and sell the tractor. But as of Saturday afternoon, it’s nearly all done. Nancy (our realtor) bought the CRV for her daughter – we had bought it because we needed a four wheel drive car for winters on the hill. Mike’s friend Mark has put a down payment of the tractor and will pay it of and take it as soon as Jay’s work is done. There’s still some work to do in the garage, and a couple of hours of cutting pavers for the edges of the barn floor, but so much is done.

The barn is transformed – more so than the house. The house now has patios front and back and new back stairs from the bedroom and dining room. The garage has a new floor of pavers. We added the wonderful on-demand water heater and my beloved pellet stove, but the house really didn’t need much. The barn, on the other hand, was a nearly blank slate, partly occupied by the late owner’s old horse, Zen, when we moved here. After Zen moved out, with our erstwhile caretaker, Dan, we enclosed the small front section, which was the original open barn, and added garage doors to make an additional two car garage. We replaced the big, unwieldy front barn door with a massive garage door. The first two winters that damn old door froze shut, and I was glad to see the last of it. Miserable trying to open that thing to get Charlie into the barn for a warmish place to pee in the winter. Then the Otesaga hotel, where Mike works, was replacing windows, so Mike brought us twenty windows for the barn, which just transformed it. And now the barn has a beautiful floor of concrete pavers. The barn has gone from being unappealing storage to being a place of possibility – a workshop, a studio, whatever. With the north facing doors open (they’re still barn doors) the view out over the pond is one of the prettiest views on the property. And the breeze in there is delicious with all those big doors open. I have no idea what we’d do with the space if we were still living here, but it’s a lot of usable space now. I hope the new owners will find good uses for it. I have to remember to warn them that the barn swallows will cover everything with poop all through the summer.

I think about the new owners, although we know little about them and have only met the husband, who seemed very nice. This will be a summer home for them, at least initially. They’re young, and have a new baby. What a wonderful place this will be for a kid to spend summers. I hope they will get as much pleasure as I have gotten watching the stars and moon, seeing the sun rise and set, seeing the year’s goslings grow up. Friends ask me if I won’t miss the place, and of course I will. But mostly, I think about how incredibly lucky we’ve been to be here for over three and a half years. I never imagined I would own such a place after we sold the family property in Amenia. The two years in California will go by quickly, and then there will be the project of remodeling the house in Cooperstown and settling in next door to Pete and Vi. All of that future will be different for me than it would have been had we not lived here. I don’t think I’ll lose the sense of how big and busy the natural world is, of what a small, but dangerous, part humans play in the life of the planet, let alone the life of the bit of the universe we can see.

It’s a good feeling to know that we are leaving the place improved. It has certainly improved us.