Day 7
In between offer and counteroffer, we played the waiting game. That being said, we definitely kept ourselves busy. Besides the aforementioned cleaning and clearing, we did our homework. Lots of it. If we were to acquire the property, we knew there would be plenty of work to upgrade the house and restore the land. We were able to take a few extra trips to the house to take a closer look as we continued to negotiate with the owner. On these visits, the owner was always pleasant and more than happy to provide information about the house. He loved to share stories about any and all facets of his life. Being a master electrician, he was quite handy and enjoyed the handiwork he had personally done to improve the house. Considering I can barely hold a hammer, I'm always impressed by learning about the process of fixing and improving. We appreciated hearing as much as we could about the house and land, especially if we were fortunate enough to one day call it our own.
Learning about the interior was fine and dandy, but the massive backyard was what I focused my homework on. The owner mentioned that sandhill cranes often visited the windows of the back of the house and that his kids once came back from a round of exploring with a large snapping turtle. It was nice to hear that his children spent a lot of time exploring the land because that was one opportunity we hoped we could provide for our own. However, now that those kids had long since moved away, the land had pretty much been left alone. It was designated as a wetland and was not able to be built on and developed under the current law. One positive for this land was that it was considered a dry marsh, making it able to be more easily explored. One negative is that when the land was prepared for agricultural through the installation of ditches, the invasive species took advantage of this “disturbance” and essentially took over. Being free to dominate the landscape over a longer period of time would make any future restoration attempts that much more challenging.
