quote:

Originally posted by Steve Miller:
This rural living thing is starting to sound complicated. So far we've learned:

The combined electric bill is about $280 winter and summer. Higher than I expected. No gas bill. The house is served by cable and has good cell reception.

The leach field was cleaned out this year (roots) but no info on how often that has to be done. The current owners have the heatpump serviced once a year for about $100. Everyone I talked to said that geothermal is the hot ticket in that climate and they systems are very reliable.

The biggest question is how remote it is and the size of the yard. Kim's video shows more of the yard and there is a lot more landscaping that it shows in the pictures. I'm not going to want to keep all that up and suspect a service will be very expensive. I suppose I could let some of it go back to nature.

I'm not keen on an early storm snowing us in and relying on a generator that isn't even in place yet. I think the kids would keep an eye on the place for us but it's about 30 minutes from where they are and they have a lot to do as it is.

So we're vacillating. It's a beautiful house but may have too many drawbacks for us.

The learning curve is there, but it is a gentle slope. If you like puttering, it's a good fit. If you don't, go with a condo.

quote:

Originally posted by Steve Miller:
Here is a video of Dean Road that my daughter took today. She says the road gets much better as you head north from the house.

(She also swears at about 1:28)

Dean Road

Tried logging in with a gmail account I never use. Still comes up as private and I can't watch it.

Try this link:

https://youtu.be/imQBxpD8-ac

Same message: "Video unavailable. This video is private."

Once more with feeling. This one works even when I am not signed in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ba5U3ta89gc

That link works!

So, yeah.... that bridge and narrow portion of the road... but I agree with your daughter (in-law? my memory..) that it is really lovely!

Pretty much what I expected! And I still want to move to Dean Road...

As far as gardens are concerned, as someone said, if you want to spend the time on the gardens, that's great. If you don't, you can let everything revert to woodlands. We didn't have time to garden much at a vacation home, so we had zero, zilch, nada in the way of landscaping.

The surrounding area was so beautiful we didn't feel that we needed it. Plus the deer viewed any landscaping we put in as their personal salad bar. You just have to be selective about what you plant.

Daughter. The guy she's yelling at is Jeffrey - my Son in Law.

I like how you can hear the van downshift to climb that hill. Must be quite a hill - the van is a fairly new one and has a 6 cyl. in it.

I remember Jodi saying that her house in Le Grand had a wall furnace in the basement. It may have been there to warm the basement so you could do the laundry, but I remember thinking it would be clever to put one of those in a basement to keep the pipes from freezing in the event of a power failure. Most of them don't require power to operate and they're inexpensive. I'm not sure how you would vent one but there must be a way.

In this case it would have to be a propane unit - not impossible. My question then, is whether or not keeping the basement at say 50 degrees would be warm enough to keep pipes from freezing on the ground floor? If there was a vent cut in the floor and the basement door left open?

The crawl in our former vacation home usually stayed around 45 to 50 degrees during a typical winter, but I'm pretty sure the house proper, despite the fact that it was very well insulated, would have dropped below that given a long enough power outage or failure of the boiler. How far it might have dropped, I don't know.

But that's a crawl. A basement, being deeper, might actually stay warmer because it's below the frost line in the soil. Here in Chicago, I think the frost line is about 40", so any footings have to be deeper than that. I'm thinking Cleveland is similar.

Whether pipes will freeze depends on the location of the pipes (exterior or interior walls) and how well the house is insulated.

Trying to build something automatic that kicks in gets expensive, and it's hard to cover all the possibilities. I think I'd be focusing first on a monitoring system.

I would think that implementing something that tells you in a timely fashion that something done broke is the most cost effective approach. There are many home monitoring solutions available that will tell you if the inside temp has dropped or if you have a water leak, like from a busted hot water heater.

This article talks generally about concepts:

https://blog.diycontrols.com/i...ovide-peace-of-mind/

A search for "vacation home monitoring" might turn up some good ideas.

Just so you know, we are not seriously considering this house at this time.

That said, we probably should be. It isis exactly what we need and no more. A serious house for serious people. It really is a nice house, and anyone would be proud to live there.

But it is really, really, boring.

https://www.realtor.com/reales...H_44039_M46149-60770

The Cleveland area, especially the area west of Cleveland has not been getting much snow lately. This is not to say that they won’t this year or next, but the snowfall has been much lighter than normal

It is a nice house. I could totally live there.

But it's on a corner lot, which is a lot of mowing and snow removal. And it looks like all the bedrooms are upstairs, yes? edit: I think what I thought was a stairway up is actually a stairway to the basement. And when I went back and looked at exterior photos, it looks like a ranch. oopsies...


(I'm just trying to give you reasons to feel OK about not considering that house that you are already not really considering.... )

quote:

Originally posted by Steve Miller:
The Cleveland area, especially the area west of Cleveland has not been getting much snow lately. This is not to say that they won’t this year or next, but the snowfall has been much lighter than normal

When we first started talking about snow, I was under the impression that Cleveland was more in a snow belt like Buffalo, but it's not. I don't think snow removal is going to be a big deal.

Besides, when you're retired, if it snows you just stay home for a day or two, take your time, and watch the rest of the world go crazy dealing with it. You come out when it's safe to do so.

quote:

Originally posted by Steve Miller:
Just so you know, we are not seriously considering this house at this time.

That said, we probably should be. It isis exactly what we need and no more. A serious house for serious people. It really is a nice house, and anyone would be proud to live there.

But it is really, really, boring.

https://www.realtor.com/reales...H_44039_M46149-60770

I really really like the boring house. Do not live in the house in the woods. You want a Low maintenance house place where you have neighbors all around that will notice if something goes wrong. The boring house looks perfect. (And I don’t think it’s boring, it’s quite nice inside, and the outside is very practical.