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Maine Bound!

92 Green YJ

General Lee Jeep
Joined
May 19, 2020
Member Number
401
Messages
779
Loc
Mariaville, ME
Guess it’s high time I start a thread about or flight from the People’s republic of Kommiefornia.
it’s been quite the adventure so far. After several months of prodding, my better half finally agreed it’s time to get the hell out of California. So we went state by state and came up with a short list of possibilities that we were interested in. All in all we had 7 states on the maybe list.
Montana, Idaho, Utah, Kentucky, Virginia, New Hampshire, and Maine. We did a ton of research on each and slowly eliminated them until we were down to our top 2. New Hampshire and Maine. Started house hunting via Zillow and found some we liked.

one in particular in Mariaville Maine really stood out to us. It was in our top ten houses. It had been on the market for 247 days at a price of 499k for the home on 24 acres. Our real estate agent here in San Diego that helped us buy our house got us in touch with a local agent in Maine at a sister agency. The day we got her contact Info and made our initial contact, I got an alert from Zillow that the house we really liked in Mariaville had had a 100k price reduction. Seems the owner had decided to carve off 6 acres from the original listing, dropping it to 18 acres and reducing the price.

so we made arrangements with the agent to do a FaceTime virtual tour two days later. Unfortunately she didn’t have a strong enough cell signal for the FaceTime tour, so instead she walked the entire house and property with her phone and took several incredibly detailed videos, pointing out any issues she saw along the way, and emailed them to us to review. After watching the videos we liked the place even more, but we wanted those 6 acres back as they were the fields between the home and the road. So we put in an offer for 450k for the original listed 24 acres. Seller responded the next day and didn’t even counter. He accepted outright.

agent set up the home inspection for us and this guy was obscenely thorough. The inspection report was something like 149 pages long. The inspector was actually there 2 full days. Pumped and inspected both septic tanks, tested the well water, went thru every inch of the house with a fine tooth comb. Most of the issues were minor and stuff I can handle myself. The two big things were slightly elevated levels of arsenic in the well water (like.002 over the limit) and slightly elevated radon levels in the finished basement. Our agent had a couple of companies out to bid for a whole house water filter and a radon mitigation system. With that we negotiated down to our final price of $435,000.

we are set to close escrow at the end of this week. We have lined up a 28’ semi trailer thru ABF for our move. It will be delivered Friday June 18th and picked up on June 22nd to make the haul across the country to Maine. We are leaving the 22nd as well for a 9 day cross country drive. Myself, my wife, and the kids will be in the RV pulling the Jeep on the trailer behind it. My mother and her husband have agreed to make the drive with us as well in my Ram pulling the wife’s Grand Cherokee on a trailer behind it. I have booked 7 KOA campground sites in 7 states and we will be doing some sight seeing along the way. Gonna take I-40 most of the way across. Hit Grand Canyon, Memphis, Nashville, day at Hershey Park for the kids, etc. if all goes well we will arrive at our new home in Maine on June 30th.

the new home is a 6 bedroom, 5 bathroom, 5,500 square foot home with an attached 2 car garage/barn with a workshop on the second floor of it on 24 acres. We are about 35 minutes from Bangor, 25 minutes from Ellsworth, an hour from Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. We are just a few miles from Graham Lake. The house also has a finished basement, it’s own drilled well, two 1,000 gallon septic tanks, a whole home propane standby generator, a pole barn, several smaller outbuildings, a chicken coop, and a wood shed. Baseboard heat thru the whole house fired by either oil or a wood boiler, also two mini split systems and a Jotul wood stove in the living room. Eventually I am going to build a 40x40 workshop with a large lean to off one side to park the RV under. We have been kicking around the idea of planting an apple orchard and doing a pick your own apple business in at least one part of the large fields. Maybe do a pumpkin patch in the fall too.

the home was built by a local contractor as his family home. He has built many of the houses in this area. He really went all out on this place, all oak hardwood floors, lots of finish detail work, soapstone counter tops, French doors, tin ceiling in the entryway, stained glass windows, you name it.
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You're probably a fine person but we both know that too many people getting out of commie shithole states is very bad for the states they move to even if the people getting out are good people individually.

If you're a blue collar type of guy you're really going to like the Bangor area
 
You're probably a fine person but we both know that too many people getting out of commie shithole states is very bad for the states they move to even if the people getting out are good people individually.
I get it. That said, I’m no California liberal. No way am I gonna vote for the asinine bullshit that has destroyed this state where I’m headed.
 
That route is shit. Avoid I95 and the other coastal roads from NY to DC. Stay inland until you get to 84 then take that across NY and CT to I90.
 
That route is shit. Avoid I95 and the other coastal roads from NY to DC. Stay inland until you get to 84 then take that across NY and CT to I90.
I’ve done 95 many times between Rhode Island and New Jersey when I was in college. The route from PA isn’t set in stone just yet though that being said. Also I’m. It sure I can take the Garden State
parkway thru Jersey anyway in the RV.
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With the extra axles you'll have all the tolls in NJ/NY become even more of a bad decision. You'd be paying a hundred bucks for the privilege of shitty traffic.
 
I’ve done 95 many times between Rhode Island and New Jersey when I was in college.

The cross-Bronx will be absolute hell with that setup and you'll pay out the ass in tolls.

Just do 81N from Hershey to 84 as said above, or at very least 78-287-Tappan Zee to 95.

Even in a plain ol' car I will gladly go an hour out of my way to avoid the cross bronx, but usually that hour ends up being a net time savings.
 
The cross-Bronx will be absolute hell with that setup and you'll pay out the ass in tolls.

Just do 81N from Hershey to 84 as said above, or at very least 78-287-Tappan Zee to 95.

Even in a plain ol' car I will gladly go an hour out of my way to avoid the cross bronx, but usually that hour ends up being a net time savings.
Yeah back in the day when I drove from school to my dads place in South Jersey and back I would always take the Tapanzee bridge. That was my original plan as it’s a route I was well familiar with. (Though its been 17 years now since I last drove it)
 
thats is a lot house to keep clean.
that’s the wife’s job ;)

When i read the op it reads just like the introduction to a horror movie.... the picture perfect family moves across country to thier new house they bought sight unseen.... only the locals know why it hadnt aold for the last year
Lol. Well as it turns out from what we found out, the first floor master bedroom was an addition for the builders wife. She got sick and couldn’t manage the stairs anymore. When she passed away (not at the house, the wife asked) he couldn’t bear to live in the house anymore. Too many memories. So he moved out to another place and his parents have been living there as tenants since he moved out. I think it was just priced too high for most of the locals to go for it. While it is a pretty central location for the area, it’s still pretty rural.
 
Grats. Nice spread. Its awesome up here. Best move I've made.

Its a bit of a drive, but RMTP has a bunch of stuff you may be interested in.

Also, check out Deep Woods Extreme. Not sure if they're still relevant in the area. They were the go-to guys for hardcore wheeling in the area.
 
Grats. Nice spread. Its awesome up here. Best move I've made.

Its a bit of a drive, but RMTP has a bunch of stuff you may be interested in.

Also, check out Deep Woods Extreme. Not sure if they're still relevant in the area. They were the go-to guys for hardcore wheeling in the area.
Yeah I’ve checked out RMTP a bit online. Found a central Maine Jeepers Facebook group that I joined. I’ll look up Deep Woods Extreme.

I briefly looked at the Jeep Jamboree in Bethel coming up at the end of September. Thought it would be a good way to check out some local stuff, but man, awfully expensive for a weekend of wheeling and they seem to be really anal about their various rules and regulations. Not sure I’d enjoy wheeling under that strict of a schedule. Not really my style.

we can’t wait to get there though. Super excited. Also have discovered there are two very large fireworks stores just 20 minutes from the house. Gonna have to swing thru one of em on our way in I think.
 
Yeah. But what a beautiful driveway.
 
Yeah. But what a beautiful driveway.
Right? Don’t even have pictures of the really pretty part that runs up thru the trees before wrapping around into my huge gravel parking lot. (Which I may eventually want to make asphalt. At least the parking lot. The driveway would be a fortune I’m sure )
 
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