92 Green YJ
General Lee Jeep
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.
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.