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Part 2: Holy crap. We bought a cabin.

Posted on April 30, 2021April 29, 2021 by thepoelog

Picking up where I left off: By September, we were getting pretty frustrated with the whole “let’s buy a vacation cabin” experience.

When we began looking in June, we had visions of spending late summer all settled in the country. After all, our rowhouse in Old Town was literally the first house we looked at when we were looking at houses. We looked at like, three other properties (just to be sure) and put in an offer right away. We know exactly what we want in a property and are pretty decisive when we see it.

So when September rolled around and we still couldn’t find our dream cabin, we did what any nervous buyers would do in our situation. We increased our budget. Which brought us to our little chocolate box in the woods. A three-bedroom, single story cabin set on five wooded acres at the top of a mountain with views, decks and a screened in porch.

I’ll admit: for me, it was not love at first sight. Even though it most definitely did check all of our wishlist boxes, it just did not have very good curb appeal. But as XFE points out, we don’t have many people driving by. Our “subdivision” has four other residents spanning six homes (two AirBnBs owned by one of the long-term residents).

It also seemed like too much space for a vacation house (it’s 1900 sq ft versus our 1200 sq ft rowhouse), but it turns out, it’s perfect, especially since we’re both working from home. XFE has his own office and I work out of the guest room/office. And the internet is shockingly good out here, thanks to a $31 million federal grant to build out high-speed fiber-optic infrastructure in the entire county in 2010.

The cats love it too. There’s a screened porch for them, plus huge windows throughout that are also close to the ground. Pinot, our older cat with an old back/hip injury really appreciates the lack of stairs.

We put our offer in on September 2 and after a delay in the appraisal process, we finally closed on October 9, with a move-in date of October 22.

We had hoped to find a cabin that was furnished, but the furniture at the chocolate box did not convey. And, because of the pandemic, we did not want to go into any stores at all.

The solution? We literally bought an entire household online and had it delivered to our city rowhouse. That included furniture for the living room, the dining room, the kitchen (including a 300-pound table), two offices, two mattress sets and all the bedding. Rugs. Artwork. Dishes. Pots and pans. A new grill. New cleaning supplies. New vacuums. New cat stuff (litter boxes, cat towers, scratching posts, food, toys, grooming supplies). Everything was purchased online.

Another wrinkle: the address for the cabin had never been registered with the post office and didn’t show up on most mapping services, such as Google Maps, so we couldn’t risk having things delivered out to the cabin. In fact, we didn’t even have a mailbox. We had to buy one (and a post) and install it ourselves at the end of the road (after we finally got the address registered)

So we had everything delivered to our rowhouse, we moved the furniture close together and piled boxes in every available space, all unopened, until move-in day. We had UPS, FedEx, Amazon Prime and sometimes DHL at our house every day from October 9 (ok, maybe a bit earlier) to October 21. It was insane. Anyone walking by our front windows thought we had turned into some kind of crazy hoarders.

Just a small sampling of the box fort that was our home.

It took the movers about an hour to load everything into the truck and drive it to the cabin. We also rented a small dumpster to dispose of all the boxes and packing materials, which we filled to the brim. In one day. Let’s just say, we do not play around when it comes to unpacking and getting settled in.

And now, six months later, we’re still out here. We got to experience late fall and watch the leaves changing right from the Adirondack chairs (purchased online) on our front porch. We had Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas tamales, and a million other meals. We’ve gotten tons of snow and even got snowed in (we literally could not drive down the ½ mile gravel road from our house to the main road). Right now, we’re watching the trees start to bud and the hill behind our house is turning green with moss and plants and teeny tiny flowers.

We’ve learned about septic tanks, well water quality, propane maintenance, cast iron gas stoves, what works for fire wood, and all sorts of pests, including woodpeckers, carpenter bees, and yes, country mice. We’ve seen a rafter of turkeys in our driveway, chipmunks darting in and out from under our deck, tons of deer, and even a couple of cows in our front yard one recent morning. And the squirrels here? They’re on steroids. HUGE. Plus they have these black squirrels out here. I’ve only seen one once, but yeah, he was definitely black as night.

We’ve done a ton of household projects and upgrades, and still have more planned.

We bought a wood-fired hot tub and an outdoor gas-fired pizza oven. XFE has become obsessed with trout fishing and I’ve become obsessed with cabin sweaters. We’ve gone on amazing hikes at Lost River State Park, Trout Pond Recreation Area, Short Mountain, Wolf Gap, Seneca Rocks, and Blackwater Falls. One of our most challenging hikes is that roundtrip one-mile trek to the mailbox, which is down-the-mountain on the first leg, but a grueling climb on the way back up.

Eventually, XFE will have to go back into the office and our cabin will likely become the weekend and holidays escape it was intended to be. We just feel lucky to have it and to have had all this time to love it and get to know it. It’s been weird. It’s been wonderful. And it has definitely been an adventure.

By the way: if you are looking for a cabin in West Virginia, I highly recommend our realtor, Kim Eggert at Lost River Living. I found her on Instagram at @lostriverliving and she was fantastic to work with.

Part 1: Holy crap. We bought a cabin.

Posted on April 22, 2021April 22, 2021 by thepoelog

Hello from the other side, my fellow vaxxed and inoculated pandemic people. We made it. I mean, we’ve still got a ways to go to make sure we reach herd immunity, but there seems to be a very dim light at the end of this long, crap tunnel of death and illness and isolation.

We got our second shot of Moderna about a week ago and while I feel a great deal of relief, I’m definitely not ready to venture out into the world again. My only concession to being inoculated is that I now feel ok going maskless when I go outside to greet our non-vaxxed UPS driver, Mike (he’s got some….theories).

Luckily, I’m in the perfect place to retreat from the world. Because we bought a cabin in the mountains of West Virginia and we’ve been living here full time since late October. (If you follow @thepoelog on Instagram, you already know this)

Our corona cabin on the day we closed in October

It. Is. Crazy. All of it. The fact that we bought a cabin. During a pandemic. In West Virginia. And we’ve been living here. For the past six months. All of it is nuts. Just nuts. I still can’t believe we did it.

Let’s back up a bit and I’ll explain.

Before the pandemic, we used to travel. Like, a lot. Big travel. Big, extravagant, long vacations to places very, very far away a couple-few times a year. We wanted to see as much of the world as we could and we wanted to do it while we were reasonably young and physically able. And I think we both still feel that way.

For the last couple of years, we had taken our spring vacations a bit closer to home, renting AirBnB cabins in North Carolina and focusing on relaxing and hiking. They were great way to unwind and spend time in nature. In fact, we liked them so much, we started talking and daydreaming about buying a vacation place of our own. Someday. Way down the line when we were tired of our international travel.

But when the pandemic hit last March, that was the end of travel for us. For everyone. We cancelled a beach vacation we had scheduled for July in Antigua, and for the first time in a while, we didn’t have anything on the books as far as international travel.

We were working and living in our 1,200 square foot row house in the middle of our great walkable urban neighborhood and it was fine. Except. Everything we loved about living in that neighborhood was basically gone. We couldn’t walk to shops, restaurants, bars, salons, anywhere because everything was closed. And suddenly, with everyone, all our neighbors working from home as well, it began to feel very crowded.

By the time summer rolled around, we were spending lots of evenings outside on our patio, listening to our neighbors on either side of us, doing the same thing. And we started talking about the cabin dream…..

Let me just interject here to say: I know that we are incredibly privileged and lucky to even be considering such a thing. A lot of people suffered economically during the pandemic, including people close to me. I’m not insensitive or immune to that reality and my personal privilege. XFE and I were both able to continue to work from home during the pandemic and our financial situation allowed us to do this. Sure, I lost a couple of clients when the pandemic hit, including a big client, but I was able to keep going and find new work from existing clients and even previous clients. I also knew going into the pandemic that I had put aside enough over the years in my savings to cover living expenses for up to a year, even if I lost all of my freelance clients, which I did not.

I had originally (in the back of my mind) planned on maybe buying a vacation place in my home state of Texas. But if the pandemic showed us anything, it was that having to fly to a vacation home might not always be an option.

We thought about North Carolina, which we loved so, so much. But at best, it was a four-hour drive away. We decided we needed something closer, maybe about two hours away so we could take the cats with us as well. That would mean Virginia, Maryland or West Virginia. We knew we wanted something with some land, in the woods (low yard maintenance), near hiking and outdoor activities, that felt safe and private above all else. Oh, and good wifi. Of course.

We really had our hearts set on the Lost River Valley region of West Virginia, right over the state line. There are a ton of hiking opportunities nearby, a state park and national forests; lakes, streams, rivers for fishing, and a couple of really cute towns (Wardensville and Lost River) that have been built up as tourist destinations by DC transplants. So we started by putting our focus there, but there wasn’t much available.

We began looking in June and it was so stressful. Apparently, a whole lot of DC people had the same brilliant idea as us and everything with land within a two-hour drive was getting snapped up as soon as it went on the market. It was competitive to say the least.

Plus, we just really did not want to go see houses in person. Even with all the precautions. We didn’t attend any open houses, only private showings. We wore masks and insisted the realtors do the same. We opened all the windows and doors and didn’t touch anything. We brought our own lunches and drinks so we didn’t have to stop anywhere and hand sanitized like crazy. I think, all told, we looked at nine houses in person and each time was so stressful.

We put in an offer on a place in Berkeley County, West Virginia—an adorable A-frame with a completely dangerous spiral staircase and no washer/dryer–but backed out after the inspection revealed some serious problems, including foundation. We also put in an offer on a log cabin in Mount Jackson that we weren’t totally in love with the day it came on the market but we got outbid.

We had put in offers on two houses in our preferred area. We got outbid on one of them. The other house (again, with a totally unworkable spiral staircase we planned to replace) had an even more disastrous inspection than the Berkeley A-frame. In addition to a bunch of other issues, all the pipes in the house were made of polybutylene, a material that was banned in the 1990s and would have to be replaced. The seller didn’t want to budge on the price or any other concessions, so we walked away.

I’ll leave it there for now and pick up the rest of the hunt in my next post. But, spoiler alert: we did eventually buy a cabin.

Reality TV Time: Escape to the Country

Posted on August 13, 2020August 12, 2020 by thepoelog

If you are a reasonably cautious person, you are now well into your fifth month of quarantine/self-isolation/stay-at-home/work-from-home-ness. Congratulations on caring not only for your own health, but for your community as a whole.

I’m sure, like most of us, you are hankering for a getaway. Maybe a trip abroad (HA!). Or, slightly more realistically, someplace serene and peaceful, with lots of fresh air and rolling hills dotted with quaint cottages and rustic cabins.

Maybe you yearn to go someplace far from the bustle of urban life full of all these people going out maskless to restaurants and bars and Costco because, in reality, those people are idiots who don’t believe that COVID-19 is real, or at least, not as bad as the media is making it out to be and, goddammit last time they checked, “America was the land of the free and the home of the brave,” and they’re “not going to be told what they can or can’t do,” and by the way, “it’s a proven fact that masks make COVID worse!”

I’m already hyperventilating. I feel you. I, too, wish to escape. In fact, a lot of us do, which has given arise to a whole new, back-to-basics aesthetic trend known as cottagecore.

Along those lines, I have found a (very) safe way to give in to that vibe. Let me introduce you to the quarantine viewing wonder that is the BBC One’s “Escape to the Country.”

There is no coronavirus on “Escape to the Country.” Mostly because the only season we seem to be able to track down is Season 22 on Amazon Prime, and, lucky for us, Season 22 was filmed in the quaint olden times of 2014.

I had read that the show was available on Netflix, but I can’t find even one other season, either there or on our YouTube/Roku TV.

The beauty of this program is that it combines the desire to travel abroad (safely) with the yearning for beautiful, peaceful landscapes. In this case, in England. Without leaving your house.

We’ve been watching Season 22 for the last week or so and let me tell you, my heart swells and my stress melts away just hearing the dulcet string instrument intro and watching the camera pan over hills and valleys and dales before settling on a close up of some yellow flower in the field (Is it a daffodil? I think it is).

The format is a lot like HGTV’s House Hunters, except, decidedly rural: A couple or family is looking to trade in city life for a slower paced life in the country.

Many of the house hunters on the show are also looking for more independence, and want a property that also presents a business opportunity, like a separate apartment or cottage to rent out.

And, they all want properties that combine character and Old World charm with some modern conveniences.

To me, it sounds like a ridiculously tall order. But, literally, in every episode, our hosts of “Escape to the Country” deliver, offering up two properties that fit the bill (and, unlike many house hunting shows, actually come in around or under the couple’s stated budget).

They also offer up a third “mystery property,” that challenges the home hunters to think outside of the box. Sometimes that’s like, a church conversion, or a huge property with lots of outbuildings and barns waiting to be converted into apartments or rental units, or a miniature airplane modeling and sales studio (that was the stated professional goal of one of the gentlemen house hunters in a recent episode).

After a walk through each property, the house hunters meet up with the host and give their best guesses on how much the property is on the market for. Then the host reveals the actual price, which, again, is usually under budget or very near the top but almost never over.

At the end of two days of looking at the three properties, the house hunters sit down with the host and tell them which property was their favorite and what they’re next steps will be.

The houses are charming and sometimes quirky or historic (I now know exactly what a snug room is and am thisclose to demanding we buy an AGA range), there’s a little local history lesson in each episode, the hosts are gentle, patient and helpful. The cinematography is gorgeous. It’s a great, great show.

My only quibble is that Brits are just too cautious for my taste. They almost never agree to just put an offer in on one of the houses! They always say they’re going to do some more research about the village or the area and visit the property again. Even in instances where they’ve already sold their own city homes and only have like, a month for find something. They’re just so timid!

It is beyond frustrating. My TV co-partner, XFE and I always end up shout incredulously, “But you LOVED the mystery house! It literally had everything you asked for!! And was way under budget!!! What are you waiting for? Get to the estate agent before someone else snatches it up!”

As XFE recently put it, the show should be called “A Chinwag in the Country.”

But it is a really great show that seriously plays into my recent cottagecore/cabin fever feelings. Now if we can just figure out how to get the more recent episodes. I saw on Twitter that one couple with a sizable budget was looking for a country house with a helipad!