At last I can unveil the super secret project I’ve been working on since Christmas! Last week, I completed the sale of my ranch in Oklahoma, and today I’m closing on a much smaller (but with more & better structures) property just a little over two hours from Seattle. In other words, as of today I’m officially a permanent resident of Washington state. It’s a bittersweet time for me: on the one hand, it will be really wonderful to have Grace nearby, to have a country place I can reach without taking at least a week off of work, and to have a fully-built house with excellent outbuildings and no mortgage; on the other hand, it means giving up on a literally lifelong dream and the place in which I lived with Matt for years. We poured so much effort and so many tears into that place, building it up from an empty tract that was so overgrazed it looked almost lunar into a lush, thickly-wooded ranch with its own road, shop, barn, fenced pastures, well system and house. And I was trying to build another, bigger and better house, but that was not to be; too late I discovered that banks won’t give construction loans on rural property, no matter how good the borrower’s credit. When I came to Seattle I still planned to finish that house, and then life happened; about a year and a half ago I had a vision that I’d never live there again, and I knew in my heart it was a true one (yes, I have visions when high on edibles; deal with it). Then last summer I began to realize that there was really no way to make the economics of the situation work, ever; by autumn I began to understand what had to be done. And once I had a plan and asked Grace if she was willing to move, everything fell into place within weeks (as it always does when I’m going the way Aphrodite wishes me to go). The place I’m buying was the first one I physically looked at; we had discarded dozens from their listings, and this one looked so good I made sure it was the first we visited (on January 3rd, while Grace was still here for the holidays). Most of the time between then and now was taken up with getting my buyer’s financing straight and dealing with inspections, title work, etc, but finally all that’s done. Grace and a friend of ours are already packing and soon they’ll load the new-to-us trailer and hitch it to the new-to-us one-ton truck I bought a few months ago, and set off on the first trip up here (Grace reckons it’ll take about four). By the end of summer that should be all done, and…well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Goodbye, Avalon; hello, Sunset. And may the pain I suffered while resident at the former purchase me some peace at the latter.
Diary #361
May 30, 2017 by Maggie McNeill
Posted in Diary | Tagged blogging, Oklahoma, pragmatism, Sunset, Washington (state) | 11 Comments
11 Responses
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Beautiful.
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Congratulations, Maggie, for achieving your dream. It takes determination and hard work to getting such projects to completion!
Congratulations! I hope everything works out as you have planned.
Wow, I must say this was most unexpected. I kept trying to puzzle out what your secret project was, but all my theories just didn’t make sense.
That being said, I’m glad that everything worked out as best as it could.
I’m happy that things are working out so well for you, but Oklahoma is going to be a much sadder place without you.
Congratulations, Maggie. Best of luck at the new place!
It is wise to have a place in the country. Riots are coming in the cities.
Have you checked that your property is safe in the event of a massive earthquake?
It seems that the Pacific Northwest is vulnerable to just such quakes and has few of the measures that have been taken in California.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one
Worth checking to be safe.
There is no such thing as “safe” from a massive earthquake, only “relatively safe”. But the house was built in 1927, so it’s been through several.
CONGRATS TO YOU!!!
🎶 There is a house 🎶 far from New Orleans 🎶 they call the Setting Sun 🎶
(I am a bit surprised that a quick search found no evidence that anyone had already said that)