Odds and Ends 2010

Happy holidays, everyone! (Or Merry Christmas/Happy New Year, if you prefer; I'm a practicing Buddhist, so I don't have a dog in the 'Christmas Wars' fight.) The holiday festivities in the Vermonster household began with a day trip to Shangri-La to make sure the cabin was still standing and that the crawlspace wasn't flooded. It was and wasn't, respectively. I drained the pressure tank last time we were up and shut off the pump, so there was nothing to freeze. I'm new to this game, though, so it seemed prudent to check.
 

Someday that Tyvek will finally be completely covered. Probably on the same day I finally haul away those pallets...

There was just a dusting of snow on the ground, and - with the exception of some new mouse droppings - everything was just as we left it. I took detailed measurements of the kitchen and bath for cabinets and fittings, and then an inventoried the remaining materials before locking up. It seemed a shame to drive all that way for 30 minutes' work, though, so I walked the perimeter of the property to stretch the time. Turns out I have parts from an old car on one end of the property, and some old cans and buckets on the other. Everything I found looked to be from the 30's or 40's, so at least it was 'historic' garbage. CVPS also cut a lot of hardwood installing the new poles in the right-of-way this year; I'll have to cut and stack it in the spring in preparation for the wood stove.

Looking over the posts to date, I found a few 'holes' in my documentation of this cabin-building journey. Here's a modest attempt to fill them:

Q: You spent a lot of time talking about prefab and kit options - any regrets not going that route?
A: Not really. During the research stage, they all seemed to be at least 1/3 more than framing the place myself. In the end, this was mitigated somewhat by paying a contractor to do the roof sheathing/shingles, and the additional time it took to do it all 'from scratch'. In the end, thought, I got valuable experience in framing that I can use for outbuildings and additions, the pride of saying we did it ourselves, and a little extra money to put toward finishing. As we're doing everything with cash, spending more up front to get the structure in place wouldn't have bought any time, as we would have just run out of money quicker and spent more time staring at the place rather than working on it.

Q: You neglected the blog through almost the entire framing process. What gives?
A: The framing work was intense and exhausting, and it was hard to spend time writing about it after 3-4 days of working. With the exception of the hipped porch roof, however, it really wasn't all that hard. Building the walls was relatively easy, and the sheathing was only difficult in that it was awkward to work with on ladders on the South side. The hardest thing about framing the roof was the sheathing and shingling - something that I would have done myself anyway had I not opted for a 45-degree angle. I knew very little about framing when I started, but two books gave me everything I needed:

• The Ultimate Guide to House Framing by John D. Wagner
• Working Alone: Tips and Techniques for Solo Building by John Carroll.

Q: When you were planning the electrical, did you consider going solar and staying 'off the grid'?
A: I did, but the fact that I had a CVPS pole less than 100' from the cabin made it just too easy to go conventional. Again - we're doing everything with cash, so a big outlay for solar now would just mean that the rest of the work gets done much later in the future, preventing us from actually using the place. My current plan is to add solar panels after we've finished to feed power back to CVPS. Vermont does net metering, so this should offset the cost of electrical significantly. Not quite 'off the grid', but arguably the next best thing. The other thing that worked against solar was the fact that it seemed to require a different well setup - low flow pump and underground storage reservoir - that would also make the well installation more expensive.

Q: No that the market has recovered, any regrets about cashing out the 401(k) during the panic?
A: Ah, yeah, well...you have to be philosophical about this kind of thing. The story I tell myself these days is that I converted a stock investment into a real estate investment. Yes, the cost of land and materials dropped in the same time frame, but the truth is that I still lost more by cashing out than I gained in lower prices. No one was sure what was going to happen in those dark, post-crash days, though, so I rolled my dice and moved my mice. And now I own a place outright that I was forced to build myself to save money; I'm proud of both, and that's worth something.

Q: What's next?
A: Our goal for 2011 is to get the place to a point where we can use it. That will mean insulation, the primary heat (as opposed to the woodstove, which will come later), plumbing, and the bathroom. Stay tuned.

Carpe Cabin

LSW here.

The Vermonster will readily admit that he's Type A. He's a leader, a strong personality, he feels the need to control things.

But he's not as bad as he makes himself out to be. Over the years, my decidedly un-Type A family has beat him down, so now he's able to go-with-the-flow. Sometimes.

But recently, when the stock market started plunging, he, to put it simply, freaked.

"Should we? Shouldn't we? Withdraw our 401k? Take a loan? Buy the property and just let it sit? Build immediately?" There were many questions and I know they were keeping him up at night.

Me, well, it's not that I don't worry. It's just that I'm good at denial.

So when we decided to go for it-- to do this project without a loan from anyone-- I found that quiet place inside of me (the one fueled by a big glass of wine at the end of the day) and decided that yes, I would be all right with this.

Throughout the process thus far, I've been okay. I've tried to participate in decision-making, I've tried to be excited about the possibilities. I've really made an effort to be excited rather than totally freaked that we might be pissing away our retirement. But last week something happened that has made me realize that, hell yeah, we are totally doing the right thing.

A friend died of a heart attack. A 39-year-old friend. Yeah, scary shizz. After many days of deep introspection, I've come to realize that I want to live my life doing the things I think will be fun, because you just never, ever know when your time is gonna be up. More importantly, I want to pass this mindset onto my son. He will be three years old in just a few weeks. Some of his first memories will be of us building a cabin in "Mont," as he calls it. He'll climb trees and find bugs and go snowmobiling and do all sorts of outdoorsy boy things at the cabin that he won't be able to do here in the 'burbs. As he grows older, he'll probably hate going up there, and then the time will come when he'll want to go up there to party with his friends. And you know what? It'll be worth it. It'll be worth giving the finger to the stock market and 401ks and mutual funds. It'll be worth every single dime to be able to say, "Let's go up to 'Mont for the weekend."

(P.S. The Giraffe House is almost finished! Look at my boys!)

The Incredible Shrinking Cabin

Once upon a time, restoring old British cars – usually MGBs – was my diversion of choice. The LSW endured a parade of clunkers for which I tried to combine concourse-quality restoration plans and a shoe-string budget. While almost 50% of these projects resulted in something that could be safely driven, all of them reinforced something I grew up hearing about projects in general:

It will take twice as long as expected, and cost 3 times as much.
And so I’m finding as the estimates begin rolling in:

• 16 x 28 frost-line crawl-space foundation with a ‘rat-slab’: $5,000 (rats and excavating not included)
• Power: Needs to be estimated, but I’ve heard stories of $2,000 - $4,000
• Septic (as currently proposed): $10,000 - $13,000
• Well: $5,000 - $7,500
• Land Clearing: $2,000 - $3,000 per acre

With each new piece of information, the cabin in my imagination gets a little more modest. The kit becomes DIY stick-framing, 20x30 shrinks to 16x28, the full-size kitchen becomes a stove, sink and under-counter refrigerator, CVSC power becomes a solar panel, and indoor plumbing becomes (at least at first) a mulching toilet and 5-gallon water containers. In short, the “cabin” really does become a cabin. *sigh*

I have mixed feelings about this process of ‘right-sizing’ my expectations. To be brutally honest, I like the idea of having the kind of ‘camp’ that makes friends, relations, and neighbors envious. It’s a side of me I don’t care for, but can’t deny. There’s another side, though, that is attracted to the idea of a small, off-the-grid, minimal maintenance getaway that provides the experience of being mostly outdoors and close to nature. And one that bucks most to the materialistic pretensions we’ve been awash in over the last decade.

The interesting thing is that, while many of our friends were upgrading locations and square footage over the last decade, we’ve willingly (even enthusiastically) embraced smaller, older homes. Our current house - built in 1940 and clocking in at just less than 1,800 square feet - is the biggest – and newest – we’ve ever had. With its original kitchen, windows and [lack of] insulation, I’m confident that it inspires very little envy in our friends, relations and neighbors. So why would I care what they think of our little shack in the woods? Not that they’ll have an opportunity to form an opinion; it’s now grown too small for visitors.

I still occasionally surf the real estate adds for Vermont for ‘turn-key’ properties, wondering if I shouldn’t use the project budget as a down payment. But here’s what keeps me on the straight-and-narrow: I want to own the property and anything on it outright. And if that means a shipping container with a window, at least we’ll never have to worry about seeing ‘foreclosed on it’.

This land is my land

In the previous post, the LSW illustrated her misgivings about The Dream with a picture of a rusty shipping container marked ‘Foreclosed’. While her faith in me warms my heart, I think I can set her mind at ease on at least one thing:

When you pay cash for everything, there is no one to foreclose on your property.

And this is probably where The Dream diverges for the two of us. I suspect that for her it represents weekends with The Boy camping without actually having to go 'camping' and trolling the picturesque countryside for good food and diversions. For me, however, the knowledge that I own a home outright is at least as appealing, and provides a number of intangible benefits:

1) In economic downturns like this one, we don’t have to be concerned about becoming homeless
2) We don’t have to worry about how to pay off my current house before retirement
3) Should we decide to ‘downshift’ our lifestyle or change careers entirely, we can ditch the portion of my salary that supports a (big NYC suburb) mortgage on a (relatively modest) house
4) It gives The Boy a model of home ownership that is not based upon enormous debt, and introduces him to people who are less immersed in the consumerist/career culture that is predominant in Southwestern Connecticut
5) Being right on the VAST system, gives me an excuse to by a Snowmobile



The LSW has heard me repeatedly summarize these benefits to friends as “Three acres and a shotgun!” It’s tongue-in-cheek, but I guess I can see why she’s a little nervous.

Capitulation

I had been watching the stock market obsessively for over 3 months – furtively stealing glances at CNBC every hour at work, listening to ‘Marketplace’ every evening and surfing a handful of financial web sites between guitar practice on the weekends. What did I learn?

1) The market had no confidence in the Bush administration
2) It has even less confidence in the Obama administration
3) No one – from the pundits to the traders to (seemingly) the Fed chairman – has any idea how bad this is going to be or when we’re going to get out of it

The voices predicting a rally grew steadily weaker as each surge in the market crumbled under the weight of fear and uncertainty. As I watched my share price drop from $21 to $12.50, I found myself traversing that famous mental path through denial (It will come back!), anger (But I was just about to finally realize The Dream!) and bargaining (I’ll cash out when the Dow goes back to 9,000 – we still get more than we put in) to acceptance (Eh, it was all just paper wealth anyway. Let's order out for Chinese!).

The breaking point came when I read that ‘the charts’ were predicting the Dow would fall below 6,000. It was bad enough that I knew what ‘the charts’ were (too boring to recount); the fear that my money would completely dry up and blow away had finally became unbearable. I was tired of tracking the markets, numb from all the bad news, sick of the prognosticators and weary of the punditry. I finally ‘capitulated’, as the talking heads call it: I took my money and ran.

I know what you're thinking: But wait! You’ve locked in your losses! This is the time to buy, not sell! Stocks are always a good investment in the long run!

Meh. I never trusted the market to begin with, and I’m done.

...And the surprising thing is that I feel really good about it! Now at least I know my budget: A very modest $24,276, plus any interest (at 2%) that accumulates and any nickels I find under the couch. I don’t have to tell the three of you that clearing the land, building a cabin, digging a well and putting in septic at this price is going to require a lot of sweat equity on my part, a rift in the time/space continuum and infinite patience from the LSW. Should be a fun year!

Stay tuned.

Venting

This week, the stock market is officially off 50% from it's high earlier this year.

Give me a second to rant: I couldn't have cared less about the stock market until this little adventure began. I only put money in it because of the 50-cent-on-the-dollar offer from my employer if I participated in the 401(k) plan. Frankly, I've always mis-trusted the stock market as a baby-boomer fad, and, like most of their schemes from Vietnam to leisure suits, nothing good can come of it.*

Now, unfortunately, I follow CNBC religiously, as well as The Motley Fool, and any number of other financial websites, wondering how long it will be before I can access the pittance investments that will fund The Dream. For the record, I resent the time I'm wasting following all this crap when I would have been perfectly happy to put my retirement/future cabin funds in a safe 2% COD. And to think I would have been laughing all the way to the bank! (To make a withdrawal.)

I know...no, wait - I hope it will all come back, but dollars to donuts (which are probably worth more) it won't go up nearly as fast as it all fell apart. Of course, I could bet the farm and pull it all out now, but the talking heads are all saying that everything will turn around at the end of 2009.

I feel like Basil Fawlty after he beat his Morris 1100 with a tree branch: [Shaking fist at the sky] "Thank you god!!! Thank you so bloody much!!!"


Rant mode off. I wish I could say I felt better, but I don't.

*I hereby specifically exempt any schemes by my next-door neighbors and, of course, my father.

Why "Madness"?

So why did I subtitle this blog 'Green Mountain Madness'? So many reasons, but today I'll comment on one: I'm funding this endeavor by raiding a chunk of my 401(k). Foolishness. But hey: It's a real estate investment, so it's not like I'm running out and buying a Corvette. Hopefully.

Thanks to our recent, involuntary education in mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps, I no longer have delusions that real estate will fund my retirement, but I don't expect I'll loose money on it either.

But why would you do that now, I hear you ask.

Well, duh - I didn't intend to, Einstein. The market had just started to tank when I signed the offer and cut the deposit check. "So we're in for a correction," I figured, "how far could the market really fall?"

Great Caesar's ghost, whodathunk we'd see a 40% plunge in less than 2 months?!? Ouch.

So now I've been reduced to 1 part hoping the market goes up by mid-January (the closing is on the 23rd) and 2 parts scrambling for temporary financing options until all you irrational investors decide to dig up the sacks of gold you've buried in the garden and give it back to the kindly stock purveyors.

But there's hope: My father - god bless him and everything he stands for - has taken pity and is looking to see if he can help. He's only asked in return that I pay a reasonable interest rate and cast a 'correction ballot' for John McCain (it's a change he can believe in). A little embarrassing to be 40 and asking Dad for financial help, I admit, but luckily I have almost no pride. And with a little luck, the market will smarten up soon and realize that the little guy is suffering. Me, in this case.

I know you, and I know what you're thinking: "But how can I help?" Please, for the love of all that is holy - put your money back in the market now so I can take mine out. I promise to thank you here personally.