Tuesday, May 1, 2007

A little background to start

Welcome! I hope writing this and sharing our trials and tribulations will help keep me sane while we try to renovate our 1824 home. It may also serve as encouragement to keep the ball rolling.

A short summary:

After becoming empty nesters and having several friends move to waterfront property we decided we should start looking before all the "good stuff" was developed. We drove all over Southern Maryland and looked at hundreds of houses and pieces of property but we kept coming back to this one. We sold more than half of our "stuff", packed up and left our beautiful, custom built, huge 3 story home in the woods and moved to what I call "summer camp".

We closed on July 5, 2006 and spent almost a year recovering from what we did to ourselves. For me that meant get up, make coffee, sit on the porch and stare at the water, go to work, come home, get a cocktail, sit on the porch and stare at the water, eat, stare some more, have another drinkie poo, and go to bed. Repeat. I hated going inside, it was depressing. Lee looked for boats and fished off the pier alot. He did his share of drinking too. A few things went wrong immediately but more on that in another post.

The house is on the eastern branch of White's Neck Creek, almost at the confluence of the Wicomico and the Potomac Rivers. We are only a few miles from St. Clement's Island where the first Maryland colonists arrived in 1634. The area is known as the 7th District (fire district). Most of the families have been living here all their lives, everyone is related. Just recently more outsiders have been moving in - I hope we don't ruin the local flavor.

As I said, the oldest part of the house was built in 1824, an el was added well before the turn of the century, the porch went up after 1912, and the back porch bathroom, water, and electricity were all installed in the 40's. It looks larger than it is as the entire house is only one room wide.

More later,

K

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