Well, we didn´t come to common terms on where to park our Trackside Diner this month and who will facilitate the move from the November location to the new place, so I took the liberty of stepping in! For the twelth time this year -
welcome to Jeffrey´s Trackside Diner, which is located in the Northeast of the USA for us to celebrate Christmas in Vermont and Maine for this month! Our base for the month will be the Boothbay Railway Village, as we explore the region, hopefully with the help of fellow diners familiar with this region with both Vermont and Maine.
Jeffrey´s Trackside Diner is the place for you to go to relax and talk off topic about most anything - as long as you stay within the forum rules, which means certain hot button topics are excluded. Please refer to Steven Otte´s post on Forum Policies. Everybody is welcome to participate in the Diner !
The staff - that´s Zoe, Chloe, Flo, Janie, and Brunhilda - is very friendly and will serve up plenty of virtual food with a smile. Just don´t forget to leave a generous tip! Now and then, our host Steven Otte chips in and brings along some goodies for us to try - which is always heartily welcomed!
Portland Maine was one of the major rail junctions during WW1. (As well as WW11)
During WW1, over 70% of all the horses used in the war were shipped out of Portland Maine. The pileings are still in place in the harbor from the wharves that were in place for this endeavour.
Has anyone used a thread holder used in fly tieing to run power lines, or fencing? It is a “Y” shaped tool that holds the spool of thread/wire between it’s arms, that is then fed through a brass tube to the working end. To feed the thread through the tube, a short section is started down the tube, with slack thread handy, the working end is placed in the mouth, inhale sharply to draw the thread the length of the tube. Pull out the slack, and start whatever----I have found it is easier-(for me) to run phone lines, fence wire, compared to trying to hold a spool in one hand. Also easier to make loops, tie knots.
We came home to a few surprises yesterday. We had never been gone for four weeks straight before.
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Number 1: If you stay gone for four weeks, all of the water will evaporate out of your toilet bowls. This water in the toilet is what keeps the sewer smell out of your house. We opened up the door into a terrible odor yesterday.
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Number 2: My lawn service does a great job! They picked up all the newspapers and garbage from the driveway and kept the house looking “lived in” while we were away.
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Number 3: If you have your mail held for four weeks, you will have a ton of mail when you return! We had three big totes of mail on our front porch! It took hours to go through all of it.
When we escaped tom Denmark earlier this year, we were gone for quite some time, but neither had the water in the toilet dry out nor was there a terrible smell in the apartment. But than it doesn´t get as hot (or warm?) in my neck of the woods.
I spent the better part of this day on my computer, making new plans. Petra is next to me, so she does not complain about me spending so much time on the “drawing board”.
I took up the suggestion the nice lady in Greece made to cut down on cost. The basic idea is to use just two 40´shipping container for each house. While this offers sufficient living space for a single person household, it´s not enough for two, so I decided to “insert” a section of roughly 3´by 40´ as a kind of spacer between the two containers. This really adds a significant amount to the space, enabling us to furnish the home according to our liking (and using the furniture we have to a large extent). It´s nice to see not only whether the furniture fits into the house, but also what the rooms will look like!
This is what I did today:
Floorplan
And some views
From the entrance:
From the garden:
And from the sides:
There are still some details missing - like the rooftop deck and the rooftop shed, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.
Time to light the first candle on the advent wreath!
Kevin - I am so deeply indulged in planning our future refuge, that I forgot to say thank you to you for being our tour guide last month! You did a smashing job showing us around!
I’d put a big sign on the toilet seats, otherwise Murphy’s law will take effect.
What does that do for the septic tank in the spring?
We vacationed in Bar Harbor 15 years ago. After taking a carriage ride on what was John Rockefellers carriage path, now NPS, we asked for directions to a place to eat lunch. I don’t remember the town, but it was south of Bar Harbor.
We got there and the recommended place looked like a shack, but there were people dinining on the porch of a big old white house. We decided to eat on the porch at the white house. We were seated and asked for ice tea and a menu. For the next 20 min we never saw our waitress again.
While we were waiting, we noticed we were the only heterosexual couple there. No problem there. There were 3 women at the next table and one had a UK accent and was hard of hearing so we heard every word.
Two of them were friends of long standing, one a Brit and the third was new to the Brit. The Americans worked for “Foundations” (The very rich set up a foundations to do charitable work, mostly.) The Brit said she was a cook, but not wanting to feel left out, added “my lot (meaning her employer) has their own foundation too”.
There seemed to be no possibility that we were going to see our ice tea or a menu, whether because of incompetance or they didn’t like our kind, we will never know.
We went to the dive, which actually had quite good lobster rolls.
The take away message is, you aren’t really rich unless you have your own foundation [:D]
There was another surprise waiting for us when we arrived at home.
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They are buillding a new house on the empty lot across the street. The permit box says the builder is “Express Homes”, which is bad news for us. Express builds the cheapest “Spec Homes” you can buy. They are designed for high density communities (less than 1/10 acre lots), and thse houses look stupid when you put them on a normal building site.
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These are the houses you see advertised in new communities like “Move to Del Opra Creek, Homes from the Mid-200’s”. Then they put them 3 feet away from each other. They have ridiculous entry ways, because that is all you can see from the street, and over half the front elevation is garage doors.
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Oh well, at least we will not be able to see our neighbor’s junky back yard across the way any longer.
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Now we will be down to six unbuilt homesites on the road.
I googled their name and saw a few pictures of the houses they build. I don´t think I like them - they pretend to look like a million dollars, but everyone can see they don´t.
This is the house that was permitted for across the road. It clashes with everything else on the road. Every other house has at least 60 feet of frontage on the elevations toward the road, This one will be less than 40.
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If you want to move to the US, this house is for sale, and the family next door are immigrants from Germany also.
Whoever is going to move into this house, must love his cars more than his family! The floor plan shows a long a narrow hall - what a waste of space! People coming to visit must queue to enter the place.
How much does a house like this cost?
To be fair, the “normal” family home in Germany is not an iconic masterpiece of architecture, either - usually just a box with a roof on top, either covered covered in red brick with black roof tiles, or rendered and painted white, with a red tiled roof.
Pretty always costs a pretty penny!
My house was built in the traditional way houses have been built over centuries - as a half-timber framed house.
That is the standard design for these narrow houses that are intended for high density communities. I hate them, but they sell easily, so they keep getting built.
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With the garage taking up 65% of the house frontage, there is not choice but to make a long hallway to the center of the house.
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Depending on the location, $210,000.00 to $250,000.00 for the completed models for sale.
