It is settlement day! The settlement itself was very quick and the signing of papers was finished in around 15 minutes. We had a nice chat with the seller. His agent had told him of our plans to build a cob house and the seller had actually looked up photos of cob houses! He owned other tracts of land and knew the forest officer Michael Kays, who we hope to meet soon. The seller talked about wildlife and tree species and succession – he obviously had experience taking care of land and was almost sounding like the guys who talked during the ‘Woods in Your Backyard’ course! Apparently the land was an orchard more than 50 years ago. The forest that has grown in its place is something that developed naturally. This tells us that most of the trees are native species and it is a mature forest. We got other useful bits of information – e.g., his grandfather had a vegetable garden in the same location where we plan to have ours! The location where we plan to put our fruits trees has stone/bricks (from the small house that was on that spot) buried into the ground; this means we will have to dig them up and put in some top soil as we plant the fruit trees. He mentioned the names of some of the neighbors and from the sounds of it, they are really nice people. Apparently, the house behind our land has a clear view of Frederick during winter – it will be interesting to see what kind of view we get. It did sound like the seller had fond memories of coming to the land when his grandfather and father were around. Hopefully, he will be happy with what we end up doing on the land. We celebrated by having some tea and appetizers at Cafe Nola in Frederick before we picked up the spade and hose that we had located on Craigslist.

#purchase #craigslist

I doubt this will be the only tools we will buy from Craigslist. But we managed to get a bunch of useful items over a span of 3 weeks and I decided to log them in a blog post. Note that for each item we buy; there are probably a dozen that we go through and at least 2 or 3 listings that we end up reaching out to.  We are not just trying to save money by minimizing what we buy; we do not want to accumulate a lot of clutter and waste time tracking and maintaining stuff.

We first found a really nice wheel barrow for $20. We pounced on this deal since most good wheelbarrows are at least $60 on Craigslist. Besides the guy lived 20 minutes from our house. When Alan went to pick it up; he ended up chatting with the seller. It so happened that the seller was downsizing his house and was trying to get rid of other stuff. So Alan ended up getting a seed disperser, sprayer, rake and another pry for free.  Alan then found a guy selling an interesting mix of unique things – it just so happened that we needed all of them – a drill attachment for a stirrer, an emergency starter and compressor, a heavy metal chain, a couple of spanners; a couple of snow chains for a garden tractor (which could double up as a security chain) and a grease gun (which we needed to lube our tractor and backhoe). We got the lot for $75 and the guy threw in a metal drum for free. We were looking for a drum to burn stuff in and this would be perfect. We just need to figure out how to remove the top. We just seem to keep adding sub-projects to our tasks! We then found someone selling a spade in Frederick for $5.00 and a brand new 100′ garden hose for $5 – both were very close to downtown Frederick. This is where our settlement is going to be held on October 7th. So we arranged to pick them up after the settlement on Friday evening.

We also located a really nice 14′ heavy metal chain for $20.00 in Herndon. The guy was moving and didn’t want to carry the heavy chain along. Since I have a friend who lives in the area, I asked her to get the chain from the guy. I hope to pick up the chain from her when I meet her next.

#craigslist #purchase