Done Deal

                                                 August 2009 had arrived and Sharptail season was now just weeks away. I had decided regardless of whether or not I sold the property I would spend the fall season in North Dakota one way or another. The Setter's and I had made a trip out there in April and toured some parts of the state I hadn't seen before. I had an open mind about relocating and also accepted that I may not get it right the first time. That's an attitude I learned to adopt as it gets you moving towards any goal as you can always improve your focus along the way. I call all the things I try experiments. Then if things don't work quite right then it was just another experiment not a failure! Plus I like experiment as a term because it suggest's an attempt to solve or discover something. And that's a positive thing. I won't recount the experiments I had done on the farm but there were definitely some that worked better than others is all I'll say! Just ask my ex wife! So my life with the Setter's was not only a great adventure it was the biggest experiment I'd ever undertaken and it was working very well.

Now here's the results of a great experiment! Try planting four thirty
foot rows of green beans. I picked these beans every other day for
quite a while. And three years later they still taste great having been
frozen in gallon and quart bags within a couple hours of being picked!

                                                 I was mowing the lawn one morning when a truck drove up. I got off the mower and a young man introduced himself as one of the people who had been making offer's on the property. He and his wife had just married and had been looking at the property for six month's now. He explained that they only had so much money and that's why they'd made an initial low offer which over time had come up by 40 grand however. That initial offer also stated they wanted the pool table in the carriage house game room included. My response to my Realtor was to get on the phone and have a clarification session with their Realtor so we don't waste each other's time. That was the politically correct version anyway. I had told him I suspected people may want the pool table and explained it was not for sale ahead of time. But people do all kinds of things when making offers. I had a friend who's buyer got fixated on their riding lawn mower of all things. Whatever!  Anyway this kid asks about the deer hunting in the valley etc.. He was a bow hunter and I could tell he was a dreamer as well as passionate about his sport. Anyway he drove off and I finished the mowing before I started picking beans in the garden which was an every other day deal right now. Trying to keep an open mind I reflected on this whole process and what my objective was.

Beans beans and more beans. Also tomato's peppers and pumpkins.
The tall structure's are tomato trellis's I made from some rough sawn
pine lumber I had laying about. Another experiment! I guess I was
trying to appeal to the buyer's inner gardener or maybe I was just a
hunter gatherer in another life.

 The objective was to sell the property so I could relocate to" Bird Country". I didn't want to relocate without selling due to the ongoing required maintenance and upkeep. There were a few things that impacted my position on price as well. First of all I was asking a premium price in a down market so similar parcels although tough to compare to were priced and selling lower. At the height of the sub prime mortgage days it may have been possible to get 20 or 30 thousand dollars more due to more easy money being available. It hadn't hurt to try to get more but the facts were that if you wanted to sell the value was what someone was willing to pay. However if I would have sold two or three years earlier I would have been required to pay around 40 grand in capitol gains taxes since I wasn't planning on reinvesting in real estate but now being at age 55 I could take the one time exemption on the gains tax. The other factor was that where I planned on living it was possible to buy a very livable house for next to nothing. The glitch being you're in rural America baby! Where the wind blows and people are said to lose their minds on the prairie listening to it howl!

The bean factory. This actually was a lot of fun and good exercise
as well. I only used half of a 5 dollar package of bean seeds and
froze more than 75 pounds of beans! You can't go wrong with beans!

                                       After this numbers crunching and review my strategy was to offer to finance the gap in price for these people by taking a second mortgage for the difference. I had my Realtor write up the proposal and we were once again trying to move the price up for I think the 4th or 5th time. This was a creative solution I could afford to put on the table. If nothing else it would get them thinking again. This guys hunting season was coming up as well! The financing offer was declined so I put my bottom line price on the table. They moved up to meet it and we had an agreement and closing set for the second week of October. It just wasn't worth it to me to wait for another buyer to try to get 10 or 15 thousand more and possibly having to go through the winter here again. The taxes alone were 500 a month. To live in my own house. No way America's Dairyland! I wanted to get down the road.

Sidewalk view of the cafe project the first day I saw it in
August of 2009. The shell was up but construction had been
 halted as they had no opening plan to go further until I agreed
to take on the project and get it open and running.

When I had visited in the spring time Willie and Joann had mentioned a new cafe was being built in a small town 40 miles west of them. I thought nothing of it at the time but being registered on the North Dakota Job Service site I got a hit on my resume from the Economic Development Board in charge of the project around this time in August.

The view from the rear of the new cafe building as I first saw it.
The Economic Development Committee had worked hard to
get this project going but needed some real expertise to make it
happen.  This was a nice community and once I met these people
 and heard the story behind this project I decided to help.

I thought I've got nothing to lose so I contacted them and made arrangements to meet. The deal was the city had been gifted with a half a million buck's by a local benefactor to construct a new cafe for the community and had turned over the money to the local Economic Development Committee. These guys meant well and had given countless hours of their personal time to get this done but were all thumbs when it came to getting this project completed and the experience I had was just what they needed to get it finished and open. While there were things I knew I couldn't help them with like the fact that they had built way to big I could fix the layout and equipment issues and get this thing opened properly. And for that the community was very grateful.

Front view on the day I first saw this project. Later the benefactor
 Reuben Wentz 93 year's old would say to me" It's quite the sheep
shed isn't it" Referring to the size and profile of the building. He
 was a humble man. He and his wife had farmed their whole life
together saving every cent they were now giving back to this
community of 800 people.

 This was the community we had hunted around the past 6 years and had driven through remarking at how nicely the houses were kept what with the irrigated lawns and all. It'd be a fun project I thought and 40 miles from Tom's place so I was very familiar with the area.The heart of "Bird Country" in North Dakota. So all of a sudden I had a timeline and a destination to move ahead being right on target for the upcoming hunting season.
                                         I had made arrangements with Tom to initially move my belongings into his garage and house for a period of time while I looked for a place in this little town. I had lived in a remote location with no neighbors to speak of for over 30 year's and was actually looking forward to living in a small town. I liked the sights and sounds here. The people were very open and friendly as well. It was Mayberry would be my best analogy. You see you don't need to own a lot of land here to hunt with as much public access land as there is available so reinvesting in land wasn't my objective. Nor was I interested in reinvesting a lot of money in housing. This was a paradigm shift in lifestyle and the cost of living which was at the heart of my strategy on how to make the recession work for me. It was possible to have it all! A lifestyle and a dream with the Setter's that I could afford!