In the beginning....

...was the river, our local creator. The river, now shallow and small but sturdy, carved its rolling little valley between the ridge to the east and the ridge to the west. It ground rocks into sand and soil, sparing precious few to scatter the ground as we are used to. It nurtured its minerals and life forms and heaved them up onto the valley floor, over and over again, offering human animals a richness they craved. So they came and eventually built farms up and down the valley, following the course of the river. In Vermont, because of all those mountains and hills, prime roads ran next to the rivers to take advantage of what flatness they could find. Today we have Route 14 in a not-heavily-travelled stretch. A little, short side road winds briefly off of Route 14, crosses a little bridge over the creator and deposits visitors next to an old house now named the River House. We bought it on November 19, 2008.

Welcome to the River House Weblog. Some friends have found the idea amusing of a running record of yet another unwary couple tacking the challenges of renovating an old house, so I decided to offer such record in this form to whoever might want to partake of the soap opera.

The honeymoon is not yet over. ..

The land in this tasty little river valley is soft and rises up in occasional curvaceous mounds with the western ridge as backdrop. The River House sits on one of these little mounds like a cat on a pillow with its paws tucked in and its tail neatly arranged along its side. Its mound rises up about a dozen feet from the floodplains that surround it. The river--called the Second Branch of the White River but called by Mark the Middle Branch (we don't know yet if there are three or four branches)--flows at depths witnessed by us of one to two feet about eight feet below its banks. We figure we have about twenty feet of leeway before our house would flood. The previous owner, who had it for ten years, said it never flooded close to the house, and we saw no signs of untruth in that.

A note about the old owner, Mike Palmer: by coincidence, he is an old friend of Mark's oldest friend, a sloppy but warm carpenter, a sweet man we made friends with. God he kept that house a mess! And run-down and poor--you would never imagine he was handy with tools. He is an avid hunter and the living room was decked with, not only antlered buck's heads on the dingey walls, but the teeth-bared, claws-presented, roaring front half of a bear. If the views out the windows had not been so splendid, I would have been horrified.

The house sits in floodplains that have been planted by a local farmer in corn, so now all corn-stubble. We own 10 acres. Our fields run seamlessly into fields planted by same farmer and owned by a non-local Vermonter named Rick Yeiser who must sell his 154 acres that surround ours on three sides in order to pay off his wife in their divorce. Hmm....good land.....selling off....surrounds ours with no natural separation...is this a recipe for trouble?

Another "interesting" feature is that our land contains not one but two rights-of-way right across it in two different directions. One accesses the southern portion of Rick's land, which also flows up onto the wild ridge. One goes onto our knoll between our house and where the barn once stood and where we will have a new one built. Yikes! It services a road at the northern end of the valley and Rick's land, called Laughing Waters Way. Why two rights of way? Because our bridge over the river was the only way for larger vehicles to get across. There is a covered bridge by Laughing Waters Way that has, thankfully, been reinforced to bear heavier trucks and we might be saved from much of that. As far as the southern one goes, we hope to buy the southern portion of Rick's land, thereby nixing that access if we can, and getting ourselves a woods. Mark needs a woods. Minnow does too. Josie is thrilled with the fields and more fields.

One solution for the land for sale is to take control. I am marketing the land for the owner. He has told me he will allow me to subdivide it. We hope to get about 30 acres, much of it not developable, if we can afford it. That leaves a lot to go. If you know anyone looking for farmland and beauty, let me know!

Stay tuned for more on the house itself: photographs! renovation planning, and can this house be made truly energy-efficient? Also, what to do with 10 acres of fields? Will we succeed in protecting our views? Will be be mired in dreary rural isolation, or are there lively and literate people waiting for us to discover them? (yes) Will we go broke on this one?

Love, Josie