Our house in Washington was as sold as it could be before the closing finalizes it and at that point we will be handing over the keys to the new owners. We had done some looking on the internet at properties in Ohio, but hadn't wanted to get too attached to anything that might get sold before we were ready. We had looked in Oregon just to see what we could see and now we were ready to go find a house to buy. We were pulling a trailer to get the first load to Ohio even though we had nowhere to put the contents except a storage locker courtesy of U-Haul. They know we'll have to rent another truck to get it out of there.
The scenery is just east of Bozeman, Montana and it made me want to stop and look for our little farm there, but we ignored the impulse and kept on rolling. We saw this house in Ashland the second day we were looking and it seemed just about perfect in it's attibutes except that it wasn't near the folks we wanted to be near in Pike county. So we spent four days in southern Ohio trying to find something that would measure up to it. We found one lovely house that we made a bid on, knowing that it was much bigger than we wanted or needed, and that deal fell through when we realized that some expensive work needed to be done to finish the house.
So we went back up to northern Ohio to look at this house again and when we were having trouble making up our minds, Ken made a strong argument for erring on the side of caution by buying a house that seemed to fit our needs. And his sister Carol reminded us that even though we wouldn't be extremely close to our friends in southern Ohio, we would be a lot closer that we were in Washington state.
The 7 acres are about 1/3 wooded (behind the pond) and are in a long narrow plot. I've shown the north and south boundries (the browner mow lines) and the pond is visible in each of the shots. The garage is attached to the house by a breezeway and I have plans to make it my studio. We got airline tickets the same day we signed the papers for the house so we are back in Washington now, packing like crazy and hoping (probably fruitlessly) that we will be able to fit the rest of what we want to keep into a rental van.
