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In other news, construction continues apace on the former empty lot across the street from my home. We knew at some point someone would buy that lot and attempt to build on it, but we were also assured by our neighbors that they'd been told it was an unbuildable lot. They'd considered buying the lot so no one could build on it, but they figured that since it was supposedly unbuildable, no one else would buy it.
It looked that way for a while, too. People would come out to look at it, and then withdraw their bids to buy the lot. "For Sale" signs went up fairly regularly, and came back down again just as regularly. My neighbors loved that little lot; their seven-year-old daughter refers to it as "The Hundred-Acre Wood" from the Winnie the Pooh stories.
Here's what the lot looked like when they first began to clear it. I've been really surprised by the workers' schedule. My neighbor tells me they started clearing at 4pm on a Friday, and the folks doing the clearing work seven days a week. Sometimes they don't leave until the early evening, although I can't fathom what they're doing that late because it's completely dark by 5pm now.
Unfortunately some of the trees have messed up my neighbors' fence as they've come down. Apparently one tree took out an entire panel, while another tree sort of skidded along the outside of the fence and removed a plank. It's a bit of a bummer because that fence is brand spankin' new, not even a year old. It'll be fixed by those responsible for busting it, but it shouldn't have happened.
My neighbor now parks her Volkswagen minivan/camper on the street because she's so afraid that it'll get ruined like the fence. They've completely cleared all the trees away, and there is nothing protecting her property anymore from what's going on in the former empty lot. I don't blame her for moving it.
Now this is what the empty lot looks like. Yesterday they installed the septic tank and covered it. My neighbor tells me that for some reason, they're installing the drainfield uphill from the tank, so the waste will have to be pumped upwards. I wouldn't want that for my own home -- just one more thing to have to break down. But I guess if that's the only way to get a drainfield for the septic, that's the way it has to go.
It's weird being able to see my friend R's home. I used to have to go all the way out to my mailbox and peer through the trees to see if she was home before I called her. But now I can see her house from my couch! I can even see that her house is sort of green, where before I thought it was blue.
It's amazing to me how much they've been building here in my neighborhood lately. My home was one of the first to be built, back in 1981. They started here with small ranch-style (or, as they call them here in Washington, "ramblers") homes, most of which are two- or three-bedroom homes with one bathroom. Then in the late 80s to early 90s, they filled up most of the easily-built lots with three-bedroom, two- or two-&-a-half-bath homes. For the first couple of years that I lived here, there was no more building. There just wasn't anything on which to build easily, and the nice part of it was we had a lot of wooded lots to make the neighborhood feel less like a development and more like a collection of homes.
Then a year or so ago, building really took off here. The yellow house a block up from my house was a wooded lot just a year ago. There's a house on the corner of the entrance into the neighborhood where there had just been trees, and now another house is going up just across the street from it. Two homes have been built in the last year on such steep plots of land that one has no backyard to speak of, just a sheer dropoff, and the other has its back to the street in order to situate it to the best advantage on its tiny lot. A house is going up on the "main drag" of my neighborhood which is so huge that it has very little yard. Another house is being built just four houses up the street that is so close to its neighbor that if the owner of the original house sits out on his back deck, he could probably touch the walls of the new home. This past summer that lot was nothing but blackberry bushes, and I'd pick the berries to munch on as Grace and I went for a walk.
The nice part about all of this is it means that the housing market here probably won't go down any time soon. Yes, there are a ton of new houses going up, but most of them are on odd pieces of land. My house, while small, has a ginormous side yard just begging for playground equipment for a small child. It's also set back from the street a bit, so you have more privacy. Also there are so few lots to build on anymore, and people just keep moving here. So hopefully next summer when I want to sell the house, it won't be hard at all, and we can get an excellent price for it.
Keep your fingers crossed!!!
PS: We are most likely moving to Tennessee next summer so that Kurt can be a detailer. That's the guy who lets you know which duty stations are available for you to move to, and he gets the paperwork going so you can transfer. All the detailers are based in Tennessee, so that's where we will go! It will be odd to be somewhere without a huge body of water, but I've heard Tennessee is really pretty. And maybe my good buddy Art will come to visit and show me around Graceland!!!