Retiring to the Willamette Valley - but where? (Gates: sale, house)

[Anna_K]

Thank you, Silverfall. I like your honesty and I hope that when we get down to actually looking at homes or properties the broker we work with is as knowledgeable and straight-talking as you are.

I've been spending some time on trulia.com. Their servers are very slow tonight and it's a frustrating treck. I was looking at Silverton and Dallas for no particular reason and found two modulars. One is trashed, a 1971 model. The other one was a 1999 and looked decent enough. Not many MHs for sale out there.

It doesn't have to be a modular. It can just as well be a regular house so long as it's just one floor and there's space to build the atrium. I have my heart set on that. Oh! Idea! We'll build the most fabulous atrium and just set up our 17' travel trailer as living quarters.

No?

Okay, maybe not

[Nell Plotts]

If you go back to designs of the 70s you can find designs with atriums that connect two living spaces. As a practical matter that would need to be a design build as the odds of finding one on the market are slim to none.

The only reason to buy a property with a mobile home sitting on it is to know that the site has a functioning well and septic system. Getting a mortgage on that property will be tough.

[Anna_K]

Yes, the '70s. The period in our lives when going green and back to nature and saving the planet became life styles for many, when food co-ops and health food stores and baking our own multi-grain bread and eating sprout-and-tomato sandwiches were how we lived, when we recycled and avoided plastics and grew our own whatevers and tried to minimize the impact we made on the earth.

The more things change the more they stay the same. I still bake bread, make yogurt, grow vegetables and then freeze them or can them, and I still want to live in a house that's as self-sustaining as I can afford to make it.

We do not want to start building a house from scratch. The modulars are a convenient way of incorporating living space with garden and light space. If the land x MH idea is not feasible, and I'm beginning to get that sense, then we'll look for an existing property that can be suitably and affordably restructured.

To get an idea of what we hope to achieve take a look at Garden Atriums of Poqoson in Virginia. The link goes to the anticipated net-zero utility conservation concept. It requires careful engineering and architectural design, especially when it's an add-on to an existing home.

[Larry Caldwell]

Originally Posted by Anna_K

We do not want to start building a house from scratch. The modulars are a convenient way of incorporating living space with garden and light space. If the land x MH idea is not feasible, and I'm beginning to get that sense, then we'll look for an existing property that can be suitably and affordably restructured.

I have a hard time believing there are only two lots with MH available in the valley. It's likely you are being two restrictive about acreage. There are very few lots in Oregon between 0.25 acre and 5 acre. Once people start subdividing, they want to squeeze as much profit as they can. I have never met a developer platting 1 acre lots. There are many MHs on 5 acre lots, some of them distressed or in foreclosure. Guaranteed, they are out there.

You have a very urban vision of your lifestyle. You apparently want a house where you never have to go outside. That's vanishingly rare in Oregon. The typical lifestyle here would be a house and a barn, maybe a greenhouse, and everything else outside. The Willamette Valley is one of the great garden spots of the world. People who live on acreage tend to love dirt.

[Anna_K]

Then I have completely misrepresented myself. That's awful!

Our lifestyle revolves around dogs, gardening, camping, bicycling, swimming, and maintaining our place in PA which means the regular upkeep of nearly 3 acres of greenspace and a small wooded area. Most of our time is spent outdoors.

The desire for an atrium is in consideration of and concession to the Oregon weather. We would like to maximize daylight even when it's grey. We would like to grow things even in the winter. The atrium is intended to meet our outdoors lifestyle during those times of the year when the outdoors is not hospitable.

We are not fond of snow and ice and cold below 25F and do spend much of our winters inside, and hate it. One of our several reasons for wanting to move to that part of Oregon is that its climate is far less extreme. Six months of rain and grey skies beat six months of bitter cold and three feet of snow under a six inch layer of ice.

"Atrium" really is just another word for "greenhouse", and a prerequisite for gardening is the love of dirt.

I don't know how I've managed to convey that we're urban types who prefer to live indoors. Nothing could be farther from the facts.

[Anna_K]

For what it's worth, I would like to give you a general idea of our current environment and have attached a Google sat image (I hope—not sure how that works).

The property is very hilly. There's a plateau where the house sits and another where we have the AGP and the garden. The rest is at grade, some inclines being steeper than others. The substrate is layers of shale with less than 2" of topsoil.

The straight lines of Blue Spruce were planted by the previous homeowner. We added 23 White Pines to the right of the curve in the driveway. This area was weedy and neglected and ugly for the neighbor to look at. To the left of that same curve we added two rock retaining walls which hold flower beds and where I grow squashes. The property there is too steep to mow safely, hence the conversion to growing space.

If you've ever tried to dig a hole big enough to plant a tree in shale you'll know that it can only be done with an iron bar, a pick axe, and lost and lots of manual labor. Or heavy equipment. We did it by hand.

The driveway leading to the house is 300' and steep. Snow and ice removal in winter is a b*tch. We do that by hand, too—with a snow thrower and shovels.

The garden on the upper plateau on the left (white fence with rabbit fencing) is all raised beds with the dirt brought in by the wheelbarrow load. As I said, shale and no topsoil.

The pool is surrounded by a birch grove through which we've made paths using years of grass clippings covered by mulch which we haul from the township's yard waste site. The 'Upper 40' are our dog training field; it's surrounded by wild black raspberry bushes and a fair stand of woods and is home to bunnies, deer, and groundhogs (marmots). We mow it and keep the poison ivy at bay as much as possible.

The white roof attached to the rear of the house covers the indoor/outdoor dog kennels, the grooming room, and the winter patio. To the left of that you see the deck and, out in the yard, the clothesline. Must have been laundry day when the Google plane flew over because there's wash on the line.

Urban lifestyle? Not really.

[Hawk J]

http://ts2.mm.bing.net/images/thumbnail.aspx?q=957900988849&id=c8dc5839ba7f3fd4f b4939fe90b5c603&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.paradiseconst .com%2froom4.jpg (broken link)

When my beloved mom retired her dream was to have a glass sunroom added to a small house. She searched until she found one with a Jacuzzi in the room. She loved her time spent in the room.

[mamh]

Anna
Welcome to Oregon,its a great place to live.
I've read all of this with great interest, 1.because we live in an 8 year old manufactured home here
in Salem and 2.I'm an avid gardener..
On the house issue I totally agree with Silverfall there are a lot of nice ones out there but I wouldn't touch one much older than ours with a 10 ft pole.they can turn into money pits...Ours was built locally and is in a manufactured home park with a small yard and room for our cocker play..
Gardening and green houses, lots of local places to buy greenhouses and people up here are such
knowledgeable gardeners and some have sit up so they can have cold frames, plus greenhouses and garden almost year a round...It makes it fun.
I think from talking to people out in Silverton they only have one manufactured home park..Silverton is a neat town.
When you come make time to visit my favorite dirt pile in Oregon, Oregon Gardens in Silverton..Its neat..
Well I've said my two cents ..Lots of luck with this big project..

[meestro]

Originally Posted by Anna_K

... Must have been laundry day when the Google plane flew over because there's wash on the line.

I am pretty sure these were taken via satellite imaging.

[Anna_K]

Hawk, that solarium is just gorgeous! You wrote in past tense . . . has your mother passed on? Mine died 13 years ago and I still find myself reaching for the phone to tell her something or ask a question about a recipe or gardening.

Your mom's sunroom, was it heated? Cooled or ventilated? It's an option we're exploring for an add-on or a conversion from an existing deck if the central atrium of our dreams isn't feasible.