Homes, Homes on the Range?

Joplin, Mo., where many homes were destroyed by the May 22 tornado (photo by J.B. Forbes)

How lucky am I? We have a fantastic 100-year-old (this year!) St. Louis home that we've rehabbed (okay, it's not perfect, but it's close enough). We own my mother's pristine little 1920s condo in Louisville, with windows on three sides looking out on mature maples, sweet bay and conifers; she feels like she's in a tree house even though she's on the first floor, and she loves it! And we're able to pursue yet another home -- an in-town cottage in Hamilton, Montana! Some people have lost homes, lost everything, and we've been just frugal enough and lucky enough to be able to add on.

If we got the little Montana place, I am thinking we'd rent it much of the year through a wonderful woman there, and "book" our own visits in the heat of July and August (here), plus a month or so in winter for cross-country skiing and other outdoor winter stuff. But we're still struggling with how we might divide our time.

I think about all of these options and how incredibly lucky we are to have them when I visit the photo exhibit of Joplin's tornado-flattened homes.  My former colleagues at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, senior staff photographer Jim Forbes...

the lovely Mr. Forbes

 ... and (Pulitzer Prize finalist) Robert Cohen, put on this showing with help from the newspaper and from Schiller's Camera to raise money for Joplin. I missed the party and silent auction but stop by the next day and fall in love with the horrible beauty of these shots.

(photo by Robert Cohen)

I can't stop thinking about them, and when I email Forbes about one of his images, he says that if I match the silent-auction price, I can get it, framed!! What a deal. Happy Birthday to me, and the proceeds go to Joplin! Can't wait. 

Meantime, I also can't wait to hear about the Hamilton, MT, house.


Do we really get it?  (Do we really get it?) Maybe we weren't meant to have the house. It is all so complicated.

Oy vey is the only, short-hand way to describe it.  We are trying to be the best -- VERY BEST -- consumers, getting inspections on ALL of the pertinent issues before closing on what may be our "last, best place." And yet, those very inspections may be our undoing.

They turn up many unforseen problems with the cute little house: an aging electrical system that may have been grandfathered in to the local code, in an otherwise beautifully refurbished home, circa 1939; a decades-old shingled roof needing to be replaced; but most upsetting, a basement radon reading of 16 (normal levels shouldn't go above 4, according to the EPA, the Montana Dept. of Human Health and Public Services and other authorities; YIKES!).

granite in nearby Bodgett Creek canyon

Montana is a surrounded by and built on top of gorgeous granite -- a natural source of radioactivity. It is "a terrible beauty," to hijack the phrase and its meaning from the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. But it IS horribly wonderful -- all of that decaying radioactive uranium in those gorgeous upthrusts of steel-gray rock.

It's kind of funny, too. Only one in ten houses that we looked at had been radon tested. The tested one had, indeed, gone through a radon-mitigation process. We wonder if Montanans don't worry about such things, take it as a part of life in the Bitterroot. In fact, online, I found this funny little Montana "resort" site featuring so-called Radon Health Mines, at http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2143. People with arthritis and lupus (me on both counts, but very mild cases) go there, the story says, for "natural" treatments!?! They do keep children and pregnant women out. I would never partake.

And yet, it makes me think again and again about the radon. We've made pre-sale radon mitigation a condition of the cottage purchase -- no negotiating. We've also asked for a price reduction to factor in the new roof and electrical work that we would have to do.


(Crickets.)  The sellers are very quiet. We get occasional emails from our real-estate broker saying they're "still pondering... it may be a day or two yet before they respond." 

Meanwhile, I go back to my life in St. Louis. I get approved for an American Express credit card (whoopee!! don't tell me, Equifax, that I don't have a credit rating!!!).  We're slogging past the spate of 100+ temperatures (103 yesterday) and are expecting a "cool spell" of high temps only in the mid-90s.  Out I go today, to work a little in our scorched garden and then on to a meeting for Brightside St. Louis (see a new promotional image for my favorite daffodil-supplying, not-for-profit, below).

http://operationbrightside.org/

And we wait. And we wait. And we wait. I'm thinking that I very well may be planting fall crops of lettuces and kale in my St. Louis garden by the time we hear back from Montana. Oy, again...