Wanna buy our house?

It's yours for $75,000 plus points and closing costs, as is. It needs a roof, a central air & heating unit and it could use new windows. (You'll probably want at least new screens unless you're like us and keep the mozzies out with a nice stick of satya sai baba nag champa incense in the kitchen window. So long as there are curtains across the front windows after dark they pretty much stay out from that side too.) There's a stud wall between the kitchen/dining room and living room areas, leaving the communal part of the house very open and ready to be remodeled to your tastes. There's no carpet except in one closet (we'll take that up if you like), so you can do what suits you with the floors as well. (The kitchen and bathroom floors are covered with linoleum for now, but we're considering taking that up, which will not affect the purchase price of the house.) The kitchen and dining room walls are covered with neutral and rather plain wallpaper that I doubt you'll mind removing or covering and the walls in the rest of the house (master bedroom with a walk-in closet, two smaller bedrooms/offices/dens with good-sized closets and the fold-back doors that make 'em really easy to get into, furnace unit closet, front closet and living room) except the bathroom are (mostly a little chipped and dirtied) white, and the bathroom is, again, very neutral in basic peach paint with all it's usual accessory tones thrown in via one of those 'border' strips that runs around, in this case, the middle of the wall. I suppose it gives one something to look at when one ends up on the toilet longer than one expects and either doesn't have or finishes with one's reading material. :) Anyway, the bathroom has all your usual amenities, shower/tub (the drain doesn't keep the water in very well) with curtain rod, toilet, two wooden towel bars and one of those little towel rings for the hand towel, sink with cabinet beneath, mirrored medicine cabinet and a brass'n'glass two-bulb light fixture. The light switch needs fixing, but we may get to that in the next little while. (Again, anything we get done won't affect the purchase price.) The odor of cat lingers about the place a bit, but I think not irreversibly. The garage is finished with pegboard on two walls, two attic entries (one with pull-down stairs for storage and the other requiring a ladder but more convenient for service people - telephone and cable repairpeople and such), a workbench with cabinets above and below and a tall standing cabinet near the laundry fixtures for keeping brooms, mops and cleaning supplies. There's a wooden deck out the back door with benches most of the way around and a table with benches affixed to the center. The shed down in the back could use a little work on the eaves unless, like us, you'd hope to encourage bats to take up residence. (No such luck on that, though the local bat population does seem to be doing a bit better this year than in our first three summers here.) Otherwise it too is nicely finished with pegboard all around inside and another nice work area with a storage shelf underneath. The shed rafters are open providing further storage and the double doors open all the way for maximum entry, exit and airflow capacity, and a fairly wide view. It also has a south(ish)-facing window, which warms it nicely in winter. The lot is a large quarter-acre, mostly in the back (the house sits on a cul-de-sac in the rear of Deerfield subdivision, very quiet) where it's surrounded by a six-foot privacy fence, easily breached by rabbits, cats, snakes and other such small animals. (Of course, it slopes so that the fence offers little to no true privacy, but it does an effective job keeping dogs in and protects the hobbyist whose hobby involves something others may find unsightly from prosecution under local eyesore ordinances.) Established plants include but are not limited to: raspberries, blackberries, wild strawberries, clover, goldenrod, ragweed, several trees (maples, pines, willow, pear {decorative}, elderberry, privet, eastern redcedar and probably others), this hedge outside the front window - Japanese holly, I think - that's commonly used in landscaping (like privet) though it's also considered a threat to native plants, coreopsis great and small, showy and common evening primrose (thanks Rae! :) ), wild sweet pea, horse nettle, dandelion, prickly lettuce, purslane, sunflowers, poke, watercress, yarrow, gladioli (did not flower this year), wild rhubarb, sour/curly/yellow dock, honeysuckle, cattails, Virginia creeper, poison ivy, hummingbird/trumpet vine, daisy fleabane, Shasta daisies, lady's thumb, Pennsylvania smartweed, common and mouseear chickweed, purple deadnettle, star of Bethlehem, henbit, horseweed (I think), wild garlic/onion/leeks, tulips that come up every year but never bloom*, a wide variety of grasses and a host of others I'm not remembering or haven't identified. Plants that are showing up more strongly each year but I wouldn't call them established include but are not limited to: sheep's sorrel, daylilies, gotu kola, bittersweet and again a bunch I don't know what they are including this thing that was just a bunch of big hairy deeply lobed leaves last year, got a couple feet tall and died back. Came up this year in early spring and hasn't stopped growing. It's easily eight feet tall now (mid-June), 'though the maple whose branches it's trying to grow through may be stunting it a bit, and it just keeps producing at the leaf junctures these beautiful trumpet-shaped white flowers with a pink wash inside, as well as producing bud-covered shoots from lower junctures; looking forward to learning more about that one and any others.** Anyway, plants that we've just planted (don't know how they'll fare in the long run) are a salvia with purple flowers, catnip, Eucalyptus cinerea and Artist Purple Ageratum.*** We're in the process of cutting down and clearing out the pampas grass as best we can. I'm hoping to grow various types of vines on the mounds and those tall plants I talked about earlier, as well as some coreopsis, and I'm hoping if I keep cutting the grass back they'll drown it out eventually and make nice decoration on the mailbox.**** The mailbox is a big rural one for packages and such, plain black with a red flag. The house, thus far, is yellow with trim that's blue fading to pink. It would like new garage doors (there are spots on the garage door where the paint is coming off right now), but the garage door opener is only one year old. The front door is one big pane of plexiglass and stands up to big (140+- pound) dogs scratching and pawing at it some so long as they keep the jumping up and hitting it to a minimum, and the southern exposure means lots of light and warmth in the winter and the minimum possible sun in summer. Winter tends to bottom out around 20° Fahrenheit during the day, 10 or maybe 0° at night, and summers get up to the hundred-and-teen °s on occasion, but mostly fluctuate from the upper eighties to low hundreds, with high humidity. More on summer later.

Deerfield subdivision here was started about twenty years ago and is pretty much done being developed. The woods down back will remain as the area on the other side has already been built up and the creek runoff is pretty important so there'll be no 'dozing it down and filling it in. They're kind of junky, got a couple old mattresses down there and other crap, and there are dangerous snakes and spiders (copperheads and black widows the most prevalent respectively, or most often seen by me anyway), but kids and critters play down there a lot and have a good time, seldom turn up dead. (I've never heard of it happening with a kid, but that doesn't mean it hasn't or couldn't. I have lost a couple critters down that direction.) They do a considerable amount of hacking with axes and shooting with pellet guns, or just crashing around and hanging out down there from the time the weather warms 'til it gets overly hot and the understory fills in too much. I go down sometimes and forage a bit, especially in early spring. The subdivision is built on a loop, so it won't be getting deeper and generating more traffic that way, and as I mentioned earlier, being on the back of the loop as we are from the nearest main road, Gum Branch (a mile or less away), things are fairly quiet back here. I'd worry less about traffic accidents than being landed on by a helicopter, which while highly unlikely could conceivably happen. There's a lot of helicopter traffic, some of it very low, but mostly only in daylight hours and not all the time. I don't find it terribly disturbing most of the time; I think most of us learn to largely disregard it. Anyway, an Osprey crashed a mile from here, a quarter-mile from some friends of ours, but the pilots are really well-trained at crashing away from populated areas so even when it does happen it's still just an infinitesimal possibility. As of this writing, June 16, 2003, we're a mile outside Jacksonville (North Carolina) city limits. There's talk of annexing us (and if it doesn't happen this round it will before too long, as Jax is growing exponentially) which will mean paying more taxes, but will also mean a significant increase in property value over a fairly short term. Due to the military and to local growth, property in the area tends to gain value steadily regardless of the wider economic system.

Twelve miles from the Atlantic coast we're close enough to enjoy it but far enough to miss out on the tourist traffic. If you're entitled to military benefits and base privileges, all the better. Camp LeJeune and New River Air Stations have beaches open only to the military, and LeJeune has great shopping. In any case, Jacksonville has all the basics (excepting any alternative medical treatments you may desire - NC is not the place to find those, but if you're an herbalist you can treat most anything right out of the yard here), and nearby are a variety of types of communities. Wilmington is a college town but also an acting/film production environment. Swansboro combines local atmosphere with tourist trendiness. New Bern capitalizes on it's historic flavor, but the whole area is one of deep history. (North Carolina was the original seat of the United States government.) Emerald Isle caters to an exclusive set and wealthy tourists. Hilton Head is a day trip south, the Outer Banks a day trip north, the mountains a day trip west and east is just ocean. As you may have gathered, this is not the place to be if you're a lover of the nightlife (I think that's Jacksonville, Florida :) ), but there's more than ample entertainment for day-trippers and the slightly reclusive. (Well, being on the slightly reclusive side of things I can't really say for certain that there's *ample* entertainment for day-trippers, but if you like boating, fishing, hiking, driving, exploring, hunting, shooting, swimming and touring, it seems like you'd never run out of things to do. At night it's pretty much restaurants, bars and tittie bars. I think there are a couple local car clubs. Lots of folks motocross and off-road (beach and muddin'). Oh, golf of course, lots of golf. A couple tattoo parlors whose quality I'm not qualified to determine. And growing all the time. (I won't say it's not a little seedy, but the potential is tremendous for someone suited to the climate.) (And hey, what's wrong with a little seediness? Seeds are just part of nature's bounty. :) ) It's a very diverse area, with the military bringing in folks from all over the world, but since there's already a common community (the military) into which most folks who are not locals arrive, there's little cultural diversity exhibited around town. Jacksonville is an actual melting pot in which all ingredients take on the consistency of some base substance (as the wax in a candle) and are stirred into a common whole. (Or, and this is entirely possible, I just don't get out enough to see the diversity. :) ) And of course, there's always church. There are several sects to choose from, mostly fairly classic Protestant types (Southern Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, a few Lutheran churches) with a smattering of Catholics, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and Wiccans/pagans thrown in. Some blocks are just church after church, there are the couple that thrive downtown next to the 'gentleman's clubs', and otherwise it's mostly a 'church on every corner' kinda town so you've got lots to choose from, could probably find a service any time of the day or night. (Well, day. :) )

It would be a good idea to have your own business, something portable, or a highly desired skill or specialty, or the capital to support yourself through the first while if you want to open a new brick-and-mortar shop of some sort. The local job market is not replete with opportunities on any level, although whenever the major chains move in as they've been doing regularly since we arrived they create a swell of employment in several areas of skill and experience. Lately the movement has been toward attracting high-tech industry complementary to military applications. Aircraft design and manufacture is on the table, but if we can meet air and water quality standards semiconductors would be a reasonable bet, too. (Meeting those standards may be difficult, but it would give eastern Carolina a reason to continue recent trends toward environmental responsibility.) Or, perhaps you're on your way in with one of those major chains, looking for a house that wants decorating in a neighborhood that's clean but not too pretentious, close to what you need and enough of what you want. (Ah, and I mustn't neglect to mention the requisite IHOP by the mall and a Waffle House on every downtown corner. :) )

Last but not least, there are the hurricanes. The power here isn't all that stable (and by the way, the wiring in the house could use a good going over; we're not sure what works and what doesn't, just that the parts we use do and some others don't), but a good UPS and a generator will get you through the worst outages that don't come with something requiring evacuation. We went through the Dennis/Floyd/Irene trilogy here, which flooded the rest of the eastern third to half of the state, and our county was an island (as in the only one not evacuated and flooded - the military did their homework before building here :) ). My personal opinion is that there's worse to come, but by that time the idea of 'property ownership' will (I hope) seem a bit ridiculous anyway. In the meantime, you can sit these storms out and watch the splendor. This is one of the only natural 'disasters' to unfold over days and even weeks sometimes. It's really something. In fact, if you're a weather, plant and/or wildlife buff, this area has vast riches for you to explore year-round.

So if you're interested in buying our house and little bit of land here, we'd love to hear from you. I'll probably add notes as I think of them, and if you have questions please email me.

Peace

* Brenda Jenkins of Keep Onslow (County) Beautiful says they're too deep. Or maybe she said too shallow. But she said they probably don't much like the location either, so maybe moving them would make them bloom. She said tulips rarely do well here though anyway.

** I believe this may be a form of hibiscus.

*** The salvia's dead, the catnip and Ageratum hangin' in by a thread. Eucalyptus seems fine thus far and a Franz Schubert Garden Phlox we planted recently is still standing.

**** The pampas proved quite easy to kill. We cut the top back and I went out once or twice a week for the next three or four weeks and trimmed it off wherever it tried to grow and at least for now it appears to be done trying. A blackberry vine is already creeping around one.

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The yards are registered with the National Wildlife Federation's [updated link (February 4, 2014): National Wildlife Federation] Backyard Wildlife Habitat Program [updated link (February 4, 2014): Certified Wildlife Habitat].