A look at the Homestead (it’s been a year!)
Starting in downtown Silverdale, we take one of the roads out of town that works its way up the hill towards Seabeck. Along the way, there’s a well-hidden road we turn onto that takes us past our neighbors until we reach the postal box location, and then we start down our driveway, which curves around and down past our fruit pasture and then the place I’ve come to call the Homestead comes into view.
I had to drive into town a couple of weeks ago to renew our P.O. Box at the UPS store — that’s the Bucklin Hill address we use as our public address. That made me realize that it’s been a year since we first saw this property and decided we were going to move to Washington and live here. It seems impossible that it’s been a full year since we started that process, but at the same time, this place feels like home, and it made me realize I never got around to writing something introducing this place to you, and so it’s definitely time for me to do this.
The house was built in the late 1980’s, and is part of about a dozen parcels of land that were developed about that time. It sits on about 2.3 acres, and adjacent to it is another parcel of about that size that was left undeveloped, which we also bought. So the homestead lives on about 4.5 acres, most of which is undeveloped and covered with a nice mix of trees, including cedars, hemlocks, alders, and madrone.
The second parcel we own is left undeveloped, but there is a path through the property so we can explore and keep an eye on it. Because my knees limit my walking these days, I typically do that on an ATV (a Kawasaki Brute 300), that I also use to haul stuff around the property and between the upper and lower levels of the house. I figured I would want one to manage this place, but I’ve found it even more useful than I expected to.
The driveway is about 1/3 of a mile from the mail box to the house, and along it there’s a small orchard of fruit trees — about ten trees, mostly pears and apples. Also along the driveway are a number of rhododendron bushs, which here in spring as I write this, are now blooming. There’s a bit of grass around the house, and a couple of gorgeous japanese maple trees, but overall, the landscaping here is designed to be minimal and low-maintenance. One of the first things I did was find a landscaping firm that would take care of it, but also had the ability to help me manage the woodlot, and we have inspected it and pulled down some danger trees this spring to help make sure it stays healthy — but also kept undeveloped. My long-term goal is to improve the property as habitat for birds and critters, and we’re talking about some projects to bring in more native plants in the landscaped areas, including some berry producers.
When you walk in the front door, the first things you see is this etched glass image of Mount Ranier, which blew me away when I first saw it, and still does today.
If you look closely, you’ll see the artist included a bald eagle, one of the local favorite birds of mine.
The entry leads into a large great room. Also upstairs is a nice, large master suite, and a second smaller bedroom. The great room has a dining area, and a door that leads out to our deck. We also have a nice, large kitchen and a mud/laundry room at the side entrance in the breezeway between the house and the garage. We have set up a small computer area in the dining space, which Laurie uses for day to day things, and holds our cookbook collection of somewhere around 400 volumes. (we moved a LOT of books).
Stairs lead downstairs to a granny flat. From what I’ve been able to figure out, about 15 years ago, this house underwent some major updates, and a downstairs basement area was upgrade to living space with two small bedrooms, a nice cozy common area, and a small, basic kitchen. The previous owners lived here for about 20 years, and it looks like this second space was set up for one of their parents to live in. What Laurie and I have done is turn this into our office spaces (and we even have our own break room!). I’m in one of the bedrooms, and Laurie took the dining area of the common space downstairs for her main office, which is where we’ve added in storage for her hockey literature collection — there are two vertical files, nine drawers total, full of historical material that she’s slowly organizing for some research she has planned. Downstairs also holds our hockey collection of books, somewhere around 500 volumes, including a full set of Trail of the Stanley Cup.
There’s a small patio outside of the downstairs area, which is where I’ve set up my feeders, and I can stare out my office window at it during the day as I work. I keep both binoculars and a camera handy down here, and both come in useful. In the first year, we’ve seen 50 species on the property, which is pretty awesome. For comparison, we had 63 species seen on our santa clara property, but it took us about 15 years to get to that number. On a typical day, I can see 15-16 different species, from the very common Dark-Eyed Junco to the very large and dinosaur-like Pileated Woodpecker. We have confirmed that the juncos have fledged chicks here this spring, but we also believe that two species of chickadees, purple finches, western tanagers, pine siskins, american robins, two species of swallows and red-breasted nuthatches are nesting on the property.
The property is also home to a number of critters: we see rabbits constantly, and two species of squirrels, and we have occasional visits by raccoons, coyote, and the occasional bear. While the bears have a bad tendency to destroy the bird feeders if we don’t bring them in at night, all of this is kinda nice to see using the property. So far, thankfully, nobody’s decided to rummage through the trash cans, which we find kind of surprising, and so far, no deer, although we know they are in the area.
The garage has turned into my project space. It’s a full two car garage, plus a shop space of about 15x20 feet. I’ve added my Mac Mini up here, which is used for project design and ultimately planned to drive a 3D printer when I add it in, and I have a nice work area that I can easily set up for tabletop photography and use for general project work. the shop, while still currently in chaos mode, is starting to be functional, but right now needs a couple of days of serious organizing and tool alignment before I can really start building projects in it. I’ve brought in my table saw and miter saw, both on stands until I can build custom setups for them, and a drill press and bandsaw, plus dust collection. I’ll go into more detail on this once it’s a bit further along, but it’s making slow progress to being a real shop now.
Some final thoughts
After having owned the house for a year, and been Washington residents since the end of July, I think we made a great choice of home to spend the next phase of our life in. We’re fairly isolated from our neighbors — you have to look through the trees carefully to see any sign of anyone else — but we’ve met most of them and everyone is quite nice. We are, for all practical purposes about 15 minutes from downtown Silverdale, and as I like to say, 20 minutes from everything in Silverdale. It’s a nice, solid, town that looks to be in good shape economically and it has the resources we want handy. We found the house in good shape, and we’ve spent this first year getting all of the systems (well, septic, etc) checked out and vetted, and making some improvements, like new refrigerators, a freezer in the garage, and replacing the old stoves with new pellet stoves (which I love). The one project we haven’t had done, since we’ve struggled to find someone able to do it, is adding a stair lift between the two levels, but I keep working on that. Otherwise, there’s very little about this place I want to change.
Oh, there is one strange decision I plan on looking into at some point. When they built the shop onto the garage, they added a toilet — but no sink or running water. I’m not entirely sure why they didn’t add a sink of some time at the same time, and at some point I may try to have that added, or have the toilet removed. we’ll see.
And as I write this, it’s spring, and while they are late blooming this year — it’s been a cool and damp spring in the northwest — the Rhodies are blooming, and if you ever needed another reason to move to this region, this is it.
