Name: Paul Thurst

Location: Catskill Mountains,
New York, USA

The Home Owner’s blog is my story of home improvement and renovation of a run down ranch house located in the Eastern Catskill Mountains of New York State. These are observations and advice about living here, raising a family, and the things I am interested in. It is a constant learning experience, and I hope to pass some of the things I have learned on to my readers. With any luck at all, one of us will not make the same mistakes twice.

This house itself was built in 1965. It was occupied by a full time tenant until 1976 when it was sold to a fellow from Brooklyn, NY. It was then used as a summer home up until about 2002 or so. After that it sat empty and unused until we closed on it in February of 2004. From 1976 to 2004 it was uninhabited most of the time. In the winter, the heat was turned off and all the water was drained out of the plumbing system. As anyone with experience in building management knows, leaving systems unused is the worst thing you can do. Soon metal parts rust, bearings become uneven, seals go bad, fuel tanks get condensation inside them, and so on. Generally speaking, it is much better to use something that to leave it sitting unused and unmaintained.

The area of the Eastern Catskill Mountains is also known as the “Borscht Belt” because of the eastern European influences during the early 20th century. It was originally settled by the Dutch in the mid 1600’s. When the English took over in 1664 it became Ulster County, named after the Duke of York’s Irish Title, Earl of Ulster. The area suffered great deprivations during the Revolutionary war when the county seat, Kingston, was burned by the British in 1777. After that, raids by the Tories and their Indian allies drove most of the inhabitants from the area until after the hostilities had ended. During the 1800’s the area developed into an agricultural region. Many of the family farms in the area were settled and are still in the same families today.

We also had an experience with the New York State real estate system. Our “Home Inspector” did not find the termite damage in the additions of the house because he could not find the access point to the crawl space. I unfortunately, took the previous owner’s word (by way of a standard property disclosure form) that there was no termite damage, and water did not fill up the basement every time it rained, that the roof was 10 years old, and that the septic tank had been pumped out the year before. Of course, none of that was true. I was naive and when we began taking up the carpet we found a completely different house than what we thought we had bought.

Never the less, we pressed on and made the repairs, taking out a home equity loan to cover our costs after our renovation savings ran out.

In 2005 the New York State legislature passed Article 12-B Real Property Law Home Inspection Professional Licensing, which means that all home inspectors in New York must take an exam, be licensed and carry insurance. Hopefully this will help future home buyers avoid the needless problems we ran into.

All in all, I think we are coming out ahead because the house is coming along, and the market value should appreciate since we bought it. I have given up the notion that we will break even, much less, see a profit from this house, however, it is a nice place to live.

US Navy and US Coast Guard veteran, I have a school teacher wife, an 2 1/2 year old son, and a 5 year old daughter both of whom are much smarter than me.

E-mail: paul.thurst at gmail dot com

About the Blog

This blog uses WordPress blogging software, it is self hosted and self designed, for the most part. I like the WordPress blogging platform a lot. It allows the me to change, tinker, re-arrange things and generally feel like I am smarter than I actually am. I use several plug-ins to enhance the blog.

Plug Ins

1. Akismet, the ultimate spam comment killer.
2. All in one SEO pack, to optimize titles, meta content and so forth.  This allegedly helps with search engine traffic.
3. Feed Burner replacement feed, for all those taking my RSS feed, that is where it comes from
4. Google Site Maps XML, a site map generator to help Google, yahoo, et al index the blog faster
5. JAW popular posts, works with popularity contest plug-in below and displays them in the side bar.
6. Official Stat Counter plug in, works with Statcounter.com
7. One Click Plugin updater.  Just as it sounds, allows you to install and update plugins and themes with one click.
8. Popularity Contest, Parses all the posts and ranks them according to views, comments, track backs and pings. I had to modify this one to work with WordPress 2.5. Follow modification directions found here
9. Share This,  Social website bookmarking tool.  Makes it easy for people to bookmark a post to digg, facebook, furl, stumble, etc.
10. Site Map Tags, adds the tags to the XML site map.
11. Who Sees Ads? this allows me to manage my google ads better and select the proper audience for ad displays
12. Table Generator, generates tables in WordPress posts.
13. Yet-Another-Related-Posts-Plugin, does a good job at picking related posts by looking at titles, content and tags.  Displays a list at the end of the post and on the RSS feed.

This list may change from time to time.

Google Ads

I use Google Adsense ads to off set the costs of running this blog. Costs are hosting, domain name registration, internet service, time, etc. The Google Ads are relevant to the items discussed on the blog and therefor add value to those seeking to buy home improvement products or services. Google does use cookies to track ad clicks.

I have installed a plug-in called “Who Sees Ads?” This plug in allows me to exclude adds for certain user groups such as regular readers. A regular reader is someone who views at least 4 pages every 7 days. Ads are displayed for all those arriving via search engines and on any post that is over 30 days old.

Amazon

From time to time, I use Amazon.com by linking to my Amazon Affiliate Stores if I recommend a product. If you click on the link and buy the product I receive between 4-6 percent commission on that sale. This is another method for offsetting my expenses.

Acceptable behavior

I encourage all to comment on the subject material. There are, however, some ground rules:

1. Spam will be deleted.
2. If you want to place back links to your site in my comments section, I expect one in return.
3. Being abusive toward the site admin or other commenters is not tolerated.
4. Swearing is not tolerated.
5. Once a comment is posted, it becomes the property of The Homeowner’s blog and Uniform Circular Motion, LLC.
6. I reserve the right to either edit or delete comments to remove personal information or in the case of abuse as noted above.
7. Continued bad behavior will get you banned, not just from commenting, but from the whole site.

Use of content from this website:

The information on this site is published under Creative Commons License 2.5, share and share alike. You may use the RSS feed on another website, provided the back links to this site are kept intact. You may use the content from this site provided you cite either “www.catskillhouse.us/blog” or “Homeowners blog” as the source and provide a back link. If you use content from this site, you must maintain the share and share alike provision of the creative commons license (in other words, you can not copyright my original material to your site and prohibit others from using it).

Most of the pictures on this site are my original photographs and I retain the rights to them under the creative commons license cited above.

If you have any questions, contact me at the e-mail address listed above.

This Blog is published by Uniform Circular Motion, LLC who has the sole responsibility for its content.

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