My entire woodworking career, to the extent you could call it that, can be traced back to a decision to go water skiing in 1999. My wife and I were hanging out at Sussex Airport one hot summer day when a local buddy and next door hangar mate invited us to go water skiing at his lake house. My wife is adventurous, loves maps and, bucking stereotype, encourages my instincts for short cuts and other intuitive detours that sometimes get us lost but almost always interestingly so. My best buddy M.L. used to call it "bird dogging", a reference to the manner in which a hunting dog will traverse back and forth over territory until it finds its prey. On this fateful day, she casually supported my desire to try a back road to the lake that I had found flying over the area.
So there we were, tooling along a beautiful country road in Northern New Jersey in a black 1983 VW GTI. Before your brain kicks beautiful and New Jersey out as an oxymoron with visions of the Newark oil tank farms, I request that you graciously suspend judgment and remember that the powers that be must have named it the Garden State for a reason. Because indeed it is. Our journey took us past one lush farm after another, mostly well kept. We rounded a bend on the crest of a hill and came upon two majestic, but dilapidated dairy barns, a smaller building and and a classic center hall colonial with a slate roof. It looked like a farm scene out of a childhood story book. Then I noticed 3 toilets in the front yard and farm equipment rusting and scattered about. Nature was reclaiming this place. My wife saw a sign - "Farm for Sale" and innocently proclaimed "we should buy that". We talked about the barns being gorgeous and she wrote the owner's number down. I promised to call on Monday.
We were not looking to buy anything at the time. We were renting a very small apartment in NYC. We had a baby on the way. My career was in flux. The economy was overheated and showing signs of strain. We could not afford it. My wife was more like Eva Gabor than Laura Engels. Big Jim saw the place and told me the following and I quote: "One word for you ole buddy - D8". Now if D8 doesn't ring a bell for you, it is among the larger bulldozers made by one Caterpillar Inc. of Aurora, Illinois, about 80,000 lbs worth. Big Jim also met the seller - whose mannerisms could resemble one Mr. Hainey from a popular 60's sitcom. The sight of me (the lawyer), Mr. Hainey and my wife (a.k.a. Eva Gabor), in front of the ruins of this old farm, toilets and all, was too much for Big Jim. I am pretty sure I could hear him laughing as he drove away.
You won't be shocked to learn that we bought the farm. We took the whole thing about as seriously as one might go buy a new bed. One minute my wife and I were driving down a country road and the next thing you know we owned a farm in rural NJ. Mr. Hainey and I bonded and he gave us a very fair deal on the place. Financing and a little windfall fell into place so we could make the down payment and close. I chalk it up to divinity, because we couldn't have planned the whole thing if we tried.
On the topic of divine destiny, a grown son of one of the characters at Sussex Airport claimed for a time that he was the Messiah. He even convinced two young women to follow him around. The harem and worshiping thing was kinda cool, but overall he gave me the creeps and I allowed him wide berth. Big Jim was always really nice to him. One day I asked Big Jim - "why are you so nice to him - he is really strange." Jim looked at me seriously and said - "you know he claims to be Jesus?". "Yes" I replied. "Well", Big Jim said with a wink, "you never know, the son of a bitch might be right."
Between the time that we found the farm and closed, we did research other places in the area. I looked at several really nice pieces of land, but nothing that had the barns and the charm that the Hainey farm had. We originally talked about taking down the house and building a new house elsewhere on the property. The house was such an afterthought that we never properly inspected it before the close. I looked thru the basement with a builder buddy but there were tenants in the house and Mr. Hainey didn't want us bothering them. Another builder told us the slate roof was bad. All in all, it looked like the house wasn't worth saving and that Big Jim would, once again, turn out to be right.
The closing was delayed for many months because I had asked the seller to have the tenants move before we bought the place. NJ has wonderful landlord tenant laws if you are the tenant. I didn't want to play landlord. The house had been split into two living units, complete with separate entrances and two heating systems. On one side lived the cat lady, with 15 or cats, who kept loudly proclaiming to my wife that the house was haunted. Eva did not like the stories. The other side of the house had a family living in it that moved in a few weeks after we signed - nice right? The father owned a local business and they were supposedly in the process of rehabbing a house on a nearby lake and would be out shortly.
The cat lady left without any ado and we got to look at her side of the house. Eva was not impressed. It was a mess and wreaked of cat urine. Did I mention that Eva was an executive at a fragrance company and has an incredible nose? The floors were all covered with 70's shag carpeting that hadn't been cleaned in decades. There was old graffiti on the walls and flat purple trim upstairs. Purple is my favorite color, but they should have used high gloss paint and the shade was off. All of the muntins in the beautiful handmade wavy glass windows on the first floor were clawed up. I guess the cats couldn't stand the smell either.
Our local business owner kept promising he would get out "next" month. Mr. Hainey had never taken the "farm for sale" sign down and was getting frequent inquiries as the real estate market began the rise that would lead us into our current mess. Nearing the end of our contract term, we had to either waive the tenant condition or let go of the farm. By then, we (maybe it was I) had fallen in love with the place and so closed with a tenant in June 2000, almost a year to the date after we first saw the for sale sign.
The local business owner was not nice at all after we closed. He would not pay his rent. His wife said the place was a "dump". I had to agree but wanted them out. Four months later, on Memorial Day weekend, they finally moved. We showed up early and found a refrigerator - technically our refrigerator - on the front porch. They left garbage everywhere. I wanted to raise hell, but my wife wisely told me to let it go. We got the keys and finally got to really look around inside. The house was resplendent in Pepto Bismol pink, 70's faux wood paneling over plaster walls and deep pile shag. I felt like an owner.
Peter and Leslie, friends from NYC showed up later that day to take a tour of the house and potentially "help" clean. I roped Peter into removing all of the carpets with me. Old pink shag is not a thing of beauty. The whole house was filthy. We threw away 30 pizza boxes. We threw away bedding. We threw away a paper Darth Vader head that was staring menacingly from its perch on the landing at the top of the stairs. In a fit of insanity, we kept a three foot long stuffed lion that we found in a bedroom. It sits, as I write this, molding in the barn. We opened windows and tried to air out the cigarette stench and cat urine. We stepped back and looked. Beneath the grime, the faded and chipped paint, the broken balusters and clawed trim, was a beautiful old farm house. Or at least it was beautiful to me.
....to be continued
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