
Buying a house is way more fun in theory than in practice. I love pouring over Zillow listings and criticizing the silly couples on House Hunters, but looking at real places that you’re actually considering buying with your own real money is weirdly less fun. All of a sudden the purchase price is a real thing, the photos are misleading at best and it feels almost certain that what you want does not exist in your price range.
Also, let’s be honest, most houses are terrible. I mean, I’m sure yours is really great, but most are a real bummer.
In the fall of 2016, my husband and I were looking for a non-bummer of a place with some land where we could do projects and feel like humans outside of the concrete cube that is NYC (and possibly escape the coming apocalypse). I’m sure you know the story, we started out looking for a place to buy in Brooklyn but the reality of New York real estate set in and I couldn’t fathom spending all that money on a dumpy one bedroom. Drive two hours north and let me tell you, things look very different.
I grew up splitting time between the suburbs and a 36 acre farm in upstate New York. My siblings and I went to school in a hoity toity suburb all week but every Friday we would pile into the car and spend two glorious days in the country. I spent my entire weekend at “the barn” where we would ride horses, hang out with friends, muck stalls and come home generally exhausted, filthy and happy.
I loved the contrast between our two homes growing up and so as we started to consider a property upstate, I was really excited at introducing that contrast into my life again. We decided to stay in our rental in Brooklyn and invest in a house in the woods in Duchess County.
I reviewed about 1,000 property listings and saw around 20 in person. I think we only went out viewing properties 3 times before finding the place we ended up buying.
While we were house hunting, I made a spread sheet to keep all the listings straight but also just to make me feel like I could be a little more quantitative about the whole situation. I looked at things like price per acre and price per square foot, whether a property had views or water and just some general notes.

For a while we considered just buying land and building a prefab house on the property. This was a fun idea — there are some pretty funky prefab designs out there, and prefabs generally bring the promise of being able to build in just a few months. But so much of our budget would be sunk into lame things like building a driveway (more expensive than you might think), septic systems and digging a well. For the plots we looked at, it was always a better deal to find a house and renovate it than start from scratch.
The reality was that when we saw the right place, we just knew right away. It was just so much better than anything else we had seen that the spread sheet just went out the window.
Here was the wishlist we sent to the real estate agent and where we netted out:
Our budget is up to 400k.-Purchase price 375k ✓
Must have:
land — 10+ acres — would prefer something more woods-y instead of huge clearings-26 acres, mostly wooded ✓
off the road - the house is on a convenient but low traffic, dirt road ✓
3+ bedrooms 2 bedrooms ✗
2+ bathrooms 1 bath ✗
Like to have:
mid century or contemporary ranch feel — willing to improve something that would easily update to a more modern style — I mean this thing was just like a weird 70’s cabin in the woods. Style = null ✗
water — YES this is why we bought the property. There are two large streams on the property. It’s beautiful. ✓
views — not really, the immediate property is beautiful, but there are no rolling vistas as it’s in a valley ✗
lots of light — mmm woods and lots of light are sort of contradictory. ✗
quiet road — yes. ✓
Nice to have:
proximity train — not really ✗
garage (detached is fine) — yep ✓
central air — nerp ✗
Hate:
super old (colonials and farmhouses) — def not a farmhouse ✓
brand new construction — not new construction ✓
huge fixer-uppers — I mean, we literally could not be doing more work on this house. ✗
additions or major structural improvements needed — this is the story of our renovation ✗
low ceilings — hah the ceilings are in fact pretty low. Jeeze. ✗
I can’t decide if this wish list is adorable or depressing looking back and knowing what we ended up with. I guess when you’re looking at homes on big pieces of land, every listing is just so different. You’re trying to account for location, land, views, home style and size, it’s hard to know exactly what you want, until you see it. And sometimes you see what you want and you realize you had it all wrong when you made your wish list.
Much of the wooded land in the Hudson Valley has been clear cut at some point in the last 200 years to be used as farm land and has since regrown. The result is a somewhat “young” woods. The trees are deciduous, spindley things and the ground is often pretty thick with brush and new volunteer trees. They can be very beautiful, especially in the fall with the changing foliage, but there is something special about an older forest. The trees are taller and more established. The undergrowth thins out for lack of light and they become easier to navigate.

Our property would be horrible farm land. Not only is the soil rocky, but there is very little of it. Dig a foot and you’ll hit shale or bedrock. You can’t walk five minutes without finding a huge hunk of granite on the ground. In fact, there is so much granite on the property that the lot across the street was acquired by a mining company before the town outlawed industrial mining, thank god! (More on that in a later post).

The result of all this is that it seems like our woods have not been clear cut to farm as recently (or maybe at all?) and feel old and established. In a way it feels more like Maine and less like the Hudson Valley. Since I was used to the typical rolling hills of farm land in the area, this seemed pretty special and unique.
The plot is about 70% woods and 30% a large meadow. The house sits in between the two with the meadow in front and woods in the back. There are two streams that run through the property and meet in the middle. The first is a small seasonal stream that in a dry summer will dwindle down to a small flow. The second is a much larger stream that runs all year long and gets pretty serious especially after the snow melt.

When we first looked at the house, we opened the car doors and I could immediately hear the sound of running water. While the real estate agent was trying to get the doors to the house open, I high tailed it down to the stream and had basically already decided this was our spot.

The water levels were low at the time (it was September after a very dry summer) and I could see that the bottom of the stream was bedrock, and not a silt-y muddy mess. Why is this so cool? I have no idea. I just felt like, this stream is clean like a pool not a mud hole! I loved it! Remember how “stream with bedrock not mud bottom” was not on my wish list?? Hard to know what you’ll love about a place until you see it.
The house sits about 30’ from this larger stream and if you sleep with the windows open you can hear the sound of the water all night long.

