Friday. We have a walkthrough at 8:30 am, before breakfast, with Tara. The house looks very clean. Tara and Jake, her little boy, are loading the last of their wood into a trailer. We are not sure what needs to be done at a walkthrough. But Sam asks a lot of questions about the solar water heater. Tara gives us the contact information for the guy that installed the system. We decide to keep on the space at the community garden. Tara explains the wiring – there’s one glitch, the outlet in the stairwell is controlled by a switch. She planned the wiring herself and they used 12-gauge wire.
We walked the property line and she showed us the pins and the sight lines. Surveyors mark the trees by taking an axe to the bark. The wound heals over as a vertical scar which they can use in the future to locate the boundary lines. “Trees don’t move” unless of course they are cut down or blown over.
We go get breakfast after the walkthrough at the Village Cafe and then go to Jeff’s. While waiting for the closing, we are distracted by a trip to the Rocking Chair Goat Farm with a short hike out to Todd’s Point with Jeff and Roberta. We see lots of mushrooms, which Roberta thinks are jack o’lanterns, not good to eat.
At the bank, we are ushered in to the “Red Room” which is decorated like a sitting room in a fancy mansion. Tara and Jesse are already there, and so in Donna. But the woman from the closing company is not there yet. She arrives about 20 minutes late. While waiting, Sam entertains everyone with stories about bees. And we find out the well is about x feet deep and flows x gallons per minute. And the septic was pumped out May XXXX and should be done about every 5 years. Tara gives me an assortment of keys, some work and some don’t.
The woman arrives and we start signing papers. We sign a lot of them. The only complication is that they have us as getting our own title insurance, which Sam had already told them we’re not getting. They have to amend the paper work and amend the final amount due at closing, but they’re able to take care of that easily enough.
We leave the bank at 3:30 and go right to Airline Brewing to have a celebratory beer. We’re having people over the house to celebrate at 4:00 but we can’t think straight for quite awhile. Then we go to Edwards for snack foods, then to Hannaford for salmon and scallops, then back to Edwards for champagne. All this takes time and we probably arrive at the house around 5pm. Lorna and Greg Allen are already there. Jeff and Roberta arrive a little later, with necessities like a small grill, champagne glasses, some silverware. Also pasta and caprese salad. It’s a hectic time because the house is completely empty and we try to figure out how to prepare dinner. We do manage to find a folding table and some dishware among the boxes in the barn. Jeff takes care of the grilling. Everything tastes great. We toast our move to Maine.
At bedtime, Lorna loans us her air pump and we pump up two air mattresses that Sam bought at Kmart for our first night. Unfortunately, neither one of them holds air, so we both wake up at night on hard ground. Not easy sleeping for us. Lorna is our first house guest, cozy in her camper.