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Newsletter from Montana - Minnesota
April 2009
Nye is out of the way, adjacent to National Forest and there is a 26 mile horse trail through the Wilderness to the Yellowstone Park following the Stillwater River to its starting point. The area is adjacent to the highest mountains in Montana and is as spectacular as Switzerland. A few decades ago somebody had the great idea to put a gated community there into the foothills with a full time care taker and to give each cabin a 100ft diameter circle to build on (they are for sale for $ 20,000 each). He also drilled a couple very deep wells and put water pipes throughout, since water is always an issue in Montana. Adjacent to the property is a big pasture and if somebody has a horse, they may join the horse owners association and use the pasture. The caretaker keeps the roads maintained and checks on the cabins that are left vacant during the winter or are only used occasionally. He lives on the property in the lodge by one of the lakes, which has a common area for everybody who needs a big room, deck and kitchen for entertainment, with a library, ping pong and pool table in the basement. There is also a common laundry facility. Besides the caretaker's quarter there are three condos in the complex and I have the only end unit for sale for $ 87,900 - it comes fully furnished and sleeps four!
You also might want to take a look at the
Multiple Listing Service for Bozeman.
I posted links in the left margin for the Billings MLS and Red Lodge MLS as well, along with some other links you might find interesting.
Montana is a great place to get away from pandemics. We have less than a million people in the fourth largest state in the Union. That comes out to four people per square mile...
Take a tour of Geraldine, Montana!
On this link to Google maps, grab the N on the compass and you can turn around or walk with the arrows and take a tour of the town. As you can see it is a rural setting in Northern Montana, between Lewistown and Fort Benton. The butcher shop there was recently in operation and they were quite busy, but the renter had to go back to the East Coast and the owner would like to sell it. There is a new compressor and it's turn key. They reduced the price to $115,000, which includes the real estate!
It's a great opportunity to buy yourself a job and to live in the country.
If you don't want to be in business for yourself, maybe you want to look at the classifieds for job offers at the Billings Gazette. In the right margin are the top jobs.
Almost a degree farther south but a few clicks to the East in Minnesota, the
little farm on 12.2 acres has reduced the price to $ 100,000. An incredible value for a 5 bedroom renovated home, barns, shop, shed and 5 acres of timber! This would make a great organic farm; you could grow veggies there and sell it in the nearby cities of Fergus Falls and even Fargo! You could raise a couple of cows and build boats for all those thousands of lakes nearby. It sure would be a healthy environment to raise kids, retire or to start a business.
If you like lake living, there are 27 acres for sale with two homes and a garage with 1,700ft+ of shoreline along a dead end gravel road. There you have Walnut trees in the yard and a lovely hay meadow behind the house, lined with trees. $ 275,000
When the planet cooled into a glacial deep freeze about 2.5 mio years ago, rivers of ice began stripping northern Canada down to hard rock, dumping the ancient soil into Minnesota, Iowa, Ohio and as far south as Missouri. High winds dropping off the great ice sheet blew the pulverized dirt around to shape Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas. Today these geologic dust bunnies form the best agricultural lands on the planet.
Glaciers also stripped soils from northern Europe and Asia, redistributing thick blankets of finely ground dirt - loess - over more than 5th of Earth's land surface. Mostly silt with some clay and a little sand, loess forms ideal agricultural soil. Scraped off the Arctic by glaciers and dropped in temperate latitudes by strong winds, the deep loess soils of the world's breadbaskets are incredibly fertile owing to a high proportion of fresh minerals. The absence of stones makes loess relatively easy to plow. But with little natural cohesion, loess erodes rapidly if stripped of vegetation and exposed to wind or rain. Grazed by buffalo for at least two hundred thousand years, the Great Plains had a thick cover of tough grass that protected the fragile loess. Wandering across the plains the great herds fertilized the grasslands, enriching the soil. Much of the biomass lay below ground in an extensive network of roots that supported the prairie grass. Traditional plows could not cut through the thick mat that held the plains together. So the first settlers simply kept heading West. Montana, here they come! :-)
Then in 1838 John Deere and a partner invented a steel plow capable of turning up the prairie's thick turf and agriculture in the Midwest was born - until the dust bowl in the 30's made us think twice about the wisdom of plowing. When we run out of soil, we simply chop down some timber or till up some virgin grassland. The Roman Empire ran out of good soil and
then there was no more empire; other now extinct empires went the same route.
Nowadays many fields are not being plowed but rather re-planted with special equipment.
At any rate, lots of good soil is left in Minnesota to feed your family, take a look at the current farm listings:
Over 20 acres, under $ 300,000
or
Over 20 acres over $ 300,000
All of these are close to lakes swarming with fish and endless forests with an amazing variety of wildlife in the northern half of the state, where you have rolling hills exposing new vistas at every turn.
If you like to know more about farming, Canada is offering apprenticeships for a growing season
and so do farms in the US.
Did you ever wonder why there is wind coming out of a light switch or outlet? There is no air leak you need to fix; it is just a wind inside of your outside wall in winter when you have fiberglass insulation. The draft is due to the warm air rising along the warm inside wall and cold air falling along the cold outside siding. An insulation in the walls where that doesn't happen is spray foam or foil foam. The better the insulation, the higher the "R-Value", but the effect levels out after R-19, going higher just about has no effect.
The U-Value of a window on the other hand has a dramatic effect on the efficiency of the home. A U-Factor is the rate of heat loss of a window assembly. The lower the U-factor, the greater a window's resistance to heat flow and the better is insulating value. Windows with 0.35 U-Factor or smaller are best. Those windows are filled with Krypton Gas or Xenon Gas. Good windows also shade from the summer sun while it lets in the rays of the winter sun. Heat loss also occurs through cracks in the window assembly. Air Leakage (AL) is expressed in cubic feet of air passing through a square three foot of window area. The lower the AL (0.2 is good), the less air will pass through cracks in the assembly. However AL is not as important as the U-factor and the Solar Heat Gain Coefficiency (SHGC). The SHGC is the fraction of incident solar radiation is admitted through a window. SHGC is expressed as a number between 0 and 1 (0.32 would be good). The lower the number, the less solar heat it transmits. It will reflect the steep summer rays of the sun high in the sky and admits the lower rays of the low winter sun. Then there is the Visible Transmittance (VT), which is an optical property that indicates the amount of light it lets into the room, most values are between 0.3 and 0.8 (0.51 would be good). The higher the VT, the more light is transmitted and includes the impact of the frame. A high VT is desirable to maximize daylight.
When you do remodeling, you want to keep in mind the resale value. If you paint a neutral color, you can recoup 200% of your investment. 100% are likely for new flooring, countertop and hardware. A kitchen remodel, new siding and new windows will recoup about 75% of your cost. A new bath, master suite or garage will recoup just half of your investment. The worst returns are for built-ins.
www.remodeling.hw.net
For simple repairs,
check out this website with helpful "how to" videos.
Here you can also find 100 before and after remodeling photos. I was especially impressed by the home that lost the second floor...
But if you cannot recoup the remodeling costs in the resale, you could get a tax break! The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 renews tax credits for energy-saving home improvements, such as installing energy-efficient windows, insulation, solar energy, and more. The new legislation is applicable to improvements made during 2009. That means all the drafty windows and leaky water heaters that are replaced this year are eligible for the incentive. Here are some of the breaks taxpayers can benefit from in 2009.
Solar Energy Systems: Tax credits are available for qualified solar water heating and photovoltaic systems. The credits are available for systems "placed in service" from January 1, 2006 through December 31, 2016. The tax credit is for 30% of the cost of the system, up to $2,000. After December 31, 2008, this $2,000 cap will be removed for photovoltaic systems, but not solar water heaters.
Small Wind Energy Systems: Tax credits are available to homeowners who install residential small wind turbine systems. The credits are available for systems placed in service from January 1, 2008 to December 31, 2016. The tax credit is for 30% of the cost of the system, up to $500 for each half-kilowatt of capacity with an overall maximum of $4,000.
Do you feel strongly about a subject and would like to write your representative? Here is a website that makes it as easy as 1, 2 and forget the 3!
Representatives get so few real letters (not too many emails, either) that they consider each to be the voice of 1000 citizens. So if there's something you feel strongly about, it doesn't take that long to jot down a note, even if you don't think you're that well informed. They have the advisers to tell them the facts - what they don't get are people telling them what they really want, so you CAN make a difference!
More people who want to make a difference can be heard on the radio station
"Coast to Coast AM"
which only broadcasts during the wee hours, but now they also have a streamlink on their website and a podcast to download - 4 hours a day for $ 6.95 a month - into your Blackberry or Ipod. What a hoot to mop the floor, clean the chicken coop, wash the car, walk the dog or work your horse while listening to stories of ancient America, UFOs, the paranormal, conspiracies and anything else beyond the 6 o'clock news and far beyond the proverbial box.
If those stories won't make you want to move into the country, nothing will - LOL
:-)
Best Regards,
Dorothea Lowe, Broker
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