Kennit

My name is Ken Whitmore and I live in a small town in western Washington, not too far from Tacoma. I have always wanted a piece of property for a get-a-way for me and my family, and the ultimate dream would be to build my own log cabin. This dream started a long time ago, before I found the LHBA, before Dick Proenneke became famous on PBS.
I remember going on a camping trip with my wife in the mid 90's and found ourselves looking at land for sale. We almost pulled the trigger back then, but it wasn't the right piece for us. That continued on for several years, looking through the newspaper, the Little Nickel, and eventually the internet. We did enter a contract to purchase some acerage near Davenport, WA in the late 90's, but soon found out we jumped into it before thinking what we really wanted to do with our land. We chalked that up to a lesson learned.
Fast forward to 2006 and I stumble across the LHBA website one day. I read through every piece of information, looked at every picture and I was hooked. I showed it to my wife and told her about the class. I think the real selling point for the class was when I told her it was only held in two places around the world - Tailand and Monroe, WA. Since Monroe was only 1 1/2 hours away, that was the obvious choice.
I couldn't believe how much I learned about building a log home in a matter of 2 days. I have some construction knowledge (worked as a carpenter for a couple years after high school and built our own house in 2001), but building a log home is completely different than stick frame construction, especially the way its taught in class. But everything was explained so I knew what I was doing and why I needed to do it that way. I bought the plans, talked to my wife, and then we started making our own plans for the future.
Since 2006 we have looked at so many different properties. I bet I looked at over a thousand different pieces of land on the various web sites, and we walked on at least 20 different sites. Since this is a get-a-way and not our primary residence, we have the luxury of being picky.
There was one site that seemed to be perfect. It had everything we wanted... a great build site, trees, a spring for water, lots of wildlife, and surrounded by state land for recreation. I thought, "What more could I want???" The answer... a better price! It was out of our price range and no matter how much I talked with the owners, there was no way we could come up with a solution that would work for both of us. I have to admit, I was crushed. I thought it would be the end of the dream, and I couldn't do anything about it!
That feeling went on for about a year, then one day I found an ad that looked... well, to tell the truth, it only looked okay. The pictures that were posted only showed one little spot and it didn't look promising, but I added it to our list. That was in the spring of 2010. Later that summer, we took the kids camping to Eastern Washington and had one day planned to look at various properties. One piece was sold before we got a chance to look at it, one was nothing like it had been portryed, the others were okay, and then there was this one.
We walked up an old logging road on one half of the propery and saw trees everywhere. Each one being better suited to build a log cabin than the last one, but we didn't see a feasible build site anywhere. Then we discovered that we had only seen 1/2 of the land. We walked down a trail and popped out on a perfect clearing! It was wide, flat, and had great access to the main road. We walked around and my wife found a small creek. We followed it up the hill and found it started from a hill side spring. There was plenty of wildlife sign including moose, elk, deer, grouse, beavers, coyote, etc. The kids loved it! It is surrounded by timber company land and the best thing... it was close to our budget.
We put an offer on the table and they said, "no thank you." WHAT!?!? Did I hear that right? "No thank you!" Yes, that's right. The property owners thought our offer was too low and decided not to counter, at all. I was crushed again. I really didn't think our offer was that low, especially with the dropping land values in 2010, but I guess that's the seller's perogative. Our agent looked into it and told us not to loose hope. It had only been on the market for a short time, so our game plan was to let it sit and see what the sellers wanted to do. So it sat, and we waited, we waited, and it sat. I checked the online ad to make sure it was still available almost every week. It was very nerve racking.
This brings us up to last week. My wife and I put together another offer that was only $2500 higher than our original offer. They must have had a pretty slow year or now they need the money, because they countered back with another $2500 raise. I couldn't believe it, that was a lot lower than their original asking price and its in our budget. So now the paperwork is done and we are just waiting for our closing date. We are finally going to own our dream land get-a-way!!!

I know that was a very long first blog post, but (if your still here) you are caught up on the last 15 years and understand that buying our land isn't the first step for us, but it is a very big step. I'll try to keep this blog up to date on the cool stuff that will start happening soon.