We're Moving
We're going to be Da Yoopers!!!
We finally did it...we bought some property in the Upper Peninsula...40 acres of Malamute heaven.
This site is going to follow the transformation of a couple of Trolls into Yoopers...or how we plan to take 40 acres and a shack and transform it into a Mal Nation Plantation! If you came here from other than the O'Mal Alaskan Malamutes' website, I'll bring you up to speed. We breed and show Alaskan Malamutes and have always dreamed of having the space to sled and enjoy our dogs...well, we are finally doing it - we are moving to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and this is our story....
We were able to find a great foreclosure on a beautiful parcel of wooded land with a pretty average Yooper house. We looked at a lot of houses and most were pretty strange. This one was too. Some have commented I'm being too harsh calling it a shack...well, they haven't seen it. The front door goes into the bathroom. The picture window looks out at a blank wall ....the "loft" averages about 3' tall.., the plumbing goes uphill and is vented out a wall ( this is the hometown of the Outhouse classic so why would I expect anyone to "get" plumbing?), it has phone jacks and speaker wire in the excavated crawlspace attempt at a basement which looks like an egyptian archalogical dig, all the heat is diverted to a front porch that can only be accessed from outside. The ceiling is falling down from water damage and the kitchen is a University of Michigan Frat house dream, the deck is on a blank wall without a door. Yes, it's a shack...but it's a shack with potential. It has some nice features too...a new furnace, new roof, nice hardwood floors...a decent bathroom....It's mainly so we will have somewhere to stay while bulding Yoopertraz and eventually will be totally renovated into 2 apartments for visiting friends. In the mean time we are attempting to understand WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?
Actually it has some nicer features than our current house...namely 3 cell phone bars, a paved road and an artesian well...so that's improvement! (not counting thousands of trees!!!)
At this point I'm amazed any foreclosures sell at ALL...the hoops they put you through is just crazy. Proof of this, proof of that, you never know who is actually running things - We practically had to beg for a closing date because they wouldn't get off their hands to do it. It was just too much effort so you have to keep nagging. It's like the bank doesn't WANT to sell it. Pretty bizarre. At the last minute closing was delayed for a snow storm...HELLO??? this property is in the Upper Peninsula where snow storms are the norm...do they think a few inches of powder would deter us from showing up? But I digress..
Soon the fun begins. We are waiting for the snow to melt but in the mean time are doing fun things like arranging utilities for a house hundreds of miles away. .It will take a few to months to put up a polebarn, fence, doghouse... I also want a cupola on top of something (house, polebarn perhaps?) so I can put a webcam up there looking down on the dog yard. I think it will be cool to do that. Plus I'm going to do a website called Trenaryweather.com. Dan says I should have the webcam point to a rock and say - it's raining if the rock is wet, it's snowing when there is snow on the rock, etc. I married a Comedian.
Well, we FINALLY got the keys to Yoopertraz...what a fiasco. First they were sent and an empty envelope arrived - they apparently got caught in the postage machine. So we had to wait for the whole house to be rekeyed a second time. When Dan headed up to check things out he discovered they changed the locks on the entire house - put padlocks on 2 empty sheds - but left access to the basement (where anything of value is...furnace, HWH, plumbing) unsecured. But fortunately nothing was bothered....after contacting 5 electric companies I discovered we have one I've never heard of....apparently a lot of the things up there are out of Wisconsin. WE Energy for electric, TDS for internet... ET road...is everything in the UP initials?
When Dan went up to finally see it (I still haven't yet) he also found a broken window, removed the well pump and took a bunch of video.... I'll get to go up in a month or so ....his comment was...WOW, it's BIG. (meaning the 40 acres)...he walked to the back treeline and says there are lots of little baby pine trees all over and tried to figure out where the property line was at the road but couldn't. Well, he'd only walked to about the middle! Yes, that IS big...the dogs will LOVE it.
I'm sure you're wondering why we're calling it Yoopertraz? Well, when you live in the upper peninsula you're a "Yooper" and since fencing is going to have to be unescapable (for Superman and his cohorts) that's where the traz comes in...as in Alcatraz.... But just for fun I'm going to paint the propane tank which is HUGE like a UFO...after all, with ET Road and it is sort of expected....if you go into Trenary all the stores are painted with very cute scenes - even the vacant ones. So I think we'll fit right in! If anyone knows where I can get a life size alien figure, let me know!
At any rate we're moving to the land of Outhouse races and Pasties and Polkas...Since neither of us have ever lived in the UP so I'm going to document our move here. We've both visited a lot as kids, so know some of what we're in for - friendly folks and lots of snow - but I'm sure there will be surprises. It should be interesting from the point of view of a couple of "Trolls" (what Upers call people that have always lived below the Mackinaw bridge). I remember moving to Howell and wonder what the heck was a VGs....I didn't know it was a grocery store! So I'm sure there will be similar awakenings.