The Round Hill House

In the rush to compile the last post, I skipped over a bit of material that might help you understand what came next. If you remember, the house was posted on Zillow on a Tuesday morning and my wife and I drove up to see it on Friday. Life did not happen as normal in between. We had 3 nights to learn as much as we could about this house, the neighborhood, the Town, and the commute. If we had to make a quick call on the house during our tour, we needed to be ready.

Stop 1: Wikipedia.

If you are looking for high level information about your destination that may or may not be useful, Wikipedia is for you. Using the Village on the home’s street address, we searched away. The Village was settled in the early 1700s and was known for both its original library, decorated with Tiffany stained glass, and for having the oldest winery in America. The population was under 6,000 people. That aligned to the aerial photographs of the house which made it seem rural. Huh. Notable figures included Brian Cashman, GM of the Yankees, and Mel Gibson. Mel Gibson? Isn’t he Australian? I would need to come back to that.

Stop 2: Google Maps

Our future commute would be a huge deciding factor in any home buying decision. For those who have never lived in New York City, New York City commutes are known to be brutal. Rush hour commutes in hot, packed, underground sardine cans can often take 90 minutes, and can be even greater if you are coming in from the outer boroughs. Commuting into New York is a little like an action movie, with commuters rushing the city from above, below, and all sides. Not only do we have commuters in underground tunnels, people also commute on foot, by bike, by scooter, by taxi, by car, by boat (Staten Island and New Jersey Ferries), by helicopter, by gondola, by bullet train (from Boston and DC), and by commuter train.

At first glance, I assumed this house in Orange County was way outside of the public transportation zone to New York City. The Metro North, an extension of the New York Transit Authority, traveled on the East side of the Hudson river, but not the West side where this house was. There might be a bus that passes through, but if there was no train, it probably wouldn’t be an option for us. I was surprised when Google maps proved otherwise. Not only did the area still have commuter trains, technically part of New Jersey Transit, there were two stops, each within 15 minutes of the house. Later I would learn these were part of the old dairy freight lines which carried fresh milk down to the City. Now, having a train nearby is one thing, but being able to PARK at the train station is another. When looking for homes in Poughkeepsie, we realized that parking at the Poughkeepsie train station required permits that had a 6 year waiting list. If you actually got a permit, the cost was over $400 per year! Hourly parking in Poughkeepsie was also possible, but at a cost of over $1000 per year! I prepared to cover my eyes when I went to the LAZ parking website (the train parking lot servicer). Great. The website had a mistake and I needed to find the parking cost somewhere else. I did some additional research. I eventually looked up from the computer with my head spinning. The LAZ website didn’t have a mistake. Parking cost $21 a year, and there was no waitlist at all.

The commute from Orange County to New York City was not preferable, but it did seem manageable. Door to door, it looked like about 1 hour and 45 minutes. 15 minutes to the train station, 1 hour on the train, 15 minutes on the PATH train, and a 15 minute walk. My wife would need to do that twice a day, at least 4 days a week. As we planned our Friday visit, we realized that she could sample that train route after our tour. If she didn’t like it, we would know. That was part of our decision to hit the 7:45am train on Friday morning.

Stop 3: Internet Search

This is where things got a little interesting. I don’t know what I expected to find about the house using a general internet search, but I certainly didn’t expect to find a full blog about it. The current owner of the house had performed extensive research on the property and had documented her work and home renovations on a blog. Unfortunately, the blog is no longer active to link to although I can list some of her more interesting findings.

The house was built in 1853 by the Brewster family, descendants of the Mayflower Brewsters and cousins of the Long Island Brewsters featured in the AMC show Turn: Washington’s Spies. For fans of that show, this village in Orange County was founded by both the Brewsters and the Woodhulls. The Brewsters had moved into Orange County in the late 1700s and built an original manor home in 1800 that is now used as a wedding venue. Generations of Brewsters were born at that home before, in the early 1850s, they finally expanded by building a sister house down the road. This sister house, our Zillow find, was modeled off the larger manor, down to the unique trim and molding styles.

The house stayed in the Brewster family for over 120 years, until the 1970s. Eventually, from subsequent marriages, it became known as a “Board” house, another prominent name in the town, instead of a “Brewster” house. It remained a dairy farm into the 1960s and an active farm into the 1970s. For a period it was called the Tappan Brook Dairy and included nearly 1000 acres. All good things come to an end, and by the 1970s, the Board family were themselves in their 70s and without children. The house and land sold, setting in action a series of events which would lead to December 7th, 2018.

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After it was sold by the Board family, the home and land were rented out to tenant farmers. In a highly controversial incident, the dairy barn burned down in the late 1970s. Opinions on the cause differ. Some say it was because the tenant farmer had an illegal still in the barn. Others are convinced it was destroyed by an infamous barn arsonist. Still others say it was purely an accident, and the result of wet hay which caught fire. In any case, after the barn was destroyed, the house ceased to function as a working farm. In the next decades the land was subdivided and the house was rented out to various families. Here is a quote taken from the owner’s blog:

“We have heard several stories about the different people who lived there during that time. There was a doctor, there was a woman who’s son was quite the trouble maker (we heard that from the local police), and there was a woman who kept many, many cats (who may or may not have been the same woman with the troubled son). In 2002 the house was sold to an individual who did a tremendous amount of work to fix it up and intended to spend a lot of time there- until his wife told him she didn’t like it there. It once again became a rental.”

TappanBrookDairy.com (2019)

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In 2011, the house was purchased by the couple who wrote that blog. They continued to fix it up but, by 2018, were themselves being forced to sell. That was why the Zillow listing came up on a Tuesday in early December.

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Our realtor texted that she was running late. I looked at my watch. We were going to need to reduce our house tour from 30 minutes to 20 in order to still make the 7:45am train. Our anxiety level crept up. We had been outside a while now and were starting to get cold. My wife walked back to the car and started the engine to stay warm. Finally, our realtor turned in the driveway. We thanked her for coming so early and moved towards the front door. The inside was waiting and we were ready.

This was one of those new high tech lock boxes. The realtor had a key for the outside glass door but had only her phone to unlock the main doors to the house. She got out her phone and fuddled with the app. We waited. 5 minutes passed. Then, she turned to us and laid down a healthy dose of reality, “I am so sorry but my phone restarted yesterday and I seem to have lost my password to open the app. I can get it from the office but it won’t open until 10am.” My wife and I turned to each other, screaming internally. My wife needed to get to work. “I trust you,” she said, looking at me squarely in the eyes. I pushed back, “Are you SURE?” “I trust you,” she repeated.

There were a few other complications that morning. The 7:45am train was cancelled and I needed to drive my wife over the River to Beacon to catch the Metro North. I went back to Dunkin Donuts in the Village and waited in the parking lot for another two hours until I finally heard back from the realtor that she was ready. It was nearly 11:00am. I drove back over to the house and pulled in the drive. The sun had been up for hours and the temperature was now above freezing. I walked with the realtor to the porch and within a moment the door was open and I walked in.

Not knowing what I would find, I entered the house with my phone camera rolling. I could review the footage with my wife in the evening back in the city. The house was not as grand or immaculate as some of the city homes we had seen in Pittsburgh or in Poughkeepsie. Nor was it as damaged and in need of repair as 40 Carrick, 311 Highland Terrace, or 39 Virginia. As I walked through the empty rooms and hallways, I could undeniably say that this house was special. Its 3 fireplaces were made of gorgeous soapstone, painted to look like marble. It was filled with built-ins, odd angles, and cubbies. There were 5 sets of stairs, some of which, if not secretly, subtly connected opposite sides of the house. The center room in the house had 5 doors. The floors and woodwork were in excellent shape. In the attic and basement I found combative graffiti declaring “Bach Rules” and “Bach Sucks.” It was not a house my wife and I would have considered, or could have afforded, in 2016, but it seemed fitting for us now. It was a farmhouse with history, perfect for building lives and raising a family. Before I left the house I asked the realtor to put in an offer for Asking Price. The next day we learned the offer was accepted. In February 2019, we moved in.

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This is not the end of our story, although it represents a pause. The 2.5 years since have been adventures packed with renovations, repairs, mistakes, successes, frustration, and growth. I look forward to eventually sharing some of those tales, as well. Throughout this series, I enjoyed reflecting back at our multi-year and multi-state housing hunt. Pictures helped jog my memory for small details and entire trips. For example, I had forgotten that after making an offer on the 311 Highland Terrace house in Pittsburgh, my wife and I spent an entire weekend looking at apartments around the city. We knew repairs were extensive enough that we didn’t plan to live in the house for at least 9 months. We had collected paperwork from these places and nearly signed a lease! I had also forgotten our very first house tour, the tour that started us on this journey, in 2013. We must have been back in Pittsburgh to visit family when we scheduled a tour of a home under 150k. We had no money, barely had jobs, and felt a little guilty stringing along a realtor on a Saturday afternoon. The house we saw needed plenty of work, but the excitement we got from that tour and from imagining our lives there stuck with us. That realtor also gave us some fantastic advice. She was in her early 30s and had purchased an older home with her doctor husband 3 years prior. After buying the house, they immediately drained their remaining savings by re-doing the bathrooms with Carrara marble. It was only after that money was spent that they found the holes in the foundation which still had not yet been fully addressed. They loved their old home but were also putting off on having a family because of the expense. “Don’t do the bathrooms first,” she warned, “and make every purchase and renovation with your family in mind.

“Onwards and upwards. I hope you enjoyed reading this story. I will be back soon enough to share more about everything that has happened since.