ZONING BOARD MEETING.
Day 12 – 7 a.m., 58 degrees, foggy. Last night Chris Goodwin of Goodwin Carpentry out of Pembroke returned our call. We’d really hoped that Chris would call back & could fit us in. He’d been highly recommended by Alan, the head of GO Logic, one of the passive homes we’d considered first – a really good company, but we couldn’t afford them. He’d said that Chris did such great work on the fairly new building that was built at the Cobscook Learning Center. We’ll be meeting with Chris tomorrow.
While I was stumbling around this morning, waking up, Rob took a walk to Maureen Sze’s property to look at her roof. (The pitch of roofs is Rob’s latest obsession.) After lunch, the fog had burned off, and we took a drive into town (Lubec) to look at roofs and house colors (my latest obsession). We stopped at the grocery store to pick up a few items. You can tell who the locals are: most of them are not wearing masks, but the tourists are. In Lubec we got a call from Tim Hanning from Down East Home Improvement in Addison. He will come by Saturday afternoon. We’ve now heard back from 6 out of 8 contractors. That’s good! When we got home to the RV, Gracie & Java were cutely cuddled together on the dashboard.
Gracie and Java
We made baked salmon in a lemon caper sauce for dinner. At 7 p.m. we joined the Zoning Board of Appeals (NY) via phone/Webex for their monthly ZBA meeting. We were first on the agenda, followed by two others hoping for variance decisions. It was interesting, but what a bunch of red tape! And we found that we were not the only one who had been going back and forth with the Board when at every turn, they requested one thing from us after another.
The people who were third on the agenda had been doing this for almost a year now and were obviously very frustrated. They were begging the Board to please, tell them what you want from them now, everything you want, and they would get it to them gladly, but please, let’s just get this done. The verdict on our variance? Come back next month for a public meeting to see if our neighbors have anything to say. (On three sides of us, they won’t be concerned; they wouldn’t even see the deck. But behind us, those people (one of which happens to be the chairman of the Board) have a right to complain as we are getting close to the property line – (except they have 40 acres and cannot see us.) Also, one of the Board members went out & visited each site yesterday. He said he thought there was no problem as there was nothing back there but trees. So back we go next month. Never a dull moment.