Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Love at First Sight

Finding Heritage Road House actually began as a comic story. My husband, Rick who is known as a jokester, pulled a newspaper ad from a real estate section of the newspaper. This was actually the second ad he pulled. The first one was for a house on the eastern shore of Maryland, located on its own private island with a gated entrance costing a few million bucks. The second ad, brought home a few days later was held in his hand. He refused to allow me to see it before he finished reading it out loud to me. It described a huge house with 19 bedrooms, 9 baths, complete with 3 kitchens, every room full of furniture on an acre of land near Blue Knob Ski Resort. The house was selling for $159,000 and the owner was throwing in $5,000 toward closing or repairs. Rick had me jumping around the kitchen trying to see the picture and keeping me in suspense. He knew I would fall in love with the house and that I did. My first response was, “Wow, my bed and breakfast!”

For several weeks after reading the ad, I shared it with several family members and a friend where I worked. My friend encouraged me to go look at it and even printed a map of directions for me. Being the adventurers Rick and I are, we decided to take a ride and find the house before calling the real estate agent. Actually, we couldn’t call the agent because Rick hadn’t ripped that Information from the newspaper advertisement. So one Saturday morning we got into the car and followed the map. Well sort of. We got lost by taking a right at the flashing red light instead of going straight through it. We eventually saw a sign further up to road for Blue Knob Ski Resort and followed it to the resort. The road up the mountain had a sign at the bottom that requested drivers to use chains because of the adverse winter road conditions. That was our chance to turn around, but we came that far so we continued.

After making several inquiries about the location of the house at the ski resort, we found that we had come in from the wrong side of the mountain. Actually, we didn’t even need to climb the mountain, so we went over the top and down the other side. We were able to locate the house from a distance because of its size and shape. It was huge! It was also in sorry shape. No wonder the owner wanted to get rid of it. More next time on what we saw when we peeped in the windows.

Monday, February 14, 2011

New and True

Hi, my name is Dottie and this is my first Blog. When determining my subject matter for my Blog, I decided to identify something near and dear to my heart. That is a dream of owning a B&B. No, it is not the Bed & Biscuit my dog Brutus is dreaming of, but a real live dream of mine, as a Bed & Breakfast.

My husband and I purchased a rather large house in spring of 2007. We live in a little village called Weyant in central Pennsylvania. The village is so small we don't even have our own post office and we use the one closest to us in Imler, PA. When we purchased the house, it had 19 bedrooms and 9 baths.

Located at the crossroads of Heritage Road, King Saint Clair Road, Burnt House Road, and Millers Cross Roads, we are very noticeable in the community. Everyone in the area knows the BIG yellow house on the corner as either the Davis General Store or the Ski Barn.

The house is perfectly square with each of the four sides measuring 50 foot each. The house faces south with three front doors, four rather impressive windows flanking the door closest to the parking area on the east, and two additional windows flanking the third door near the west side of the house. The central door has two sidelights and all three doors have a transom window above it. The second story on this side of the house has five windows and the attic boasts three dormers.

Both the east and west sides of the house each have five windows on the second level and all four sides have three attic dormers. The north side of the house has a fire escape door that replaced one of the five windows on the second floor and the west side has a main central door on the first floor. So all in all, we have six exterior doors, 12 attic windows, 19 windows on the second level, and another 19 windows on the ground level, for a grand total of 50 windows in the house.

Heritage Road House as we often call it is pretty impressive. In the next post I will share how my husband and I both jumped feet first into this project.