Category: Uncategorized

Winter Field Snow Fences, Banking The Maine Farm Home.

Plowing Snow, Mainers Have Years Of Experience With Moving The White Stuff.

Getting ready for a Maine winter…because growing up can remember snow so high you could reach up, actually if crazy enough touch the wires along roads.

Snow, fluffy white stuff came steadily. It was that high. Had to be kept up with, not neglected. But we know how to deal with snow in Maine. Have the equipment, experience and less traffic to work around to move it. And not interrupt the day to day living in Maine.

With global warming and a tendency to be snow less Maine winters, a drought for the stuff needed to build a neighborhood fort out behind the family home has happened. Play with it in many other ways. So the winter snow handling preparation has lessened. Snow fences, like the slats of vertical wood and wire you see on sand dunes to help with beach erosion used to pop up around the countryside. To hold the drifting snow back from spilling into the roadway.

Staked, placed, put up along Maine highways prone for white out, drifting and poor visibility. In November before the ground frost deepened. And the mercury dropped, temperature dipped, state road / highway crews would uncoil the snow fencing. Roll it back up in the spring and toss it on the back of state of Maine highway crew trucks to head back to the warehouse garages.

Placing craft paper, canvass and then laying tree boughs around the Maine home foundation a ritual too.

To insulate, bank the Maine home for a warmer, toasty winter. Stocking the shelves in the cellar root pantry for canning, preserves to tap into over the winter. Sometimes along with filling up the wood shed, the cellar with cut and split logs made to just fit the heater stove, furnace. Sealing out the northwest winds, chinking the cracks, slots to help make heating the Maine home easier. To prevent a passage way for field mice hoping for a winter warm cushy Maine home with some food to nibble on over the holidays and into next spring.

Sometimes long roads, rows of cleared snow, paths running parallel along the Maine highways would be bulldozer installed.

To fill with snow as a container for shifting, blowing snow. Instead of the snowflakes doing the same fill up, foot upon foot accumulation on highways. That some winters were given round the clock attention to keep open, plowed, sanded. Pushed, winged back for better visibility coming out of Maine home driveways. How to plow a driveway after a Maine winter snowstorm video. Maine state road crews clearing the winter snow for traveling to and from work, for commerce, and emergency personnel put in some long, difficult hours with poor visibility, not a lot of sleep.

Maine Winter Snowstorm, Plowing Video

Maine winters, a time to snow sled, downhill ski, skate inside and out along with ice fishing. Snowshoeing or just holing up in front of a hot, blazing, crackling fireplace after being outdoor for work or a recreational workout in the white stuff. Maine has no bad seasons, you just have bad clothes or make poor choices if you are cold, wet, shivering and wonder why.

I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers, ME Broker
207.532.6573
info@mooersrealty.com

November 5, 2012
Maine Tipping, No, Not The Twenty Percent Waitress Kind.

Maine Balsam Firs, Wreaths Are Popular Around The World.

Tipping, not for pleasant, quick service at a Maine restaurant or the pushing over a cow in the farm yard late at night. Not the free or paid for advice kind either.

Tipping for Maine Christmas wreaths.

Not just Maine Christmas trees being wrapped and stacked and shipped south for the holidays. Up to three million fir and pine holiday circles, wreaths are created in Maine each year. The tipping season begins the first of November and runs until the second week of December before the big red guy in velvet and fluffy white shows up on the roof top with the boisterous unpredictable flying deer.

Up to five pounds of tips, the ends of tree boughs are needed to craft a Maine Christmas wreath to welcome in the holidays. Hanging festively on doors around the country. Some wreaths plain jane. Others decked out with gold, silver bells, red, green and other color bows, doo dads.

A bill of sale for the tips used in Christmas wreath production is needed from the Maine land owner. The owner of the land in Maine where the trees are trimmed, groomed, gleaned of material needed to fashion the fragrant green circles shipped round the globe. Permits are needed for transportation of wreaths, the materials to make them too.

The migrant workers that fashion the wreaths and are paid for piece work production, are fresh off the apple orchards, potato fields and blueberry barrens.

The two to three sections of tree tips are wound, weaved, intertwined together and fastened with a wire to secure. With an end of that wire curved into a loop to be used to hang the wreath for holiday display.

Tips for wreaths gathered before the needles “set” or the tree stops growing until the following spring will not be so full and green by Christmas. Turning brown, looking burnt, dried out. Appearing dead, lifeless more Charlie Brown Christmas tree like by the time December 25th rolls around.

Three year cutting, tipping routines work best to save the tree from loosing steam.

And not growing full, healthy. Maine is the largest producer of balsam wreaths in the United States. Millions of wreaths assembled each year. Most come from balsam fir that hail from colder parts of New England and in some sections of the Canadian Maritimes. The very fragrant Balsam fir smell reminds many of past Christmas celebrations. It’s why the Maine wreaths are by far the most popular in the country.

I know a lady who can crank out up to 200 Maine wreaths a day, for the small compensation of $2 per green, full, puffed out forest smelling rings.

Washington County in Maine is a beehive for Christmas wreath production. But like the blueberry harvest, more and more migrant workers from Honduras, Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador make up Maine’s wreath-factory production crews. It is harder to find locals, natives willing to work the long hours for little pay associated with Maine Christmas tree production.

Maine, big state, unspoiled four season beauty abounds in this place called “Vacationland”.

I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers, ME Broker

November 2, 2012
Haunted Houses In Maine… Means They’re Worth More.

Horror Writer, Maine\’s Stephen King Home On West Broadway, Bangor ME

Maine haunted houses, as a real estate broker in Vacationland, I would suggest they are worth more.

Especially if Bangor Maine horror writer Stephen King decided the spook inhabited home would make a good movie set. King and his wife Tabitha live in a pretty neat West Broadway Maine victorian house iron gated and off the street.

Regardless if you believe in spirits, moaning ghosts, former inhabitants with clanging chains that just won’t let go and head over to the great beyond, haunted houses happen. Because imaginations create them.

And if a Maine property has a reputation spun by a story teller, we disclose it.

And the buyer may laugh going in. But if new home owners suddenly find buyers avoid it like the plague on resale, they know, were told what to expect. That a segment of the home audience gets skiddish, squeamish. It happens with Maine haunted houses.

Some people don’t believe in God, so spooks are not going to move the needle either.

Not cause the smallest stir. Because they are in control and tough as board nails, rock solid in their convictions about how things roll around them. Believing in only what they can see. Not putting stock, having any faith in what they can not.

A John Jay, a local Hodgdon Maine native create a lot of stories about a home he used to own that he said was haunted. It started with moving into it years ago and returning from Orient Maine to the south at the end of the day to find everyone he left inside suddenly outside. In the yard and lights flickering on and off. Haunted? Maybe. Poor electrical system, most assuredly. But that is where the tales of being haunted started.

If a buyer of a Maine home loses it for lack of payment of the loan, property taxes, sour grapes happens too.

Lots Of Spooks, Might Be Halloween Haunted This Patten ME Home.

This same home was a old Farmer’s Home repossession and more stories got added to the fire John Jay started. That circulated around the local grapevine. Because the former owner of the Maine home would not cite the real reason they left… lack of payments for house loan, heat, property taxes. Nasty or even friendly divorce splits can throw a wreck into home ownership in Maine too.

Easier to say it is haunted, and vacated for that reason not because they lost it in foreclosure.

When the public sees folks, buyers, sellers, renters coming and going it adds to the haunted suspicion surrounding the Maine real estate too.

I talked to a renter of this home in Maine I’ve sold a few times over the years. He claimed he threw his winter wood supply in to the cellar helter skelter. And awoke the next day to neatly stacked rows assembled in the basement. Haunted? Maybe by Casper, the friendly, helpful ghost.

This renter went on to say he went to bed several nights with party chips on the coffee table and the next morning they were gone. I asked, do you have a dog? Yes. I had one that loved chips as much as I do. Not trying to be a doubting Thomas but…..

One buyer from Rhode Island that I shared the stories with of the home he wanted to buy being haunted was not daunted. After the sale I asked if he had experiences with anything paranormal and he said one word and smiled.

Give Me A Beat To Go Along With The Sweets. Light Shows For This Halloween Trick Or Treat Pit Stop.

Rolaids.

He could not keep them in the Hodgdon Maine home. Evidently Casper has an upset stomach. Too much acid reflex caused with his diet of whatever ghosts munch on, nibble. Besides dead bodies, young children or whatever the standard dining fare en vogue.

Haunted homes in Maine, the notoriety can increase the value just as much as it hurts the sticker price.

Depends on the Maine home buyer and how well they sleep at night. Their past experiences and if every creak, groan caused by a strong northwest, northeast gust of a northern Maine wind keeps them wide eyed and scared stiff. Looking for affordable real estate, friendly people, no traffic? Maine, neat state, a lot of story tellers spinning yarns that some swallow hook, line and sinker.

I’m Maine Broker Andrew Mooers, ME REALTOR
207.532.6573
info@mooersrealty.com

MOOERS REALTY 69 North ST Houlton ME 04730 USA

October 31, 2012
You’ve Been To Maine… Really Now.

Fun In Old Port Maine, But More to Vacationland Land To Explore, Discover.

Ask someone about Maine from out of state and often when they raise their hand to say they have been there, it means the coastal regions.

Places like Bar Harbor, Portland, Ogunquit Maine. Or out to Peaks Island, Maine or one of the many others dotting the view off the rock bound, craggy coastline of Vacationland.

But to really experience, sample Maine you have to spend more time than one or two visits.

And not just to the same place, familiar spot. Maine is a big state and takes more time to cover the expanse. To explore, discover. Requires a little more investment of time. Venturing inland to other places like Baxter State Park. Maybe the Northern Allagash Wilderness Water Way. Or the memorable Grand Canyon of Maine, Gulf Hagas. Perhaps white water rafting the Penobscot, Kennebec or Dead Rivers has yet to be stamped on your Maine passport collection of never fade memory making places.

And depending on the season the same places you grow to love and journey to yearly become different in Maine.

Because of what you do there that season. Example, Sugarloaf Mountain is fun to swish swish down hill ski. But in the fall foliage, on the world class golf course, everything at that western Maine venue changes. A different application of the same great fun place no matter what the season, reason for making time to visit. Over and over.

Maybe sneaking across the US border into Canada with boards on the ski rack from Maine. Come here to unplug, recharge like on Cadillac Mountain, in Acadia Park.

Maine, she gets in your system and good luck shaking her. Getting over her. Not going to happen. Maine, consider investing some time and maybe a little money to spend more time in Maine. Start small with a vacation and watch it build up and become a healthy addiction this place called Maine.

I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers, ME Broker
207.532.6573
info@mooersrealty.com

October 29, 2012
“Maine Farm Fresh Cageless Hen’s Eggs…”

Find What You Are Missing, Looking For In Down Home Simple Maine.

Descriptions, wordsmith pictures designed to hit, spark emotional nerve endings.

To cause a stir in all the media message overload good and bad and in between whirling around us today. Advertising creativity, opinions aired and the spin of remarks election time creates make you tossed and turned. Pushed and pulled.

So back to the Maine farm fresh egg headline.

If the menu stated “Fresh eggs anyway you want them” that would be okay. But to pull you in, taking you by the hand to the Maine farm barn yard the hen lives at. Without chicken wire holding her in, giving you the sense she is a happy egg layer. Clucking merrily as she produced your just off the Maine farm egg for the eye opening breakfast.

And she “balk balk balk” lives another day. To hunt and peck. She was not the BBQ chicken being served up, to star in another later meal. Not losing her life to create this breakfast tummy pleaser now before you so all is well. Not an over easy fried or fluffy scrambled egg sitting in front of you trucked in from a factory farm either by the way. But a good old Waltonesque, Old MacDonald small scale local, simple, wholesome farm operation part of your breakfast meal this morning. Good night Jim Bob, Elizabeth et al. Ee-eye-ee-eye Oh!

I grew up on a Maine farm and we produced vegetables for the local area. Farm fresh and priced right with an extra piece of produce thrown in was all we had to do to have the driveway lined with customers. Keep them coming back to stuff cash in the corn jar that helped out the household farm income that spiked up and down depending on the market, the weather, other set backs or storms of life that happened right on schedule. With often imperfect, challenging timing.

Now more than ever presentation is everything.

Trumping substance, reality and made surreal. Tasting good is fine and dandy but looking good an absolute must. Being entertained by giving a cart ride towed by a team of horses or an antique Maine farm tractor is part of the dog and pony. Today I would have to load the customers in the rickety but quaint wagon to create an experience to go along with the Maine farm produce.

Why? Boredom of the consumer, more free time or just bankrolled to be able to pay more money for the Disney adventure in everything that is done today? Maybe happy, content is not enough any more. No no. We want over the top euphoria to happen. Center of attention “home runs” in everything done through the day in this great land of abundance, richness Columbus discovered called America.

And back to election banter, reaction to debates.

Talking heads picking up the same tired expressions for the lead in to the sound bites that are crisp, catchy, jammed packed with staying power. Like accolades, medals for the candidate’s quick jab come back to an attack comment retort that really “moved the needle on public opinion”. With a witty, saved up and in his pocket pre-packaged, just waiting to be released debate statement.

Primed, shaped, carefully carved for tomorrow’s bold print headline or anchor sound bite. “He or she got some major traction with that bold move to win the (geriatric, Asian, Hispanic, blue color or blue blood, etc) portion of the voting audience.”

How you say it, spin it comes as a given in the marketing of a product, service, ideal today. And like an Olympic medal event, reaction to the marketing like it is a sport is underway to gain attention. Be heard in the noisy crowd, to stand out and be noticed. To rattle a few bones, be noticed in a big way.

Maine, a place without all the hooplah, razzle dazzle, smoke and glass antics needed. Just simple, natural, pure and drop dead gorgeous. Get here quick as you can. Then just try and stay away once you have a taste, feel her tug on your heart strings in a good way. Thanks for being a faithful follower of the Me In Maine blog posts.

I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers, ME Broker
207.532.6573
info@mooersrealty.com

October 24, 2012
A Maine Church For More Than A Spiritual Home.

Maine Old Churches Hit The Heart Deeply, Add To The Worship Experience.

Maine is a God fearing, respectful state and churches abound in the many towns, few cities around Vacationland.

And sometimes too many churches, facilities for worship means the facility use changes. Over the years have sold lots of Maine churches in my area. Some torn down for building other improvements or for land vehicle parking purposes.

Other churches bought by another Maine faith healer provider, used for the same worship experience services as a place to get on your knees.

As a place to surrender. To open up your heart. Search deeply for answers. Give thanks for blessings. A few becoming used for business. Like one Church of the Nazarene that became a small engine repair facility. Another Christian Science Church that kept the “Truth Will Set You Free” and “God Is Good” wall scripture reminder showing proudly. As the 1880’s vintage church transformed, became a unique Maine home.

The owner of this “home” made the transformation of the Maine church’s original use because he liked “different”, “unique”. And did not want standard fare in anything he did in life. A housing maverick of sorts in a class of his own. A bit of a loner. He set up shop in an old stone train station in Pennsylvania old home town he previously lived in. And proceeded to turn it into an office for his geology industrial pump business.

Currently there are a number of churches in the Lewiston Auburn Maine area for sale because of a decline in attendance. Or sheer glut of new places springing up to compete with the older, smaller, not so handicap friendly multi story structures. Like big box stores selling the Good Word, broadcasting to more than a few pews of worshippers to make the overhead. Churches are businesses too and have to keep the wolf away from their doors to avoid the padlocks, closure.

The old century young churches that were some of the earliest buildings in Maine’s many small communities were vital meeting places through the ups and downs of anyone’s life. To be the light to follow for guidance. Some becoming gutted to the wall studs, floor stringers, roof rafters and given a new life as assisted living centers. Complete with the clipboard check list of handicap ramps, elevators. All the bells and whistles added, bolted in to comply with current fire, air quality and other safety regulations.

The grand old history rich churches in Maine. Ones where the spires, Victorian gingerbreading impress and hit you deeply.

Extraordinary but costing an arm and a leg to maintain, heat, insure, keep full. Grand old church structures that compete with thousand seating and more worship centers catering to today’s audio visual rich worship experience needed to fill the pews. With elaborate sound systems, overhead projectors, big screens to enrich the audio visual worship experience. To compete effectively with the many other options in the same time slot on Sunday morning for worship.

The Portland Maine city church called Grace now is a memorable, gorgeous setting for dining. Transformed into a special spot put out to hire, reworked. Tinkered with to be a Maine home for catered events like weddings, private parties or meetings.

Maine, nothing is wasted and churches that become outdated or find themselves in areas of just too many take on new roles in the local communities. Come see what you are missing, how life can be fuller, more complete and satisfying when everything is kept simple, natural, home grown easy.

I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers, ME Broker
207.532.6573
info@mooersrealty.com

October 20, 2012