Mt. Sunapee continues to make snow around the clock. By Sunday, December 26 they expect to have close to 50 trails open. Over the course of the holiday week the few remaining snowmaking trails will open. They will also be building the beginner terrain park on Calypso. You should make your reservations now for children’s programs over the holidays. There is limited capacity in child care and the Snow Stars program for children 4-7 years old. Starting Monday, December 27 all 11 lifts will be operating daily. Over the holidays if you see their snowmakers in their bright yellow jackets, thank them for another white Christmas at Mount Sunapee. The forecast looks seasonably cold right through the holidays.
Holiday Happenings at the Mountain:
December 26 (and every Sunday through March 27)
GROM-A-THON
A jam at high noon in the Bob Skinner’s Six O’ Three terrain park on a small to medium feature for young skiers and riders. Emphasis is on fun. $5 entry fee includes a goodie bag. Register at the park shack.
December 28
SUGAR ON SNOW CELEBRATION
Sample delicious sugar on snow from Valley View Maple Farm in Springfield, NH. Other maple products are on sale on the patio at Sunapee Lodge.
December 29
ABSOLUTELY MAGIC
Andrew Pinard performs strolling table-top magic in Sunapee Lodge from 11:00am until 1:00pm.
December 31
NEW YEAR’S EVE CELEBRATION IN GOOSEFEATHERS PUB
Ring in the New Year “Sunapee” style as we dance the night away and enjoy a fireworks display. A delicious family buffet is available in Goosefeathers Pub. Buffet at 7:00pm, fireworks at 9:00pm and DJ until 10:00pm. No reservations required.
January 1
JINGLE JAM RAIL JAM
A rail jam in the Bob Skinner’s Six O’ Three Terrain Park. $500 cash prizes provided by Golf & Ski Warehouse.
ABSOLUTELY MAGIC
Andrew Pinard performs strolling table-top magic in Sunapee Lodge from 11:00am until 1:00pm.
10 Ways to Prevent and Stop Roof Leaks
Today’s issue posted by RISMEDIA featured an article posted by the Vice President of Pillar to Post Home Inspections. Here are the highlights:
Stopping potential leaking problems at the source can help prolong the life of your roof and keep repair costs at a minimum. If you’re not handy, call on a professional to inspect the situation and advise if repairs are needed. Being proactive in this way will save money in the long run.
1. Incorrect shingle installation. Improper joint locations and a lack of underlay are two issues that are particularly hard to see, but can be extremely problematic.
2. Structural sagging. A sagging roof structure is often the result of moisture retention, and nearly always foreshadows, or coincides with, a leak issue.
3. Water “ponding.” Clogged roof drains and indented areas on flat roofs can cause water pooling—which is basically a leak waiting to happen.
4. Damaged nails. Even on shingles that have been expertly installed, nails are the first thing to show wear. Corroding nails leave microscopic holes that invite water in.
5. Improperly hung gutters. Gutter placement is critical, and if you’re in an area with strong wind, just a tiny shift can tamper with the gutter system and divert rain—meant for the gutter—onto the roof.
6. Moss. You might think it’s just an aesthetic problem, but as moss gathers, it retains more and more moisture that you might not be able to see—until it starts dripping into the attic.
7. Insufficient insulation. The roof might look great on the outside, but if it’s not properly insulated underneath, you’re in trouble. Pre-1980s homes, in particular, may not have an adequate vapor barrier; if they don’t, a replacement is warranted—surface patching and minor repairs will just amount to wasted money.
8. A deteriorating chimney. Whether it’s cracks, eroded joints or a decaying cap, the chimney has plenty of inroads for moisture and water. Don’t discount the chimney; sometimes it might need all the repairs, when the roof might be just fine.
9. Evidence of badly-done past repairs. From improper plastering to inadequately plugged-up holes, any past repairs that look like they’re DIY are probably not up to code, and are just a stopgap measure. Don’t look to them to provide any leak protection in the future. Have a professional inspector evaluate these half-hearted fixes, and suggest ways to re-do them properly, to prolong the roof’s life.
10. Don’t forget the attic. Leaks into the attic aren’t just a problem; but so are leaks originating in the attic. One of the most important precautions: Don’t terminate any vent or exhaust pipes in the attic.
December 14, 2010. RisMedia. The author of the original article is Charles Furlough is Vice President, Pillar to Post Professional Home Inspections.
For more information, visit www.pillartopost.com.
Wooden toy soldiers have assembled and come to celebrate the holidays this year in New London! Area businesses purchased the templates and creative residents and artists dressed them up! Have fun strolling around the town to see Elvis and the pizza man; the fireman and construction worker. Our two handsome soldiers were hand painted by our sales associate, Sara Ellis.
Enjoy the Holidays!
You'll love chatting with guests in the large entertainment room with a slider leading to the sun porch. Sunny and bright home has recently been updated. For photos and details, visit www.563TownFarmRd.com.
Since the most enjoyable part of selling your home occurs when the proceeds from the sale are deposited into your account, there are some things that you can do that will help you reach that goal more quickly. Most sellers need to de-clutter, which means not only, removing knick-knacks and taking out excess furniture, but removing other distractions from your home which make it harder for buyers to picture themselves living there. Many sellers like to sort through their personal property themselves, but there is help out there in the way of home organizers who specialize in assisting people through the selling and moving process. Consider combining this service with a professional stager to make your house stand out from the competition. Living in a home that is on the market can be disruptive. Ideally, you, your children and pets should be out of the house when it's shown. Buyers feel inhibited by the sellers' presence. They won't say anything negative about the house while you're there. Work with your agent to set up a showing procedure for your home that you can live with, knowing that it gives your house the best chance to make a good impression if you, your children and pets skedaddle. The perfect house doesn't exist, so buyers always have to make compromises. It's important for buyers to have an opportunity to weigh the pros and cons of a home while they are there with their agent. Here’s a great hint: Preparing for showings is easier if you have bins in the bathrooms for your personal effects, in the kitchen for things you use daily, and to store children's toys. These hints will help get you to the settlement table sooner! Based on an article on InMan.com, November 15, 2010 authored by Dian Hymer, a real estate broker with more than 30 years' experience, who is a nationally syndicated real estate columnist and author of "House Hunting: The Take-Along Workbook for Home Buyers" and "Starting Out, The Complete Home Buyer's Guide."
Have a Contract? It’s Still not Time for the Bubbly!
Getting a house under contract can sometimes be challenging enough. However, it’s still not time to break out the champagne once it happens. According to a survey by the Nat’l Assoc. of Realtors, about 14% of pending sales don’t close and another 20% are delayed but eventually close. Most of the issues can be attributed to financing or home inspections.
So what can you do? Be mentally prepared that there most likely will be hurdles to overcome and the closing date may not be concrete. Have a home inspection prior to putting your house on the market and make needed repairs so you can avoid post-contract negotiations or worse, giving the buyers reason to walk from the contract. Be aware that tighter lending regulations can slow the process - anything from the house not appraising to last minute negotiations that create a 3-day delay due to new lending rules. It’s a complex process and that’s why you need a knowledgeable Realtor to help navigate your way to a successful closing. Give me a call and put my 15 years of experience to work for you. 603-526-4116
Donna Forest, ABR
Find out if your home is squandering precious energy and costing you money. By following up on problems, you can lower energy bills by 5% to 30% annually. What you’ll need:flashlight, screwdriver, paint stirrer, tape measure and, not just for serenity’s sake, a stick of incense. 1. Hunt down drafts. Hold a lit stick of incense near windows, doors, electrical outlets, range hoods, plumbing and ceiling fixtures, attic hatches, and ceiling fans in bathrooms—anywhere drafts might sneak in. Watch for smoke movement. Note what sources need caulk, sealant, weather-stripping, or insulation. 2. Check attic insulation. Winter or summer, insulation does the most good when it’s overhead, so start with the attic. First, do you have insulation? If the insulation you see covers the tops of the joists by several inches, you probably have enough. If the insulation is only even with the tops of the joists, you probably need to add insulation. 3. Check wall insulation. Remove electrical outlet covers to see if your wall contains insulation. Shut off power to the receptacle before probing beside the electrical box with a wooden paint stirrer. Check some switch boxes as well. Their higher wall location lets you see if blown-in insulation has settled. 4. Look for stains on insulation. These often indicate air leaks from a hole behind the insulation, such as a duct hole or crack in an exterior wall. Seal gaps with caulk or spray foam insulation. 5. Inspect exposed ducts. Look for obvious holes and whether joints are sealed. Heating, ventilation, and cooling (HVAC) ducts are made of thin metal and easily conduct heat. Consider insulating them. Uninsulated or poorly insulated ducts in unconditioned spaces can lose 10% to 30% of the energy used to heat and cool your home. 6. Check anything that goes through an exterior wall. Examine dryer ducts, plumbing lines under sinks and vanities, anything that pierces a wall. Any gaps around it should be sealed with spray foam insulation or caulk. Taken from an article by Jane Hodges for houselogic.com, a service of realtor.com
Back in the “good old days”, buyers who were pre-approved usually spent less than a month looking for a home; typically, they would see 15-20 houses. In today’s market, it’s not unusual for buyers to look at two or three times that number and still not say “yes” to one of them. With the number of homes available, buyers become overly concerned that they have not yet seen the “perfect” home. News media reporting has also helped convince them that there is a “better deal” around the next corner.
Here are some tips which might help buyers be more efficient in their search:
-Look at enough properties to get acquainted with the local market and its likelihood of meeting your expectations. Also, be sure to have your agent provide you with data regarding the performance of the market in your area, including sold statistics.
-Let your emotions help you. Too many buyers have forgotten that buying a home should be a satisfying and rewarding emotional experience, as well as a sensible purchase. Without emotion entering into your considerations, it will be much harder to make a decision. Go ahead, fall in love with a house! Then be sure it is a good purchase for you.
-Decide if a distressed property is really right for you. Purchasing a property which is under foreclosure or short sale circumstances can be a complicated and trying experience. Buyers will need a very good agent and a lot of patience and flexibility to be successful.
-Don’t focus too heavily on price. Yes, price is an important consideration, but it isn’t the only one. Sometimes focusing on getting the “very best” price keeps buyers from considering all the other benefits of purchasing a home
-Be ready to negotiate. The first step is to make an offer at a price you are comfortable with…but be prepared to consider a counter-offer from the seller. Negotiation is part of the process and can be the open door to a successful purchase. Typically, in the current market, sellers are still finding that they are the ones who need to do more negotiating, so, go ahead, give it a try, you never know where you might end up!
-Get plenty of advice but trust the professionals. Now, more than ever, buyers need the experience and guidance from a real estate professional who knows the market in his/her area. Friends and family can certainly offer good ideas for consideration, but, in the end, trust the professionals.
-Don’t let negative comments about the housing market scare you off. Despite the fact that there still seems to be bad news being broadcast about the real estate market, serious buyers should keep their eyes on the target. This is a “perfect storm” for buyers: historically low interest rates, high inventory, motivated sellers…you can buy more now for your dollar than at any time in recent history.
Go on out and buy a home! You won’t regret the decision!
Based on an article published on line, November 17, 2010, by RISMEDIA, the Leader in Real Estate Information Systems
I associate a treasury of colorful Sutton tales with a theatrical legacy dating back to Vaudeville performers. Many performers did live in and around South Sutton in the early part of the 1900s. Although most of the stories of their early acts are now forgotten, at least one tale lives on.
There is a snake charmer buried in an unmarked grave with a hollow iron pipe connected to his casket so his snakes could come and see him after his death. This otherwise unmarked grave is said to be near some vague landmarks in a patch of woods along a back dirt road; it’s an area I’ve come to know very well over the past 25 years.
As teenagers, we would invariably invoke the story of the snake charmer’s grave when walking along that dark road on moonless nights. That story was more than enough to quicken my pace, although I was sure it was just a myth, re-told by local kids to scare wide-eyed citified visitors like me.
Turns out, the story is true.
The snake charmer was Winfield Scott Littlehale, third generation of the Littlehale family to inhabit a now-vanished farm located at the foot of the steep granite knob where I live.
Littlehale was an eccentric, a farmer and a seasonal exhibitor of native wild animals, some of whom he had trained to perform simple tricks. He kept and displayed exotics: a prairie dog, an alligator, a parrot, and a monkey as well as some oddities in his traveling show including albinos and a “fox-dog” named Judy.
A 1956 memoir written by the late Chet Wright of Sutton, Sketches Here And There, recounts details of “Littlehale's Museum,” as it was known before the turn of the 20th century. As a boy of 10 or 12, Wright worked for Littlehale and eventually made a name for himself as a Vaudeville-era ventriloquist.
I remember Wright as an aged, nearly deaf proprietor of a general store overlooking Blaisdell Lake. His reminiscences are perhaps the only stories ever recorded about Littlehale’s menagerie.
According to Wright, Littlehale took his “Museum” on the country fair circuit in the fall and in the winter he rented a vacant store in a city and exhibited there for two or three weeks before moving on to another city.
“His show consisted of small animals such as mice, doves, guinea pigs, porcupines, rabbits, foxes, coons, woodchucks, crows, snakes, bobcats, turtles, monkeys, and a big alligator. He also had some very odd freaks such as a white crow, a white porcupine, white woodchuck, and a white squirrel. He had some small cages about three feet long with doors on each end, and by taking off these doors and putting the cages end to end, he made one long cage which he called ‘Littlehale’s Happy Family‚’…
Littlehale was quite a large man. He had a white horse and a buckboard, and when he got into the buckboard it nearly dragged on the ground… One of his attractions was a parrot whose talk was not exactly the Sunday-school type. He used to have a little perch on the side of his ticket box for the parrot to sit on, and when anyone came along and walked by instead of buying a ticket, the parrot would say ‘Cheap cus’.”
Littlehale died in March 1904. The circumstances of his burial are nearly as strange as his career. He was interred in the ox pasture behind his farm, somewhat diagonally due to difficulties in digging his grave. According to the obituary published in The Boston Globe:
“His burial in the pasture back of his home was in accordance with his expressed wish. He had selected the spot on the hillside, close beside two great boulders, and had buried some of his most cherished animal pets there, including the fox dog, which he had prized so highly. He asked that he might sleep with them in a casket of plain oak plank and his directions were faithfully carried out.”
The second description of Littlehale’s grave at the end of Chet Wright’s Chapter titled “My First Job in Show Business” contained an important missing clue to the location of the grave.
“Littlehale left full instructions for his burial. There was to be ‘no flowers, no singing‚’ and the coffin was to be made of two-inch oak plank… the town carpenters made the coffin according to instructions and the village blacksmith made the iron handles… Littlehale wished to be buried on the hill back of the house, between two rocks, under a big pine tree. A pipe was to be put into the ground so the snakes could come and see him. The details were carried out as he wished. Thus ends the story of one of Sutton’s best known showmen.”
The snake charmer story was re-told by successive generations but was nearly forgotten by the time that I first heard it. New residents of town don’t seem much interested in old local folklore. I hadn’t suspected there was any truth to the tale at all until I met Dr. Chan Blodgett, Littlehale’s great grandson.
Blodgett shared family photos of Littlehale’s cape house that burned in 1909. He also shared old postcards of a Victorian style inn subsequently built on the Littlehale house site by the Blodgetts. More importantly, Blodgett shared my desire to find the actual location of his great-grandfather Littlehale’s grave. We compared the two, slightly different descriptions of the gravesite. Fitting the pieces together, Blodgett and I soon found ourselves in the woods with a metal detector.
We spent a late autumn afternoon using the metal detector to search for the hollow iron pipe or any indication of buried metal - barbed wire, an old horseshoe, tin cans, shotgun shells, iron coffin handles - whatever. At the last possible site located between two great granite boulders and under a huge and ancient pasture pine, the metal detector beeped and flashed as we traced a rectangular pattern resembling the outline of a buried coffin. Late afternoon was rapidly fading to dusk.
“Maybe you ought to poke around here some more?” Blodgett suggested. “See if you can find something more convincing? Maybe you’ll find the iron pipe?”
“No thanks” I said. With the hair was bristling on the back of my neck as it grew ever darker, I was convinced we’d found the grave. Instead of digging around in the woods further, I contacted the absentee landowner to see what he knew, if anything, about the grave.
He purchased the tract of forestland 20 years earlier from Realtors who had no definitive knowledge of an unmarked grave - at least no knowledge they felt the need to disclose to potential buyers. Perhaps in the absence of a grave marker, the true story was in the process of becoming a local myth? An old iron pipe stuck in the ground is a feature that could easily disappear in a century. Obviously, stranger things had already happened.
Then the landowner produced an old survey map from his files with a handwritten notation: “Supposed location of the grave of W.S. Littlehale.” Case closed.
That night, I had a vivid dream of a white porcupine. Then about a week later, I actually saw one!
A pure white, albino porcupine with little pink eyes and pink palms perched in a roadside tree not far from Littlehale’s grave! The whole affair was getting creepy. Poke around that grave some more? I don’t think so! I don’t need the wrath of any ghost of a former inhabitant of the place where I now live.
Besides, I’d become fond of old Littlehale.
According to Chet Wright, “Littlehale had a great by-word ‘Yes I swear damn my soul!’” On occasion, I say that incantation aloud while working around our farm. The effect is immediate and electric.
It feels to me like Littlehale is ever just around the curve in the road, his buckboard wagon springs sagging under his weight. In pre-dawn gloom, Littlehale manifests in the creaking sound of the old-fashioned hand pump on our well, or the whinny of our horse, or the chatter of a squirrel.
A former neighbor named Don Lowe, once told me how the show people originally came to populate South Sutton. He said sometime before 1900, a rickety, horse-drawn wagon from an asylum for drunken performers broke an axle on a steep curve, spilling its passengers along the road. The liberated performance artists who literally just fell off the wagon performed a collective escape act, eluding authorities that made only a cursory search of the rugged countryside. In time, the harmless eccentrics founded a colony of Vaudevillians in the sleepy hollow of South Sutton.
And to that, Lowe raised his glass and winked.
Lowe knew that a good local story should end with a wink. The very act of telling a tale well gives it the quality of legend – even when it’s true. Perhaps the finest crop ever raised in the hill-farms and villages of once-rural New Hampshire is a handsome crop of local folklore; the stories that lie yet unharvested, their edges just touching like two great boulders deep in the woods of an old abandoned hillside ox pasture.
This tale was written by Dave Anderson for the Concord Monitor, date unknown. Dave is director of education for the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests. He can be reached via e-mail at danderson@spnhf.org or through the Forest Society web-site: http://www.spnhf.org
You can find this tag line on the NH Department of Resources and Economic Development’s web site at Welcome to New Hampshire. If you’re planning a visit to NH for a vacation or house-hunting, it’s the perfect place to start. You can make your reservations right on line. The site is designed around the current season and, there is an absolute wealth of information to be found. Some of the many subjects covered are Arts & Entertainment, Shopping and Antiquing, Family Attractions, What to do, Where to Eat…etc. For example, in the Arts & Entertainment section, you’ll find a brief description of NH’s music and arts scene, but there are also separate links to “Music”, “Galleries”, “Museums”, “Theatre”, “Film”, and “NH Made”. There’s even a NH Brewery Location Map! There are plenty of pictures and even some suggested itineraries suited for the season, and what could be more appropriate than “Yankee Dollar Stretchers”? You’ll find yourself going back many times. Come visit us in the New London-Lake Sunapee Area when you get here!