Here is the story of how this went down.

My Neighbor with a Machine Shop

Ever since I moved to VT I have been wanting to be friends with my neighbor with a machine shop. But he was a cranky hermit, and everyone in the village confirmed this - he doesn't want anything to do with anyone. It was disappointing, since I thought we probably had a lot in common. But all attempts at meeting him failed.

I was sad about this, I imagined how cool collaborations might have gone, learning how to use the tools that I have no experience with - my kids making friends with the cranky hermit engineer... I thought about this A LOT. It was something I would bring up with strangers when talking about where I lived.

The Auction

About a month ago (late October 2023), a sign was put up on the mailbox that the property and everything in it would be auctioned on 11/16. The building is adjacent to my home property, it is the closest structure to my house. I didn't know very much about it, other than that there was a machine shop inside. The auction had a bunch of extra details: apparently there were three apartments in the building (I would say 1.5 apartments, knowing what i know now), a bunch of random rooms intended to be classrooms or something, and the workshop. I did not think it was possible for me to offer a competitive bid given that properties around here are going for stupid prices, but... I would at least bid on some of the workshop tools since I am so close by, and why not participate in the auction, I have no experience with this - why not?

So I tour the place during the open house, and am even more excited with how weird and rambly it is. The equipment is intimidating, I have no idea how much it is worth. Some of the stuff is clearly of use to me (I don't have a bench grinder or a decent bench vise, you can't have too many clamps, etc). I do my best to compete in the bidding on the tools, thinking that this is all I will get out of this whole endeavor. I end up spending about $600 on a bunch of tools and clamps and grinders and sanders and other tools. The pickup time for the items is the same time as the auction, 11AM on Thursday 11/16.

I was a bit worried about the property, so I did a short title search down at our clerk's office. The title was a weird mess, it looked like it was for the wrong property, the description was just a sentence inserted into the larger narrative of the surrounding land. It turned out later that this WAS the wrong title, but the reference to the actual title was not properly referenced. But I also found out that this was an estate sale, not a foreclosure, and the property was free of encumbrances. Also, it was owned not by the deceased neighbor, but the company he had created - WAT Inc.

Auction Day

I check my finances and decide that I could liquidate the rest of my okta options (which honestly I probably should have done anyway) and get about $100k from that (which I will have to pay taxes on, so about $80k really). So that's my limit, but I still have very low confidence that I can compete, I mean come on. It is 5500sqft on 5 acres. Even if it is kind of rough, how could it go for less than at least $200k?

The auction was very informal, the auctioneer was also coordinating the loadout of the winnings to the random people who brought uhauls or flatbed trailers to pick up their machining lathe that they had snagged for $500 (et cetera).

There were only 8 people who signed up to bid in the real estate auction, and we just gathered outside the door under the tree. So, me and 7 other people. I recognized two of them, one was a local contractor and another was an elementary school teacher at our school who had a suspiciously enormous house. The auctioneer started off the bidding with that weird auction-jibber-jabber of $100k. To my surprise, nobody was interested. After about 15 seconds an older dude interrupted with "35k". The auctioneer looked annoyed but adjusted his jabber to "got35anyone40-40-40anyone40-doIhave..." I was kind of shocked and countered with 40k. Nobody else offered any bids, just me and this other guy and I ended up winning with a bid of $46k.

The Negotiation

I was confused, the rest of the bidders congratulated me, and the auctioneer looked annoyed and waved me over to a space to talk. He said that the owners have a reserve of 100k. I didn't know what to do, so I asked: is that it? Do we have to restart the auction? I didn't ask why he didn't just tell everyone that there was a reserve and let bidding continue....

At this point, I am realizing that I have no idea what the rules are to this game, and my estimation of what people pay for these things was totally wrong. He said: well, the sellers won't go less than 100k. I said, uh, are there any other options? like they wouldn't go to 80k or something? He asked me if that was an offer. I was like: OH. And then I said: No, my offer is $60k. He seemed annoyed but not unsurprised, grumbled that they wouldn't agree to that and walked off to talk to the owners.

I was sort of relieved, I didn't really have time or headspace to deal with this WHOLE THING, and not having to think about it was genuinely fine. Especially if it didn't seem like the property would just get flipped into a wretched slum. I spent the time chatting with the other people and loading the tools into my truck. The others asked me if I was comfortable sharing what details were, and I didn't care, I just told them what was happening. The local contractor said his limit was $35k, so he was out of the bidding right at the beginning. Apparently everyone else was trying to flip the property, and part of the cost is to demo the whole structure. Maybe do a massive renovation, but either way, it would be $30k+ on top of the bid to maybe be able to sell it. Nobody thought it could be listed as it was, it was too complicated. Other things I overheard: I don't think you can find a realtor to list this. It would be worth more if the property was bare land. But the main thing was: I was the only person interested in the structure. For everyone else, the building was a negative, not a positive, so it was worth a lot less to them.

About an hour later the auctioneer asked me if I would take $80k without a buyers premium (the auction house tacks 10% extra after the bid, so my counter of $60k was actually going to be $66k). I said that was still too high, I countered with $65k and he seemed annoyed. I continued loading out my stuff which took a while due to the traffic of other buyers. Also, I had to run back home to do a telehealth thing, and so I was juggling the rest of my life with this.

Several hours later, he called me and said that they had done a bunch of phone calls and he wanted to know if I would go to $72,500 without buyers premium. The auction house was cutting their take to 2500 and the estate wanted at least 70k. He said this with a kind of finality that was different from his other offers, and I was pretty sure this was the last offer he could reasonably make. Still, this was within my budget, and so... I called my wife. I told her what the situation was and she said (pretty quickly): buy it. That was enough to push me over and I signed.

It felt totally unreal. It still feels pretty unreal.

The Aftermath

The documents specified that I had to close in 30 days. I didn't realize how bananas this was during the holiday season. I spent all of 11/17 (friday) calling lawyers trying to find one who would be able to help me close. The problem was that Vershire has notoriously bad title records and it takes a very long time to do the search. You have to do it in person, and you need to make an appointment, and the office is not open every weekday. So the first couple lawyers said: second week of January at the very earliest. I asked for references from everyone, and just walked down the list. Everyone refused... until I ended up by accident calling the lawyer representing the seller. He recommended another lawyer in the same town (Royalton) a small town lawyer with a small local practice. I was so lucky that he picked up my call, and I was double lucky that he said he thought he could make the deadline. Plus he knew the seller's lawyer, and they could make things happen a bit quicker. Not sure how ethical this is... I don't care!

I got very good vibes from this lawyer (Don Hayes of South Royalton), which was a nice bonus.

The Non-profit Org

I knew that I wanted to make a community workshop, and I knew that I would need to create a nonprofit entity if I wanted that to work because there is no way there are enough people around here for membership dues to cover costs. Plus I want companies to be able to donate tools or money to the workshop.

So, I need a lawyer to help me with that. I asked my accountant what he thought, and he recommended just doing a search at the Vermont Bar Association website for a nonprofit lawyer. That search turned up Otter Creek Law in Rutland. I made an appointment with the lawyer there (Jeff Geuvin) for a zoom consult, and also asked Don Hayes if that was something he was interested in doing. Also in my frantic search for a closing lawyer a local resident who will probably be on the nonprofit board recommended a lawyer in Barre, who said he was booked due to a new baby, and he recommended a different laywer, and I made an appointment to consult with her (Heather Devine) which I have yet to do this week. Don said he doesn't do nonprofit work, and would pass.

My meeting with Jeff went really well, he does half rate for nonprofit work and he has a lot of experience with it. He got the most awkward bit out of the way early: he wanted to make sure that I wasn't trying to make money with the nonprofit. He is not interested in that kind of work. I told him that no, the only reason that I want to make it a non-profit is because I don't think I could sustain it otherwise. And also, this isn't a business, it's a community resource. It will sell things to sustain itself, but be as free as possible. He seemed relieved by this, and sent me a letter to sign to get started. I told him that I was meeting with another lawyer, and my decision depended on how that went. He seemed totally fine with that.

Now

And here we are. I am trying to sort out what to do with this place, how to make my dreams real, and so on. If everything goes well at the closing, I will have to decide if I will take out a mortgage on the property for renovation funds, or a secured loan or something. I need to decide all of the work that needs to be done. Find a group of like-minded people to form the board with me.

Just so you know, the board members can be anywhere. I asked if it was important that the board be local or even Vermonters and Jeff said nah. They can be anyone from anywhere.

Also, I don't know what I am doing, so I have posted this to my slacks in hopes that others are curious/foolish enough to want to help. :)

This workshop would 100% have a recurring art piece at Firefly, of that you can be sure.