When we purchased our home, it was in the days when buying a home was the biggest and best investment a couple would ever make. Our home is on a corner, it has 12 lots with it, there are no other houses on this block, it’s on a paved road, 6 or so miles, outside the city limits.
Our little community offers the elementary school, up to the 6th grade, a farmers COOP, volunteer fire department, and a farm machine repair business.
We bought the house in the fall of 1986 and the purchase price was under, 20,000. This was a fantastic deal, especially, for a young couple raising four children. Other families with kids the same ages lived here. All four of ours, found best friends in the community. They started Kindergarten together and ended up graduating High School together.
This is one of those areas where about the only noise, was that of the children playing, with occasional freight trains blowing by on the tracks just east of my home. During the wheat harvest, the truck traffic increased quite a bit at the COOP. It WAS nice.
Fast Forward to 2011. My Oh My, how our little world has changed.
The Trains never cease. One after another. The higher fuel goes, the more freight trains are running up and down those tracks. All hours of the day or night, whistles blowing. They are required to blow five times for each road crossing. Sometimes I count that whistle instead of Sheep on those nights that sleep does not come easy!
The COOP, is much busier, since the main crops are no long wheat. Corn, Wheat, Feed, Cotton, and Soybeans, (which have to kept a certain temp, so 50 amp electric blowers were added), keeps the place hopping year round. Add in to that mix is the anhydrous ammonia tank farm, so legal or not, seems to always be comings and goings down there.
Within the last few years, the Kaw Nation Indian Tribe, felt generous, and paved and repaved the roads into and out of our community, to make it easier for folks to get to their casino, as opposed to going four miles on up the road, then east out of Newkirk. This has added even additional traffic and road noise, as my house sits quite close to the road, or should I say the HIGHWAY, as that is exactly what it has become.
The newly repaved road sees additional traffic from a rock quarry the sits further east of us. These trucks used a state highway for access up until the last few years. Now they run from daybreak until dark, five and sometimes six days per week.
If all of that is not enough, there seems to be very active oil drilling company or Equipment Company, utilizing this road. I have not figured out just what their destination is, but, with that much equipment, extra large loads with pilot cars, they must have started a storage yard on down the road from us.
I can not believe we have yet to see a major pileup. Our speed limit on the road, in the community is 45, but then goes to 55 and let me tell ya, any AMBITIOUS, Sheriff Deputy, or Highway Patrolman, could meet their monthly ticket quota, in a single day. Not that we have any! The truckers know this......
So, in closing, I tell you, our home is not the best investment we will ever make in today’s world. Regardless of how much money we COULD spend updating and even that we have spent, in today’s markets, we will never see a profit.
IF, we ever get out of here, doubtful, it’s paid for, taxes are reasonable, this house would have to be a rental.
No One,( in their right mind), would buy this place to bring up their Children.
Hell, maybe that COOP, needs the space for another storage bin........
Guess this is what the world calls progress
