I did not write about it here earlier because I did not want to jinx it, but I did tell some people in person about a big development here at Fernley House that we expect both simplifies and complicates our lives: We bought the East Lot ! Alan Fleming, coming through on the California Zephyr , was able to capture this excellent photo that I have never been able to collect, showing both the original Fernley House at center (with Lisa's Big Orange Van and the Rolling Stone out front) and the vacant East Lot to the left, extending to the trees and bushes at the far left. The West Lot to the right is what was recently paved and seems to be heading toward some sort of development. Thank you, Alan, for sharing this photo. It's probably the best picture I have that shows both the house and the East lot in context. As I have written before, we have been doing what we can to keep the worst growth on this lot down in order to defend the house. We'll start doing more, although we do want to keep the trees and some of the bushes, and we have no plans at this time to develop the lot, just to clean it up and possibly fence it off. This is the lot where the rabbits, chipmunks, and birds come to eat the food we leave out for them. The East Lot has featured prominently in many of the photos of the house, especially those taken from the front porch. And shots I have taken looking back across the lot toward the house. As the photos should show, we were very concerned that anyone trying to develop that lot might build right up against our fence. That's always been less of a concern about the West Lot, because our house "faces" east, and all we'd do is probably try to raise our fence higher to maintain our privacy. So when the East Lot went up for sale, we started doing some figuring, and once we had a friend (who may or may not want to reveal their identity) offer to loan us the money above what we could raise from our own immediate resources, we put in an offer back in August. The asking price on that lot was $85,000, which is more than we paid for our house, which is on a lot only half the width of that lot, and we thought it was over-priced. The Realtor said that there had been a pending sale, but it fell through. The lot is zoned for commercial development, but the would-be buyer discovered that the city of Fernley would have put so many conditions on developing it that the buyer backed out, considering the extra costs to be too high. We put in our offer and explained that we mainly wanted the lot as an extension of our own property, and that we did not have any plans to extensively develop it. The owner came back with a counter-offer that we decided we could agree upon, and we put down "earnest money" (we deposited the check in the Realtor's drop box on the day we boarded the train to Chicago) and started the ball rolling toward a projected closing date by the end of September. Of course, we had a Worldcon to attend, which complicated things. During Chicon 8, we were exchanging text messages and emails with the Realtor doing things like establishing that we had the money (including a commitment from the lender for a large chunk of that money), liquidating the remainder of Lisa's inheritance money (which by then was only barely enough to keep from avoiding maintenance charges from the brokerage), and signing multiple different documents. Those documents ended up being relatively expensive. Had we been at home, we could have simply gone to the Realtor's office and signed them; however, because we were traveling, we needed to print out the papers, sign them, scan them, and email them back to the agent. The Hyatt had a business center, so that was doable. I thought the $0.75/page cost to print the PDFs of the necessary papers was expensive until I took the signed documents back down there to get them scanned. The business center charged $3/page to scan them! Worse, we missed some of the spaces on the first round, so we had to scan them again after fixing the missed signatures. I later learned that I could probably have brought these papers to one of Chicon's back-office spaces and used a copier/scanner that they had. I did not know it at the time, and thus got to spend around $70 on printing and copying. But in any event, we got those documents done. We also got the check for the loan deposited to my bank account before we left Chicago. Our trip home allowed the Realtor time to digest all of the paperwork, for my bank to digest the check, for the brokerage to send Lisa her money, and for us to get that money from Lisa's bank account to mine. When we got home, we found that there were several more documents that we needed to sign for the Realtor. In this case, I printed them at home, Lisa and I signed them, and I scanned them on our own machine and emailed them. This was even more convenient than going to the Realtor's office. Now we found ourselves in a hurry-up-and-wait situation. For a couple of weeks at the end of September, various delays with title/escrow company left me worrying that something was wrong. The money was consolidated into my bank account and I could have wired it to the title company at any time, but they couldn't see to come up with an amount and an account. The Realtor reassured me that we had done nothing wrong, but she had to have us sign an addendum to extend the closing date by a week. I did check with my insurance company about how this will affect us. They said that as long as there are no buildings on the lot, our existing insurance will cover it; however, they recommended increasing our general liability insurance. That will cost an additional $2.50/month for an extra $700K in coverage ($1M total), which seems like a decent bet to us, so we did so. Should we decide to put up a fence or a storage container (both things that we've considered), then we'll need to tell the insurance agent, as they'll need to add it to the policy and probably change our rates. Late on Tuesday, we finally heard from the title company, who said that Lisa and I could come to their office and sign all of the necessary remaining documents for the title transfer, get the final amount we needed to pay including the closing fees and taxes, and get the wire-transfer information. As the title company's office is across the street from the Wigwam Casino-Restaurant and thus only above a five minute walk from our house, that was just fine with us. On Wednesday afternoon, Lisa and I walked over to Stewart Title and signed the pile of papers. The closing fees and taxes were less bad than I feared (around $1,300). We went home and I initiated the wire transfer. This was much easier than when we bought Fernley House in 2011, when I needed to get a cashier's check, and when the Bank of America branch was very reluctant to generate it for me. I could do the wire transfer ($30 fee) online. The only minor hitch was that it was after that days cut-off time, so the money wouldn't go through until Thursday. I figured that meant we would close escrow possibly on Friday. Somewhat to my surprise, the title company called me around mid-day Thursday and said the wire had completed and escrow had closed. I walked over to their office and collected the title papers. Later that day, the Realtor came by and took away the For Sale sign. (They never did put a Sale Pending sign on it, which also worried us at the time.) Lisa and I now own roughly 2.5 times as much land as we previously did: 0.41 acres (about 18,000 ft 2 ) or 0.17 hectares (about 1,700 m 2 ). A vast spread it is not; however, it probably about what we can maintain, and we now have defensible space that won't be turned into something looming over us and cutting off our view.