What's New!!!!

I have a feeling this will be my longest entry ever!! I thought that I was done writing the blog, but after I got a couple of complaints from friends and family that they were not being kept up to date, I decided that best way to update everybody at the same time was to write again. First I had to check out the blog where I left off and I have to say that a lot has happened since then.

Last fall I planted 70 flower bulbs in the front yard and 69 actually have come up. Here are the pictures of my crocuses. They are so pretty.

 

 

 

 

My five circles of daffodils are starting to come up, but I have not had time to take pictures of them yet.

A lot has also happened on the house front. We had signed a contract to install a deck in September 2012 and construction was supposed to start about 6 weeks later. To make a long story short, construction started in January 2013 after we asked for our money back, since we were tired of waiting. There were some challenges, since for example the old patio door was slightly bigger than the new patio door and we were not at all impressed with the guy that built the deck, but in the end it turned out pretty good.

 

 

We still have to build a small lattice fence around the bottom of the deck and we will add some small steps into the yard, but that will be done once the weather gets better. I am sure we will enjoy this deck for a long time. So other than some yard furniture and the usual yard work, we should be done on the outside.

Since the deck was finally done by the beginning of February Doug decided to look for a contractor to fix some of the stuff on the inside of the house. When we moved in, we knew that we had a water problem by the fireplace. When building the chimney, somebody forgot to put flashing on the roof to divert the water from the chimney and over time the water had soaked into the walls. I have to say Doug found a pretty good guy.

 Before

 

 Luckily he did not have to cut all the way to the floor

Thinking that we had this mold in our living room for a year does not make me feel any better. This is what it looked like after.

Next was the crack in the sheet rock in the hallway and taking out the pocket door in the kitchen. I expected the house to be a big mess, but I have to say that the contractor worked very clean.

  

After removing the sheet rock, we found out that the supporting beams where never joined and the stress caused the sheet rock to crack. The pocket door in the kitchen was never used and also caused additional support problems due to the void in the wall. The contractor took care of the problem and reinforced the wall that had housed the pocket door.

 

 

 

Next we had a mantel installed around the fire place.

Since the house was going to be a mess anyway, we decided to have the kitchen done at the same time. Here is the before pictures.

 

.. and here is the new kitchen.

We now have 40" cabinets,

a new floor

and a new granite counter top.

I spend this weekend putting all our stuff back into the kitchen cabinets and preparing a nice Easter dinner.

This should bring our major renovations of this house to an end and you would think that it would be time for us to relax. However, my parents are coming beginning of August and we will have to have the bedroom and the second bathroom done by then and of course paint the living room.

Maybe we will take a break next year!!   Happy Easter everybody.

The End of a Chapter

We traveled for almost 5 years and had a blast doing it. Yesterday, somebody bought our Teton Homes trailer and even though we don't know who it is, we wish them safe travels and a whole lot of good times in their new RV. It has been a somewhat frustrating wait to find somebody, especially in these financially difficult times, but I hope our rig found a good new home. It was the last major thing left from our adventure, but we will always have our memories and eventually we will go back to RVing, if we will ever be able to retire.

There is also big news on the house front. After the neighbor's water tank burst about a month ago, we decided to replace the original equipment in our house before it breaks. So Doug checked around and we are now the proud owner of a new water heater, furnace and heat pump. And it was just in time before the weather decided to heat up to 95 in the daytime and low of 75. That is not good sleeping weather without AC.

The next project done was painting the house, which is the last outside project other than me working in the yard.

Before:

 After:

This is my newest project. I want to create a barrier between the grass and the house in order to keep creatures and grass away from the house. It will take about 96 bricks and so far I have laid 18. Nice weekend project before the rain starts again.

At this point we are celebrating a whole month without rain. It should not last to much longer.

After long debate I have decided to not continue the blog unless something big happens. You guys surely noticed that I have not blogged in a long time, since I don't believe that blogging about me pulling weeds is something worth talking about. So for now travel safe everybody and we will see again on the road one of these days.

Saying Goodbye and more Progress

I thought I would be excited when the truck was sold, since it would be one more thing taken care of, but when Doug send me an email at work last Wednesday telling me that the truck was gone, I was really sad. It made our settling down so much more real! Bart (Big Ass Red Truck) had served as well and overall had run very well. We went to dinner to celebrate and ended up reminiscing most of the evening. Now if we could just get the rig sold, I think I would be happy.


Things are also moving on the new house front. They took the deck off last week. Here are some before and after pictures.

From what Doug was telling me they had removed a lot of debris, a door and an animal skeleton before I came home.


Next was the siding. The pictures are from earlier in the week and by now the siding has been completed

It looks really nice and I think we will take a little break before choosing a color for the house. Right now Doug is working on getting the metal top of the chimney replaced so that no more water can possibly leak into the chimney.


Next weekend I will try again to get the moss out of the lawn. I used a special rake last weekend, but the moss is so thick that Doug went out and bought me a tool that we can install on the lawn mower to help remove the moss. I have never seen moss that thick and am amazed that there is any grass growing at all. But, according to my boss, this is normal for this area. I just hope that once I get rid of it and treat the lawn it will not come back so thick next year. Stay tuned ...

 

Moving right along!!

I know it has been a while since I last posted (thanks Dad I knew that already), but if you get up at 4:45 am, work all day and go to bed at 9 pm, there is really not much going on during the week.

For the last seven weeks it has been beautiful on the weekends and I have spent a lot of time outside pulling weeds and taking out a whole bunch of shrubs, so the guys won't have a problem when the siding gets replaced. Here are the before and after effect.

Before:

After

It took me two weekends to cut them up and take the roots out, but it is done.

Now on to our bigger projects. The weather finally has been nice enough during the week so that we could get the roof started. I was amazed that it took them only one day to take the whole roof down and lay the tar paper.

Here they are working on fixing the water damage on the chimney, since they did not build a cricket when they installed the first roof.

Moving right along ....

Almost done ......

This picture is for my Dad so he can see the cricket that they build by the chimney. Looks like a little roof to me :-)

So it is Saturday evening now and the roof is done. Next big project is the new siding, which will start on Monday. Stay tuned .....

Moving right along .....

So many things have happened in the last four weeks that I don't know where to start. I promised you guys updated pictures from the house, so here we go.

Bedroom

We don't have shades on the windows yet, but it will all come in time. To me this is part of decorating and that gets done when things slow down.

Bathroom

The only reason I took a picture of the bathroom is that we had never installed a new toilet ourselves before and I really thought it was difficult. Guess what, it took us about 15 minutes and it was totally easy.

Office


We were going to wait with doing the office, but then we found this nice desk and bookshelves on sale and so I painted the walls and ceiling on a Saturday and we started building furniture the next week. Doesn't it look pretty nice!

Kitchen


Living Room

The living room needs a lot of work, but at this point we have a place to sleep, a place to cook and a place to relax and the rest will follow in time. We actually used the fire place a couple of times when it was still cold the beginning of March and it was pretty nice to watch the wood logs burn.

Also, work is going really well. As of last Monday I have been officially hired by Radar Inc. and started my 90 day probation period. I got a nice raise and we will have major medical insurance again by July 1st. Things are really falling into place.

One more big thing happened, which came very unexpected. We were all set with our renter for next season at Retama, when apparently a new owner at Retama made our renter an attractive offer to buy one of his lots instead of renting ours. Doug and I discussed the situation a little bit and made our renter a better offer and Bob and Linda Elliott are now the proud new owner of our old lot.

So now we just have to sell the truck and the rig. Our Teton Homes Aspen Experience is now up on Uhlman's RV website. When you get to the website you have to search for Teton under "All Makes" and you will find our rig. So if you know somebody that is looking for a beautiful and well kept 5th wheel, please send them to Uhlman's RV. If you know somebody that is looking for a great truck, just have him contact us.

Well, time to go back to doing things in the house. Hope everybody has a great April Fool's Day!!