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!!

... and a new Chapter begins!

I know it has been a while since I have posted, but so much stuff has happened that I don't even know where to start.

I mentioned in our last blog that we were working on a new project. Well, the new project was the purchase of a house. I did not want to talk about it until it was truly ours, since dealing with a bank owned property, who is out of India is not the easiest thing to do. It took Doug about a month of back and forth, since our realtor made some mistakes too, but he was finally able to get everything straightened out and as of January 26th, we are officially the proud owner of a three bedroom two full bath house in Monroe, WA.


I can not tell you how much work Doug put in this project and luckily for me, all I had to do was go to work, while he was dealing with everybody. I was going to take pictures of all the progress we have made so far, but first I need to find the camera in all the piles of stuff we have in the spare bedrooms, so pictures will have to wait. Here are some that I took when we first looked at the house.

The kitchen

Dining Room towards the backyard

Living room towards the front of the house.

As you can tell, the first thing we had to do before we moved in was to replace the carpet. I can not stress enough how Doug has done everything. He went to the various carpet places, furniture stores and bedding stores and all I had to do was go with him on a Saturday and pick out what I want. As you all know, I hate to go shopping and luckily Doug did it all for me while I was at work.

So we had the carpet replaced, bought a bed, bedroom furniture and some living room furniture and and moved in on February 17th. Sounds all very easy, except that Doug took daily trips from the rig to the house bringing up all the stuff out of the rig and that trip is 30 miles one way. It is amazing just how much stuff we still had in the rig. So now everything is in the spare bedrooms, the garage and spread around the house and I have to figure out where to store all our stuff. I will take me some time so that I only have to do it once.

Last Monday Doug went back to the rig, hooked it up to the truck and brought it down to Uhlman RV and once it gets detailed it should go up on their website. We went down yesterday to sign some paperwork and take off the pressure pro sensors from the tires. It was time for me to say good-bye to the home we had for the last four years and I have to say it was hard for me.

I know we are starting a new chapter in our lives and I am excited, but also a little bit sad to see our old home go. Well I will stop for now, since I have a ton of work to do in the house, but I will post again when I have some pictures of our improvements.

SNOW!!! OH NO !!!

This entry is brought to you courtesy of the Seattle snow storm.They started talking about this over the weekend and we really did not pay that much attention to it. We had a dusting before and found out that Seattle really does not know how to remove snow, since they only own 28 plows, but we were able to get around.

Well Doug took a couple of pictures Monday while I was at work.


Can you see the icicle that formed on the downspout on the rig. There were also some beautiful ones coming of the front of the rig. Luckily we have an electric heater and the furnace to keep us warm inside.

I still went to work yesterday, but decided to leave at 11 am, since the snow was starting to stick on the road and I have 22 miles to go to get back to the rig. It took me over an hour and the roads were getting really bad with slush and snow. My car did just fine, but some people just don't know how to drive on ice and sleet up or down a hill and there is a lot of hills around here.

I got up at 5 am this morning, saw the snow that had come down last night and decided to stay home today. These are pictures I took about 11 am.


We lost power for about 1 1/2 hours today, but at least right now we have power and therefore water again. The county road in front of our place is packed with snow and slush and if it does freeze tonight, it will be a mess again tomorrow. At least this storm is supposed to turn into rain by tomorrow and it should wash the slush away soon. I will decide tomorrow morning if I will go in late or have to take another day off from work. At least they are were understanding about me having to take time off due to the weather at work so I don't have to worry about loosing my job.

... and I thought we would only have to worry about rain here!!!

Happy New Year Everybody!!!

This was our dessert for New Year's Eve and it was soooooo delicious. Actually, it was so rich that I could not finish mine and enjoyed it again on New Year's Day. Between the pecan pie and the butter cookies for Christmas and this delicious dessert we definitely need to go back to our diet.

It has been a while since I have last posted and lots of things have happened since then. The biggest one right now is that I have found a job as an inventory analyst. I am working since Thanksgiving week through an employment agency a 90 day contract, but the company has already said that they will take me over after the contract expires. I have a very nice boss and really like my job, which is an added bonus for finding employment again. Doug has not been as lucky yet, but I am sure something will come along for him also.

In regard to the weather we really can't complain to much. It has been a very dry December for Seattle standards and we only had frozen windshields a couple of times. It just seems to wrong to own a windshield scraper again. The winds have been so strong that our temporary roof over the bedroom has come down, but since the tree has lost all its leaves, we won't put it up again right now. It is amazing how strong the gusts get around here and you have to be careful about trees and debris on the road. We actually lost power for about two hours due to the strong winds the other night.

We are also working on another big project, but I am not ready to talk about it. It is in the beginning stages and I want to wait until it firms up a little bit more before sharing it will all of you.

We wish you all a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year!!!