Progress

We’ve been running around, running down our long to-do list. It’s amusing the things you find when moving.

This had to be from several moves ago. (sigh). One time recently I told you that I’d moved 25 times in my adult life and John was skeptical. One of these days I’m going to bore you with the entire litany. Just warning you. You can blame John’s skepticism when it happens.

And I found this. I guess it came from a game. It’s going to be my new talisman.

We are forever moving pick-up loads of random things to different houses. Anyone want an enormous, slightly dusty bean bag?

It doesn’t fit in our new house. I think my friend in Santa Fe is going to take it. I don’t know what we’d do without that pick-up (hire movers like normal people, probably).

And we’re buying things, and planting things…

We’ve been working on our rentals too. Rental #1 is getting a new roof. The whole city had hail damage awhile back, and ever since then roofers have been absolutely impossible to schedule. It took lots of calling, but I finally have someone lined up for this fall, which is the soonest they could schedule us. (Hey Robert, I don’t know if you still read this blog, but thanks for the roofer recommendation!)

Rental #2 is getting a bunch done. There were bad dog claw scratches in the sliding glass door, and the screen and glass company said they couldn’t just change out the glass and that we needed a whole new sliding glass door installed. (For mega $). Then the contractor, Calob, who is working on miscellaneous tasks at our new house (more on that later), went out there and scraped off the tint on the glass doors, and it’s as good as new. The scratches were only in the tinted film on the glass! He charged me $100 for carefully scraping the sticky stuff off with a blade, and saved me well over a thousand. I don’t even remember how much he saved me. Thousands! The screen and glass company’s quote was so ridiculous I didn’t even consider it.

Meanwhile at the same house, Sam, the brick and tile guy, is laying new tile (it was old carpet and peeling wood-look laminate).

This is the tile we had original bought to match existing tile in the Placitas house, but when it arrived, it turned out to be a very different dye lot and didn’t match the existing tile well enough to use. So we stored it, knowing we had a rental with floors that were going to need redone. Remember how we had a horrible time trying to decide on tile at the Placitas house? In the end, we gave up on tile, took everything up, and had Sam install brick. Brick flooring is very traditional and appreciated in that part of New Mexico. But in Albuquerque, tile is standard.

You remember Sam? He’s super nice, reasonably affordable, and does careful work. He’s also very, very sloooooooow. Remember the months and months my backyard patio brick took last year? This is his third big job for us. He promised me it would go quickly because the longer it takes, the longer it’s sitting empty without generating rental income. A few months of lost rent would cost more than what the tile job cost.

The same rental also had a broken toilet tank lid. The tenants had glued it back together. It’s always something. This is an easy fix, just need to find the right thing to order.

Rental #3 just needed a bit of landscaping done. If you ever want something to cause nightmares, read up on bindweed. It is absolutely impossible to deal with. It puts roots down many, many feet, and will run linearly underground for many, many more feet, and can regrow from just a speck of root somewhere, anywhere buried in your yard. For those of you from the Pacific Northwest – IT IS WORSE THAN BLACKBERRY VINES! It’s absolutely impossible to get rid of. We had it growing through the front window frame inside the house this spring. My tenants were sending photos and I couldn’t even understand what they were saying! I’ve heard of ants getting into a house, but not weeds!

Anyway, we still have bindweed out there, but at least we now also have cute little rosemary plants. Here we are planting them:

And laying the drip system.

And ooops! The pressure blew the heads right off. It’s a fountain!

Haha, someone’s getting wet trying to turn it off! Turn it off, turn it off! It’s spraying higher than the house.

We also replaced a dead evergreen out at the Placitas house.

We had originally dug the hole there for a different reason. Before giving up on the entire place, we had envisioned a tranquil pond with lilies and koi (ha. ha.) After giving up on that dream, John didn’t want to waste the effort (because if you have a hole you must fill it), so he bought two trees to plant there, one of which died, so then he bought a replacement tree. I’m reminded of the children’s song, “she swallowed the bird to catch the spider…she swallowed the spider to catch the fly…but I don’t know why, she swallowed the fly.”

While out there we noticed a neighbor’s house had burned!

I don’t know anything about it. Very sad. Except the last house that burned in that same neighborhood turned out to be owner arson. (Did John and I consider that? No…why would you think that? And did John or I ever consider using the grave-sized hole for our spouse’s body instead of evergreen trees? Now why would I even suggest that?) Just because that house has been a wee bit expensive and frustrating.

By the way, it failed its septic system inspection earlier this week. Did I tell you that? We weren’t surprised because of its age, but now we have to either get it fixed or a new one installed. Best case scenario it’s going to cost some money and delay closing. Hopefully our buyers won’t back out of the deal. If they do, it would be karma. Because we backed out of buying a house a couple of years ago for the exact same reason.