More Settled in M-F…

Aug. 1st, 2016 – All settled into my New2Me Sticks and Bricks home.

It’s been a while since I posted and I wanted to update my readers with some info about the move from being a full time RV’er to a home owner. My snow bird life the last few years had become a bit stale as I was taking the same routes I’ve taken what seemed like 100’s of times. I was getting stale too. So when my daughter and her SO broke up, and my daughter couldn’t afford the mortgage payments on the house, they offered to sell it to me for a locally assessed price, I bought it. I’d been looking for a home to buy in this area for years but never found anything I could live with. Since it was a sweetheart deal, I decided to use a RE Lawyer instead of a realestate agent while I did the simple, online, legwork. Her direction and advice was very helpful and she did a lot of documentation shuffling as required to buy a house along with guiding me. Why isn’t everyone using RE Attorneys instead of RE agents that are now days charging 5.5% of the sales price? Using an RE agent would have been $13,700 for this sale had I not used an attorney. Cost all of $510 for the RE lawyer!

Anyway, I took some pictures recently of the homestead. It’s around 2 miles from the old downtown of Milton Freewater, Oregon on a dead end street with houses around all from the 1960’s with 2 cats in the yard, etc. Next to the property is an irrigation creek that is filled when some farmer needs water, the rest of the year it’s dry. But it means no buildings on the north side of the property. Check out the pictures from my posting last time.

What I’ve been doing the last month is a catching up on a bunch of deferred maintenance. Faucets, drains, curtains, lights, electrical, etc. etc. So far I’ve completed some 13 projects. One thing I noticed right away was that the plumbing for the Washer and Dryer was reversed from normal. Instead of the washer on the left, it was on the right. All I did was add a 6″ piece of hose to the washer hot water supply hose, swapped positions of the machines so now the front loading washer is on the left and dryer is on the right so doors open correctly when moving clothes from one to the other.

Originally I had set up my computer work station on the desk that Scott left when he moved and after a couple weeks, decided I didn’t like the setup so moved it into the master bedroom. My room. And yesterday I ordered another work desk that I’ll put my electronics work space on. It’ll go into my bedroom too.

And so, here are some new pictures. Note that I had my lawn guy mow down all the 2 foot weeds in the graveled portion of the back yard. Hated those tall weeds.

We’ll start with the inside:

This is the office now. There’s a couch where my computer desk used to be.

This is the master bedroom with my computer desk. The tower computer is there as I work on trying to clone the Win10 HDD over to an SSD drive. Has some very expensive CAD software on it that doesn’t work on Linux so I still have a Win10 machine. Once that’s done, I can put that entire PC tower in storage. My main computer now is that small box standing on it’s side. One of those mini-PCs. The cloned SSD will go in there when I get things transferred. When the new work desk arrives, I’ll swing this setup around and the new desk will go in that corner and under the window. I measured twice!

Here’s the original ’60’s kitchen. Those cabinets go all the way to the ceiling. I had to fix a burst hose for the faucet yesterday. Just wore out, starting spraying a strong stream against the wall and flooded the floor before daughter noticed and got the water shut off.

This is my favorite wall treatment. The daughter had painted it and added the flowers and I like it as soon as I saw it, but it needed something off to the upper right. My contribution was the giant golden clock. The TV is a 50″ but I can’t hardly make out the font on the screen when navigating and looking for something to watch so I’m going to buy a 75″. My chair directly faces the TV now so I won’t be putting it on that great looking wall.

And a few more random shots of the inside and outside.

Looking out from the kitchen onto the patio. I’ve got my temporary wood working setup.

Got my top tool box out of the RVs basement compartment and bought that lower section for $50 off of the local Nextdoor market. Perfect condition. We are on the end of a dead end street so I don’t worry about thieves too much but I roll it into the shed when needed.

Here’s the side yard where I’m going to park the RV soon after I get that chain link fence portion changed into a wide gate. Just bought the hinges and brackets for that but I need to order the wheel. Thought I already had but nooooo, I had not. This back yard was filled with weeds, had an old wood foundation for a shed (that blew away during a wind storm) and a weir box with a pump in it along with pipes and plumbing that supplied water from the creek to water the lawn. I don’t have the water rights so I just had it all tore out and smoothed.

I’m thinking of wiring and plumbing the RV and renting it out for a couple years. Make a few thousand I can apply to the mortgage.

Here’s where the long wide gate will be.

And here’s the backside of the house and the smallish back yard that still has grass instead of rocks. The rest of the back yard has 4″ of rock laid over a ground cover.

This is how it looked with the weeds…

And now…

And the side yard before…see above for a current picture.

I think that moving the RV back to the side yard and renting it out for a year or two is a good long range plan. Eventually, as I accumulate money, plan is to put a double garage back in that north side yard next to the small shed that’s part of the patio now. Incorporating it into the design.

So this is all there is from the home front for now. Thanks for reading!