We are like 98% complete with the suite! All we have left is the backsplash for the kitchen and bathroom and a few “home-like” touches.
Category: Harlingen
Three Cats
I’ve never been a big “cat” guy, but we inherited four small kittens right after we moved here.
Their father is a cat/bobcat mix and mother a stray black cat that seemed to like our property quite a bit.
She had four small kittens, we trapped all five of them (not the father), had then fixed and brought them back to the property to help with rodents.
We lost one of the cats early on when she got ran over on the main street in front of the house, but all in all, they have been great to have around. When we moved here there were all sorts of rodents all over the place, and plenty of cockroaches as well. The cat’s love those guys :-).
The cats are all outdoor cats and we feed them just enough to keep them feeling good, sticking around and hunting. Our main rodent cat got sick and wasn’t helping out the cause too much. We had to take him to the vet and get all sorts of stuff done. Hate spending money like that, heh.
Anyway, looks like it’s paid off and we are back to hunting. He brought this up to show us how good he’s feeling.
Still clearing land
One of the great things about living here is with the trash service, they will also haul away some natural rubbish. This month I think we may have pushed it too far.
The pile was quite high already, but today my Friend from Colorado, Steve, of “Steve and Katie” fame, who are on the last few days of a two-month stay, has moved up a bunch of the palm tree fronds from the back of the property.
So while we have been working on the house, we’ve also been clearing quite a bit of the property, faster than we can get it out of here really.
We have these piles of dead trees, branches, etc all over the place. We’ll try to mulch as much of it as we can, burn some and take some out to the road to be hauled away.
With Steve and Katie on their way out, we are getting ready to have three rounds of Grandkids visiting so we are working on finishing up the last bits of construction in the house. We have to wrap of the closing of the main house to the studio.
And FINALLY, we have decided how we want to treat the fireplace in the main house, framed it in late last week, will drywall today, then tape and float, spackle and paint. Hopefully, we can get it done before the kids start showing up.
It takes effort
So here is a little secret about life; It takes effort. I know, what an idiot right? Of course, it takes effort! But what a lot of people forget, is that it takes effort for all of us!
We do pretty darn good I think, Vivian and I. I make a nice living and we pretty much get to do what we want, when we want. What’s not to love about that? But the truth is that MOST of us are in that exact same position. The difference is that I am aware of it. People thought we were nuts for making the move down here, and maybe we were, but it’s been great!
We came down for a 30 day visit, bought and closed a house in those 30 days, and a house that by the way, many others thought we were crazy for buying. The plan was to come and work on it months at a time, with the construction paid for by another deal we were working on. And then just 60 miles or so from home, on our trip back, the other deal fell through. The call was devastating and 100% unexpected. I would have given chances of that happening at 0%.
But instead, we said screw it, put the house up for sale, sold it ourselves, for cash, and moved. From the day we left for vacation, to the day we were moved down permanently to Harlingen Texas, three and a half months.
Have I mentioned how much I love it down here? This is a pic of one of the neighbor’s lawns down the street.
Anyway, we choose to change our lives, to mix it up a bit and do something different. We didn’t have to do it, and we didn’t wait for somebody to do it for us. YOU decide the changes that you want in your life. Start making small changes in that direction today, and keep moving. You WILL get there.
I suck At Blogging
Yep, turns out, we BOTH suck at blogging, but we must persevere nonetheless right? So, things are moving really good with the house. I PROMISE to update more soon, but there is the house in it’s many phases.
Day 1
After pulling down all of the overgrowth:
Reconstruction of the roof:
Actually becoming a house again:
OMG, painted!! And 99% of inside construction is done as well, just some trims left:
It was LITERALLY, a full gut job. We will get some inside pics coming ASAP.
It may not be fishy, but it sure looked like river city
So, our first real bit of “emergency’ fun since we’ve been here. It’s rained VERY little since we have been here, we’ve haven’t been an official drought but leading into one I guess. So it was nice to know that some water was on the way. They seem to say that quite often but nothing ever really materializes.
Well, it showed up this time, in spades.
It looks like we got right around 15 inches in 48 house, two days of pure haul ass, save what you can, do what you can, keep anything dry that you can. It was pretty crazy.
We did do pretty good in the house, no major leaks.
We were told that this was a hurricane level event, as it related to flooding, so I’m feeling like we made it out of it pretty well. We also now know some more about our property and things we need to do to mitigate future issue like this.
In the good news department, the wonderful lake that sits at the edge of our property in the back, the lake that was about 90% of the reason for moving down here and that has been empty most of the time we have been down here, finally has water!
That’s right, the darn thing filled up from one big ass storm, crazy! We will be waiting for the wildlife to return to the lake now.
All in all, much more work to be done, we are both safe though and have our marching orders.