House Week

This was the week that we focused on houses. As per Cynthia’s suggestion, we asked the realtor to check that we had clear title to the house we planned to buy. You see the widow of the deceased of the house had been entitled to live there as long as she paid insurance, utilities, and kept it up. She didn’t do that, and moved out. But could she come back and claim it again?

We didn’t want that headache. The realtor said, “They weren’t married.” We said, “Yeah, they were. Tom married them!” So we are on hold a bit on that house. Tom had removed the carpet. I took out the tack strips and staples. But we decided not to do much more until we knew the title status.

Also, we had a tenant move out of one of our rentals… unexpectedly. Fortunately he took the dogs. Unfortunately the dogs left a mess behind on all the carpets. And the tenant left a general mess as well. We hired a housecleaner. It only took her 25 hours to get it clean. And she didn’t need to do the rugs. Well, she had to get all the stuff off the rugs. Then Tom took them out of the house. The house will need interior paint, cupboards painted, and flooring. Tom also power washed the siding.

We decided to do vinyl planking since it’s a cement slab. We checked a variety of places for cost and availability. We finally found some at Lumber liquidators… if we were willing to drive to Springdale and pick it up.

Friday morning we closed on a line of credit— to buy the Spring Park house and fix it up. Then we took the truck and headed to Springdale… about 2.5 hours away. We got the vinyl planking(for the rental house0. Actually we found a lighter color we liked better. Then we went up to the Restore (Habitat for Humanities used home items store)

On the way it started POURING! Rain swept from the west… then moments later it slanted sideways from the east. Gutters overflowed. We were in the right lane and at times the water from the gutter splashed on our windshield so much we couldn’t see at all. It was a long few miles to the Restore.

We had hoped to find some tile. Instead we found fan blades for a ceiling fan. We got a pedestal sink— very nice! (for the Spring Park house) And we found a nice wooden dresser that we’d been scouting for the past 6 months or more. So it seemed like a good haul. Tom was able to back the truck in to load the things. And the Restore people were really nice about wrapping the dresser in plastic wrap.

We stopped at Deborah’s for a few moments to wish Sarah a happy 11^th birthday. Then drove home and got in about 9pm.

Other things accomplished. We went to Family Home Evening Empty Nesters Monday night for some tasty dinner and fun games. I finished the Kenyan water project website and was glad to be done with that! I worked on another of the tech start-up websites and some publicity for them.

Nathan has been struggling with depression. We will be coming back from BYU and come and stay with us after our General Conference trip. He hopes to work and go to school here while he does counseling and sees a psychologist. We hope our nagging… er… encouragement will help him achieve the goals that will lead to his success.