This is the first in an ongoing series, currently planned for the third Thursday of each month, where I update our progress with our various properties.  Because, seriously, how often do you really want to see a wall of weathered boards in various stages of being painted.  Yes, it’s interesting to me, and maybe, in moderation, to you, too.  But let’s be reasonable.  I think once a month is more than often enough.  I’m going to run down the various properties and some of the things we’re working on in hopes of helping it make sense to you when I talk about it.

We have the Ranch.  It’s nearly 100 acres of woods and hayfield in Central Texas.  We bought it in March of 2001 after I returned from my deployment to Kuwait.  We planned on building a Victorian Dogrun house deep within the property.  That house is designed, but we won’t be building it.  We bought a house in town instead. We enjoy the ranch but don’t spend too much time out there these days.  Our neighbor contracts with us to maintain and harvest the hay from the 12 acres of hayfield, and they do a wonderful job. Through their efforts, hay quality has increased significantly over the last ten years.

We have the San Antonio House. We plan to sell it, but that won’t be for several years.  My standard answer is “at least five years,” and I think I’ve been saying that for five years.  We have work we committed to complete that must be done before we sell — keep the yard up, finish bricking the driveway, remodel the bathroom (we have the fixtures but haven’t made the time — there are several dominoes that must fall into place before this works), do a basic kitchen remodel (it’s mostly the original 1941 kitchen), paint interior and finish exterior paint, finish the fence upgrade, and, of course make sure everything is spiffy prior to putting it on the market.  There is no rush to finish this, but we plug away at it.  The house has basic furnishings that make it easy to stay here when we’re in town.

We have the Central Texas House, a 1900 Queen Anne Victorian, purchased in 2007 — a year before I retired from the Air Force. The previous owners did the essential inside upgrades — wiring, heating, A/C, plumbing, kitchen, a couple of bathrooms that make living in the house not a problem.  Of course, like anyone, there are some things we would have done differently, but that’s a different matter from livability.  We had a three car garage built behind the house, and we have certain things to finish for it — paint, windows, wiring, plumbing, and a walk-in door to name a few.  Eventually, we plan to finish out the upstairs into a two-bedroom apartment, but for now, that’s storage.  As for the house, we’re painting the exterior, replacing steps, and repairing porches and windows. Eventually, we’ll wind up replacing shingles on the upstairs wall.  We will also be adding shingles on the upstairs walls of the garage to tie the architecture together.  We need to estimate how many shingles we need for the full job and order them.  We’ll also brick that driveway and build a privacy fence around the back yard. Once the exterior painting is complete, we’ll do some landscaping.  For now, we’re working on getting the yard established.  We prefer St. Augustine grass, but we’re encouraging bermuda grass to grow as well.  The St Augustine will choke out weeds and bermuda grass as it expands, but I prefer some grass to bare spots.

We have the Store building. This is a three-bay shop on the west edge of town on a small plot of land.  We have some things stored there, but will eventually be moving everything to the shop, and cleaning that building out. We’ll probably sell it when we reach that point.  We bought this building a year before the building we really wanted became available, so now it’s redundant.  I have to keep the lawn mowed there, and we have a few minor upgrade plans before we decide to sell.

We have the Shop.  This is the building we really wanted.  It was used most recently (through the 1980s) as a furniture store.  Before that, it was an Oldsmobile dealer, and before that, it was built in 1928 as a Chevrolet dealer.  The service area is just what hubby needs for space to restore his 1946 Mercury vehicles.  The showroom and parts department will work well for establishing his 1946 Mercury Museum.  There’s also a long bay that runs the full depth of the building which is ideal for storage and a lantern museum.  This building came to us “as is” with a lot of “stuff” still in it.  We’re confident we’ve tossed the obvious trash (over 100 contractor bags of it).  There is a lot of furniture that has water damage (we replaced the roof after we bought the building), which we are breaking up and sending out with the trash.  We’ll get the second batch of mattresses out next spring during the annual city-wide clean up when we can haul stuff to the dump, and they will take it for free.  We also have a refrigerator we need to prepare to take on that day as well.  There’s an old freezer we may be able to give to our appliance repairman neighbor — it was working for awhile, but I think it needs a part.  Before we can do serious museum work there, we have numerous windows to repair, a lot of debris to remove from behind the building (we’ve cleared about a quarter of the area), and of course, continue removing the items we’ve deemed not usable.  All this is prep work. The only plumbing working in the building at the moment is the men’s room sink.

Our to do list is long, and most of the work will be done by us.  We own the buildings, but we don’t have the kind of money that would allow us to hire someone to do the work — even if my husband or I were willing to do so.  We are both retired, so we have a little time.  Health sometimes limits how much we can do at any given time.  At 75, hubby can only work like he’s 55 these days. At nearly 52, I should be able to do better than my knees, hands, and, lately, my back and neck, will allow.  Hubby and I are making progress at him getting me trained to do the work the way he insists it be done, so I’m allowed to do more things to help him, and that’s a good thing.

For the month ahead, we’re working for a couple of weeks in San Antonio — yard and driveway, I think.  Then, we’ll get back on the west wall of the Cameron House.  It’s nearly ready to be primed.