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.\u00a0 Because, seriously, how often do you really want to see a wall of weathered boards in various stages of being painted.\u00a0 Yes, it’s interesting to me, and maybe, in moderation, to you, too.\u00a0 But let’s be reasonable.\u00a0 I think once a month is more than often enough.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
We have the Ranch<\/strong>.\u00a0 It’s nearly 100 acres of woods and hayfield in Central Texas.\u00a0 We bought it in March of 2001 after I returned from my deployment to Kuwait.\u00a0 We planned on building a Victorian Dogrun house deep within the property.\u00a0 That house is designed, but we won’t be building it.\u00a0 We bought a house in town instead. We enjoy the ranch but don’t spend too much time out there these days.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n We have the San Antonio House<\/strong>. We plan to sell it, but that won’t be for several years.\u00a0 My standard answer is “at least five years,” and I think I’ve been saying that for five years.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There is no rush to finish this, but we plug away at it.\u00a0 The house has basic furnishings that make it easy to stay here when we’re in town.<\/p>\n We have the Central Texas House<\/strong>, 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.\u00a0 Of course, like anyone, there are some things we would have done differently, but that’s a different matter from livability.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Eventually, we plan to finish out the upstairs into a two-bedroom apartment, but for now, that’s storage.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We will also be adding shingles on the upstairs walls of the garage to tie the architecture together.\u00a0 We need to estimate how many shingles we need for the full job and order them.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 For now, we’re working on getting the yard established.\u00a0 We prefer St. Augustine grass, but we’re encouraging bermuda grass to grow as well.\u00a0 The St Augustine will choke out weeds and bermuda grass as it expands, but I prefer some grass to bare spots.<\/p>\n We have the Store<\/strong> building. This is a three-bay shop on the west edge of town on a small plot of land.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We bought this building a year before the building we really wanted became available, so now it’s redundant.\u00a0 I have to keep the lawn mowed there, and we have a few minor upgrade plans before we decide to sell.<\/p>\n We have the Shop<\/strong>.\u00a0 This is the building we really wanted.\u00a0 It was used most recently (through the 1980s) as a furniture store.\u00a0 Before that, it was an Oldsmobile dealer, and before that, it was built in 1928 as a Chevrolet dealer.\u00a0 The service area is just what hubby needs for space to restore his 1946 Mercury vehicles.\u00a0 The showroom and parts department will work well for establishing his 1946 Mercury Museum.\u00a0 There’s also a long bay that runs the full depth of the building which is ideal for storage and a lantern museum.\u00a0 This building came to us “as is” with a lot of “stuff” still in it.\u00a0 We’re confident we’ve tossed the obvious trash (over 100 contractor bags of it).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We also have a refrigerator we need to prepare to take on that day as well.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 All this is prep work. The only plumbing working in the building at the moment is the men’s room sink.<\/p>\n Our to do list is long, and most of the work will be done by us.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We are both retired, so we have a little time.\u00a0 Health sometimes limits how much we can do at any given time.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n For the month ahead, we’re working for a couple of weeks in San Antonio — yard and driveway, I think.\u00a0 Then, we’ll get back on the west wall of the Cameron House.\u00a0 It’s nearly ready to be primed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.\u00a0 Because, seriously, how often do you really want to see a wall of weathered boards in various stages of being painted.\u00a0 Yes, it’s interesting …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,103],"tags":[122,123,126,127,124],"class_list":["post-5491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-property","category-property-update","tag-central-tx-house","tag-ranch","tag-sa-house","tag-shop","tag-store"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5491\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}