Wow! What a Great Weekend!

 I've had a lot of Good to Great weekends in my lifetime.  Some were exciting, others just extremely relaxing.  One or more of Family, Friends and Flying were usually involved in the enhancing the weekend outcome.

This past one expanded the definition of the word "Great".  We traveled over to College Station for two reasons.  First was to see our Grandkids again (Yes, Beans, also to be with our Daughter and Son-in-Law of course).  Our oldest GrandKid is the GrandDaughter.  She's a couple of months short of 4YO.  Lovely, Friendly, and Smart (as a whip), a joy to be around.

Our GrandSon is a couple of months short of 3YO (Their BD's are only a day apart.). He is amazingly smart.  He speaks in complete sentences which are understandable.  If he hears a sentence he can repeat it and he seems to have filed it away so the context is there if he needs to repeat it again in conversation.   I would read him one of his books.  He could repeat the verbage while pointing to the word he was speaking at that moment moving to the next when he started saying that one.  The rhythym of the reading wasn't perfect, but much better than I expected from someone his age.  

One of the other reasons to visit the Daughter's Family was also accomplished.  Since both adults have jobs, they need a sitter during the day.  Which leaves them with no sitter at night, so they can't go  out and have a little adult recreational time.  We assisted them in accomplishing a little time off from parenting and reacquanting each other as loving adults.

We had fun, the grand's had fun and Mom and Dad had fun!

Win, Win, Win!

While the Family reunion was a big reason for visiting, it wasn't the only one.

Since we are planning to move to College Station, we also wanted to look at some houses.  We had engaged a Realtor via phone a few weeks ago, telling her what we were looking for and why and what constraints we had. (The biggest one being selling our current house about 150 miles away).

She did her best and fortunately (mixed blessing...Hard to sell ours, prices are down for buyers) the market isn't all that hot right now. So, quite a few houses on the market.  Wednesday, we got a call from the Realtor handling the sale of our current home saying he had some folks wanting to take a look-see.  We did a quick simplifying sweep of the house moving things into closets, drawers etc, just so it looked a bit better.  

We loaded up the dogs and cat and went to City Park and walked them around for an hour.  Got the call from the Realtor that it was safe to come home.  He also mentioned that they really liked the house and were considering a contingency offer of 60 days for them to sell their existing house!

Yay!!!!!!

So, that's my first order of business today.  Did they actually make the contingency order?  

Why?  Because our excursion with the College Station Realtor showed us a couple of houses we really liked this weekend. That set the other half of the Real Estate Cycle in motion. 

We'd like to make a contingency order on the house we REALLY liked if it's still available or one on the one we also liked a lot if not.

 

This is the Street View of the house we really liked.

Front porch looking out over the front yard

My Cell Phone pictures don't even begin to do it justice.  Just beautiful! It was formerly owned by a retired Army Lt Colonel who became widowed and put their home on the market.  Very nice, neat and well kept.  Much as I expected when I was told about the owner.

The contingency we would need on either would be based on the buyer of our house actually selling his house and signing the contract to buy ours. At that point, assuming both houses are still on the market, we could commit to the house we liked. Hopefully, the one pictured above.

Lots of if's, and's and but's in the situation, but...it is progress.  We haven't had anybody else visit us and show any serious interest.  At least, if this goes through we can progress to the next step. We shall see.  Lot's of prayers going skyward nowadays.

So, we drove home Sunday, and as we're driving along, Mrs. J's phone rang.  It was Little Juvat, LJW and Miss B calling from England.  Ain't Technology Great?  A phone call from halfway around the world into a car travelling at 75 MPH. (Yes, Beans some of the Highways in Texas are 75.)

In any case, they wanted to video chat, but that was a bit much for the bandwidth available to the phone in the car, so we asked them if we could call them back when we got home in about an hour.

Sure!

So we did!  The phone was answered by Miss B and the video came up immediately.  She was sitting there wearing a T-shirt which said "Big Sister".

 

Yep, Grand Child #4 is on the way, a late January, early February due date.

So, as I said...It was a very GREAT Weekend.  Hope your's went well also. 

Peace out, y'all! 

juvat 

For Monday… sims

 About the title…Had a pretty good idea for a post that I didn’t want to forget when I would be able to sit down to start writing, so I put the proposed title in the post building app as a reminder.  Unfortunately, that didn’t work and I forgot anyway. Rats!  So I had a bit of a scramble to meet Sarge's deadline yesterday.  More to follow below on why that is so.

In any case, old house wise, the porch is finished, painters will paint it this week. For an untrained carpenter, I think it turned out OK.

Next projects are to put together store bought chairs, lounges, tables and cabinets and set them up in various rooms. AFTER laying the rugs. Forgot that a while ago, moving a couple of rooms of furniture twice is doubly painful.

Who’da thunk?

The front door episode is still ongoing, but a key milestone was passed this week.

K

The picture above is of the first attemp when I thought this would be easy. (Silly me!). One can see the stain doesn't match and the sanding still left the scratch marks.  So, back to Lowes and asked how to do it right.  The Paint Department guru took a look at the door picture and this one and gave the verdict I was dreading.

"Sand the whole darn thing down to the raw wood!"

Well...crap.

So, purchased 5 x 20 packs of 120 grit sandpaper (the finer grit is his recommendation...didn't want to remove too much wood) and got to work.

About 30 hours of sanding (and 116 sanding disks) later, that phase is done. Thank you, Lord!  Next hoop is finding a matching stain for the door to the side panel.

Damn Dogs seem to have a need to come in the front door instead of through the doggie door to get in the house. (The doggie door is a flap they can push open themselves, the front door requires human involvement,)  To make matters worse they scratch and claw the door instead of just ringing the doorbell. 

Who’da thunk?  Progress is slow, but...still progress!

On a separate topic, Mrs J and I spent Friday and Saturday looking at houses in College Station. 

We visited 4 houses this weekend, making the total visited this week and last at 9.  This was the last one.  We were pretty tired and a bit frustrated as every one we'd seen up to that point wasn't "quite" right.  Got to this one and it didn't look significantly different than any of the others we'd seen.  Except the lawn was very well tended.  

That changed about a nanosecond after we walked in.

 Photo was taken from the upstairs landing, but, it's even more stunning from below looking up at it.  The rest of the house and property is stunning also.

We think we're going to make an offer on it.  It's been on the market for several months, and the price is within our range (barely).  Crossing our fingers because there's a lot of hoops to jump through between now and moving out and then in. But...

That about wraps up this week recap, sorry for the brevity.  We got back late afternoon Sunday and I didn’t have a lot of time to write this post. 

So, bigger, better, faster next week.

Peace out y’all!

Yes! Yes it was fun!

 Well, Campers, our 4 day adventure to College Station By the Sea was....adventurous!  As I mentioned a while ago Mrs J and my campaign plan (No Beans, we're not running for office, more of a battle plan than an election) is to find a house near to our offspring where they can assist us and we can do the same with issues that may arise.

You know, take the grandkids or the grandparents to the doctors, babysit, grocery shop, cook dinner, tell war stories.

Go to your Granddaughter's Dance Recital

Or get a chuckle out of your Grandson's response to his first Hair Cut!

 

Or maybe just sit and read a book or something. Gets a bit quiet around here occasionally.  So,  we're looking at College Station (CStat for the gocnozcenti)  for our final move city wise.  Might have to be a short stay in a rental property and then into our final home though, which brings us to the "Rest of the Story" (with apologies to Paul Harvey).

MBD has a good friend that owns a realty business and was willing to help us find potential dwellings.  

 

Photo from Zillow

 :

First house was a non-starter,  5K+ sq feet and $1.4M.  Heck, we're in our 70's, no way we need 5K nor the other number.  Nice house, but lots of nooks and crannies,  No Go in about 15 minutes of looking.

 Next two houses were in the 800K +- range.  One was older, had a beautiful back yard with a pool (not fenced in), The perimeter fence had several gaps and holes in it.  The dogs would be gone in seconds.  Finally, the interior required a lot of renovation.  Decor was mid 70's.  

 

 Zillow

Doable, but the two fence issues and having young grand kids.... another non starter.

So...the first day was disappointing, but we had a pretty good discussion of what we liked and disliked about each and our realtor was pretty responsive.  She had one more listing on her original list but it wasn't available to look at until Saturday.  We needed to be home by Saturday evening, so it was a bit tight.

L

 

Nice house,  Owner was a "collector" though, so it was fairly crowded furniture and fixture wise.  Difficult to picture what it would look like without all the stuff.  

 

Being the cook in the family, I really liked the kitchen.  All the cool stuff and a nice layout.  The yard was magnificent.  Master Bedroom was smallish as was the master bath.  The Shower in there was a nice marble,but not very large.  But....The Clutter!  Very offputting.  Not a "No", but a "most likely not" without some concessions.

Mrs J, always the optimist, went on line and found four more houses that were more (at least in the pictures) what we were looking for (and closer to our price range).  The realtor is setting up appointments for the end of this week, so...another trip to visit the grandkids.

Got that going for us. Among other things! 😗😀

Peace out y'All!