Category Archives: Photography

Crisis averted? Maybe? Possibly? Probably?

We’ll know more on Monday, but things are most certainly more hopeful than they were yesterday, even if certain aspects are more confusing. We will get through this. Hopefully with our Dream Forever Home in eleven days.

Good, solid bones and lots and lots of insulation. We think of the desert as being 100º+F all the time, and during the day in the summer that’s true. But in the winter, it’s often barely above freezing, and even in the summer it will cool down rapidly after sunset.

Insulation is your friend!

And then we hit the speed bump at Mach 9. This has large amounts of suckage.

The next day or so will hopefully have a good resolution, but the Dream Forever Home failed a major inspection. This has the potential to be a true deal killer, but we’re trying to find a solution.

Two other far more minor questions seem to be getting resolution.

First, among other things that the agent’s junior assistant had wrong when we saw the property the first time, the second tree in the back yard is not giving us persimmons. These are apples. Google a picture of a persimmon – not even close. Come the end of September, we’re gonna have a bushel (or more) of apples and pears.

Secondly, we might be in Oak Hills instead of Hesperia. It’s sort of like how West Hills used to be part of Canoga Park, but neither is an actual city, they’re both actually part of Los Angeles. So while technically we’re in the city limits of Hesperia, where Oak Hills is an unincorporated area of San Berardino County next to Hesperia, most of the paperwork on the house says the zip code is 92344, which the Post Office says is Oak Hills, so who are we to argue with the US Postal Service? In the end, it doesn’t matter. Whatever gets escrow closed!

Up early, drive to Hesperia, spend all day at the new house for inspections. Termite inspections. (Clean, no problem.) Septic tank inspections. (Wait, we’ve got a septic tank? No problems yet, but the detailed inspection is tomorrow.) General inspection. (A gazillion things checked, a list of a couple dozen deferred maintenance issues to be dealt with, but nothing serious. And several interesting and wonderful things that I’m loving!)

Eleven days ago we spent 48 minutes there, less than an hour. Today we spent over five hours and got to poke into everything. DELIGHTFUL! We are extremely pleased.

One of the features that I absolutely love is an interior courtyard, open to the sky, with my future office on one side, the dining room next to that, the living room next to that, and the back of the garage on the fourth side. It’s about 10-12 feet square, with lots of small shrubs and bushes around the edges, so there’s plenty of room for us to put in some lawn or porch furniture. It will be toasty in the daytime during the summer, but in the evenings it will be lovely. And we’ve got a fake owl! And clouds! And the Sun!

All along every exposed upper surface in the courtyard are anti-bird spike strips, so apparently the current owner considers the presence of birds to be a problem to be solved – we’re more likely to take down the spike strips and put up feeders, so there’s a post-move-in DIY project that even *I* can tackle!

Pears.

Persimmons.

I love pears. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a persimmon. We’ll have to try them out.

Most of the green that you’ll see outside of the Forever Home is plastic, i.e. astroturf. That will be new and I’ll have to figure out how to keep it clean and maintained. I will be happy to save on irrigation costs – our water bills at our current house can be $600+ per month, and that’s mainly to water weeds and dirt after the drought of a three or four years ago killed almost everything.

The Forever Home has these two small fruit trees and some small shrubs and bushes – we’ll probably add more, as well as roses. If you’ve been with me on this site for any length of time, you know that I love the roses we have next to the driveway. We’ll need something similar at the Forever Home.

But no big lawns or putting greens or sod. The “drought resistant desert landscaping” of rocks, gravel, palm trees, and small shrubs only will work just fine, thanks!

It’s getting more real by the day.

We’re hitting the physical move in two waves. All of the “little stuff” that can be boxed up now (dishes we don’t use every day, books, DVDs, all of my financial records and paperwork, clothes that don’t get worn regularly, and so on) is being boxed up and then needs to be moved out of the house and out of the way. The PODS will let us do that on our own.

And if I skip the gym for the next couple of weeks, that’s just fine. I’m getting one hell of a workout, seven days a week.

When we close escrow, we’ll have the PODS transferred to the driveway at the new house, and we’ll bring in a professional moving crew to grab all of the “big stuff” and move it in one day. Bedroom furniture, couches, dining room furniture, book shelves, and so on.

Under the category of, “No battle plan ever survived first contact with the enemy,” and, “It’s a game of inches,”

Between my storage spaces, backyard, and garage, I have dozens of these industrial shelving units on wheels, almost all loaded up with boxes of books, videos, baseball cards, camera gear, clothes, Christmas lights, tools… They’re fast & easy to just roll into a truck or PODS unit, and then easy and fast to unload at the other end.

Except…

While they fit in the PODS unit once they’re inside, the edge of the rollup door hangs down about 3 inches and the top of the unit won’t pass without being tilted just a bit. Which means they all have to be rolled to the unit, unloaded, tipped and tilted inside, and then re-loaded. That’s a ten-minute high-intensity workout for every single one that I wasn’t expecting. I’ll live, it will work out in the end, but it’s a little bit annoying.

On the other hand, when playing the world’s biggsest freakin’ game of four-dimensional Tetris, if that’s the worst problem I run into, I’ll be fine.

Happy 249th Birthday, America! (Girl, you’re in danger!)

Despite my comments yesterday about not having nearly as much to cull and toss as we did seven years ago when we moved here from a house that was twice the size, when it is time to cull, there’s no mercy shown.

We’ve had this fridge for something like 20+ years, but in the last eight to ten weeks or so it’s gotten flakey and unreliable. It’s the one that’s out on the back porch and the right side is kept full of beer, wine, water, sodas, Gatordade, and the “spare” milk and OJ when we buy in bulk. The freezer side on the left is where the leftovers go when The Long Suffering Wife cooks up a big pot of chili, stew, jambalaya, or whatever, and where the bulk beef & chicken & ice cream go when we hit Costco. We were lucky that I caught the first big defrosting failure event early and we didn’t lose anything, but it’s been an adventure trying to fit everything from here into the “regular” refrigerator inside, which is usually pretty full to begin with.

What was really weird was how it would re-freeze and work fine for another day or two, then fail again for a couple of days. We’ve gone through two or three cycles a week, which gave me some hope that it could be repaired. But after getting a quote on the cost of repairs, seeing how much a new one would cost, and then having it seem to die completely for the last seven or eight days, the moving calendar was the final straw. We’re going to be busy enough for the rest of this month, I don’t have time to spend getting some sort of service tech in. Out this one goes, we’ll buy a new “spare” fridge next month when we get to Hesperia.

We definitely got our money’s worth out of it. The LA City Waste Management folks do large item pickup and wanted to schedule us for the middle of August – um, we’ll be long gone by then, so pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease can it be sooner? Okay, since I cried and begged…

Being the 4th of July, the street is packed up and down the hill with folks coming to BBQs and parties (not at our place, not this year, enough chaos, thanks!) and I didn’t want it to be blocking the sidewalk, so on the grass it is. But I didn’t want it to tip over on anyone either, so we’re going with the rather ignominious attitude on its side. Whatever works!

I hope everyone enjoyed your Fourth! Stay safe!

Shock is being replaced with exhaustion. Sooooooo much paperwork to fill out and sign. While starting to do all of those little things that got put off forever, like making a couple of trips to the recycling place with full cars of aluminum cans and plasic bottles to recycle. And putting together shelving sets. And getting rid of the old “spare” refrigerator that’s gotten flakey. And more paperwork and questions and DocuSign rounds.

And packing. Soooo much packing.

The good news is that there’s relatively little “throwing out” to do. In 30+ years at the old house, and moving from a 3,300 square foot house to a 1,600 square foot house, a LOT of stuff simply got chucked out or donated seven years ago. Since then there’s been relatively little new stuff accumulated, and very little of it is of the disposable nature. And the new house is back to 3,821 square feet with three garage spaces and room in the back for an RV, or in our case, a storage bin if needed. (I suspect not needed, but it will be nice to have the capacity if we get stuck.) So relatively little need to cull, but a strong desire to label well and stay semi-organized to minimize the chaos on the unpacking and getting settled in side during August and September.

But with a really tight schedule, shove everything into an unlabeled box or bin and shove it into the truck to move it 100 miles ***NOW*** may end up being the default, winning strategy. It wouldn’t be the first time, but it will definitely be the last, at least for us.

A little over seven years ago we sold the house I and the kids had lived in for nearly 30 years, and moved into a much smaller rental house. It was an ordeal, to say the least. Look for posts in April and May of 2018, many of them named “Moving Out & Moving On.” There was more than a little bit of panic at times since we were in escrow and ***HAD*** to be out by a certain date, and we didn’t have a new place to live or move into until we stumbled on our current home by accident, and we had so much “stuff” that, even with massive amounts of throwing stuff out and culling (a lot of which pains me to this day), we ended up with several storage spaces.

I hate renting. It’s just burning money every month, paying for someone else’s tax breaks and property value appreciation and mortgage. I remember at the time that I was hoping we could buy a house and get back into our own home in “a couple of years.”

Obviously that didn’t happen. But over the last three years or so I’ve been actively looking for that “forever home,” where we can make one last move, then live for the rest of our lives in our own little paradise. At first I wasn’t even limiting the search to LA, or even to just California. Online (Zillow, primarily) I’ve looked at properties in Chicago, New York, Kansas City, Virginia, central Illinois, and many other places. Hundreds of online listings, if not thousands.

Eventually we focused our search on California. Even then it’s been wide ranging, since CA is not a small state. San Diego, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, the Central Valley areas of Fresno, Stockton, Bakersfield, the coastal areas of Ventura, Santa Barbara, Lompoc, Santa Maria, the desert and Inland Empire areas… Again, easily 1000+ listings got reviewed, many saved for future reference.

Recently we’ve again narrowed our focus to the “High Desert” area at the top of the Cajon Pass, on the I-15 about halfway between LA and Las Vegas. Victorville, Hesperia, Apple Valley. I had a pilot and NASA friend who lived there, and one of the Virtual Railcam webcams that I like is set up there. I was intrigued. Last May we actually spent a weekend there, and we’ve looked at a LOT of houses virtually.

Having decided that THIS was the year we needed to get off the dime and actually make it happen, my pace of searching and reviewing has picked up. We’ve been talking to a realtor, and we’ve gone as far as to get prequalified. We’re ready!

There have been a couple of extremely nice houses that had open houses, but I couldn’t afford the time off to go up for a weekend (it’s 2-3 hours each way, about 100 miles) due to my work deadlines. A couple of those properties that were particularly inviting and promising got sold in the last two weeks before we ever even got a chance to look at them. That was a big disappointment.

Moving on, and with the worst of the work deadlines almost met, I thought we had time to go back up this weekend. We had 8-9 homes that had open houses and while all of them seemed to have at least a couple of “yellow flags” at least (HOA, too small, too expensive, too little land, out on a dirt road, etc) we figured it would be a good data collection exercise. Then the first house we looked at caught us like a thunderbolt. It was magnificent.

Not perfect. It’s at the top end of our price range, I was hoping for a little bit more land, and I was sort of hoping for something in a different part of town so that it would be closer to stores, the Post Office, restaurants, and so on. Still, these were inconveniences, not deal killers.

When we got back home yesterday, we asked our agent to make an offer. This morning the Seller counter offered, and we knew that there were other offers on the table. We counter-counter offered, figuring if it wasn’t meant to be, as much as we had “house lust,” we could walk away and keep looking.

To my amazement and surprise, they accepted our offer. We open escrow tomorrow with an EXTREMELY AGGRESSIVE 21-day escrow.

Now the fun begins. We don’t have to be out of this house until September 1st, but if we’re paying the mortgage on the Forever Home starting in late July, I really don’t want to also be paying rent here any longer than we have to. We need to be packing and getting ready to move out in three weeks like all of the demons of Hell were whipping us onward.

Assuming no surprises or disasters, in three weeks we need to be ready to start living out of the new house, get all of our utilities and services set up, get movers in here and get all of our stuff up there, and on and on and on.

July may have just started, but it just got a LOT more busy and exciting than it was 48 hours ago.

Still a number of things that can go wrong, but I’m confident. It’s going to be madness and chaos up to our eyeballs, but when it’s done we’re going to be in a lovely place for the rest of our lives. It’ll be a slice!