Is the Seventh Time the Charm?

I guess I start with the obligatory "It has been a long time since the last post…" line. We've been busy since the last posting, but not a lot has been happening until this week. We have been looking for a house. That has meant a lot of driving about to be disappointed by what we find when we get to where we were going. We haven't done much sailing over the summer, and haven't been climbing in ages.

All in all, this summer has been kind of a grind. We were looking for a house near Canyon Lake, but did search as far off as Tyler, Tx. We looked hard north of Austin near Liberty Hill where we used to live. We also searched up and down Highway 281 from San Antonio to Waco and from Comfort to Buda. We looked at a couple of hundred places on line and probably walked through thirty places.

We found a really nice place near the lake back in July. We saw it when it went on the market and immediately put an offer on it at the asking price. They got three offers that day, one for $20,000 cash over the asking price. That was when we started thinking about casting a much wider net. There are some nice places in western North Carolina at decent prices. We decided to hang on in Texas until October. If we hadn't found something by then, maybe we'd look at a cabin in the mountains near Lake Lure or out by Ashville.

Early in Sept, Ivy found a place while I was traveling for work. We went and looked at it the day I got back. We put an offer on it and, after much breath holding, finger crossing, and paperwork shuffling we closed on the place on September 28. It is minutes from the marina, nicely hidden on over an acre of Texas hill country. The place ticks off almost all of the things we wanted – out in the country, seclusion, three bedrooms, near the boat, not too far from an airport for my work travel, with a nice workshop/outbuilding. I'm especially excited about the shop. It is 900 square feet and I'll be able to put in a decent woodshop to play there. The back wall also looks like a climbing wall to me.

So, today is Sunday. We closed on the place Friday morning. You'd think we have been moving our furniture and junk into the place, right? Nope – not even close. The place had some really gross carpet in the bedrooms. The rest of the place is all tile floors with stained grout. Plus, the walls desperately needed paint touch ups.

We decided we'd rather have hardwood floors throughout. So starting mid-day on Friday we ripped out the carpets.

The amount of fine dirt under the carpets was astounding.

Then we started on the back breaking task of pulling all of the molding and the tile floors up. We rented a jackhammer on a cart that pops the tile up. Unfortunately, it leaves some of the mortar stuck to the slab. We are going back today with a different bit on the jackhammer to turn all of that into dust.