Fresh-Squeezed.

You know what they say. When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.

Seriously.

The citrus tree* in our front yard full of fruit, and while we've assumed the green ones are limes and attempted to give them away and/or make mojitos with them, it's just not doing the trick. So at Nate's urging, we bought a little juicer yesterday and took the (assumed) lemons to it today.

It worked! We made lemonade! It's really tasty!

Amazing how that works.


-AKC


*- I'm always amused when the name of a tree is just "citrus."

"So... is it lemons, or limes, or...?"

"Man, whatever."

"Oranges?"

"Maybe. Who knows."

Garden 2.0

If you were wondering what Nate was scheming about in that picture of the office, here's what it was!

A garden!

We've got:

-Lettuce
-Green Onions
-Tomatoes
-Beets
-Strawberries (lots of those!)
-Brussel Sprouts (I have no idea how those will work out, but it sounded fun)
-Celery (funny story: I looked up how to grow celery after I bought the tray, and the first sentence I see is, "Celery is a notoriously hard plant to grow; it tastes about the same when you get it from the store, so most gardeners just grow it for the challenge." Well then. Awesome.)
-Mint (peppermint AND spearmint, because that's just how we roll)
-Cilantro
-Oregano
-Rosemary (the little guy wasn't doing so hot recently, but hopefully it'll recover and become the hardy monster we expect it to be)
-Sage
-and a Lemon Verbena (apparently you can make tea with the leaves, and it smelled so amazingly good that I just had to get it)

I think that's about it... not bad for our initial run. Southern California is pretty awesome in that you can almost completely disregard any "seasonal" guidelines. It's all good.

We've got the whole "raised bed" thing going on this time, which is supposed to be advantageous, or at least that's what the gardening book told us. Nate's brother and sister came down this last weekend to help put the whole shebang together, which we greatly appreciated. We also bought a soaker hose (the black tube in the pictures), and we'll have to get a feel for using that (timing, best placement, etc), but I think it'll help us get less sporadic watering, since we don't have sprinklers back here. The idea is that you plug it into the regular hose, turn it on, and it seeps water through all the little holes in it. You leave it for a couple hours to get a decent watering.

I think that having a garden again will be good for us. I'd grown pretty attached to the one at the old house; there's something about just checking in on the little guys every day that smooths out the spiky bits in your brain. Additionally, it'll be nice having herbs only a few steps away from the kitchen.

And this is only the beginning! We've got lots of space around the house and plan on putting most of it "to work" in one way or another(Nate's got ideas, make no mistake). It'll be a long process, but a highly enjoyable one, I predict.


-AKC

Some more pictures

A few pictures of things all moved in (including a kitty):

http://www.picasaweb.google.com/nate.austin/HouseMovedIn

In the office picture, Nate's making the plans for... the future garden! DundunDUUNNN. It's one thing after another around here.


-AKC

Solutions in Heating!

Alrighty so. Turns out we will be able to get that new heater in, thanks to the magic of "Financing With No Interest for 12 Months. "

We talked to the heater guy about our situation with getting tenants into the unit, and he agreed that yeah, it would be dumb to pay for repairs that probably won't work when what you really need is a new heater altogether.* It's in everybody's interests (ours, his, and even technically the future tenants') to make that happen, and since we have decent incomes (of which the tenants will be a part), a financing plan makes total sense in this case.

So yeah, I think that's a big load off our minds. They're supposedly going to start the work next week.


-AKC

*- One that doesn't set off the carbon monoxide detectors when you try to turn it on. (Insert Debbie Downer noise here.)

"Ooooh-oooh-oooooh I feel mah temperature risin'..."

Aw man, we figured it was coming. The first "big unexpected expense" is turning out to be the heating in the front unit. It kinda... doesn't work. And it's not just the thermostat, like we had hoped. So we had a guy over to look at it this morning, and I wasn't there for the technical talk, but the takeaway message appears to be, "it's old, it's busted, and even if we could get it to work, it's totally not up to code."

An aside: Now, we could play the "oh, why didn't we have someone check X more thoroughly" or "why didn't we think about Y" moan and groan game, but I feel like we covered most of our bases. The inspector certainly looked under the house around the heating area, but Nate remembers him making a point that heaters were not his thing, so he couldn't in good faith give us advice there. We did put a clause into our offer demanding that the seller fix the heater, but she refused. So it was either fix the heater later or have things get ugly, and we decided that it was something we'd be able to deal with.

So, where we stand at the moment is between any combination of three options:

1.) Say screw it for now and give tenants a bunch of space heaters: Euuugggghhh. That's the absolute last-ditch option. We really don't want to do that.

2.) Have them simply fix what's immediately wrong so that the heating works: This would solve our problem, but we'd still have a really outdated heater, and another fail would be inevitable eventually (of course, whether "eventually" means a few months or a few years makes a big difference to me, but I don't know that right now). This is pretty expensive... under 1000 but still pretty expensive. Also, they're not even sure yet if fixing it is possible, or if it's kaput beyond repair. However, if it's possible, it's much less expensive than...

3.) Putting in a new wall heater: This is the best option, and will probably have to happen in that "eventually" I mentioned up there. It's also by far the most expensive. Like, "yeah we totally can't afford that right now" expensive.

And here's the catch-22: once we get tenants into the front house, that'll be enough extra monthly income to pay for the new heater relatively quickly. However, in order to get tenants in there at a decent rent in the first place, we need heating. So now we have:

3.2) Do the #2 fix now, get tenants in there ASAP, and replace the heater when we've got enough saved up from the rental income. The major drawback here is that we end up paying for both the fix and the new heater, which is techincally wasting money. But the other option is,

3.x) Wait until we can afford the new heater, and delay putting tenants in for a month. Not a huge fan of this idea, since the amount we'd lose from not having tenants for a month is much greater than the amount we'd lose by doing the extra fix when we're going to replace the heater regardless.

So, a lot of this hinges on whether that #2 fix is possible or not. If it is, we'll probably go with that as a temporary fix. If it's not... well, I'm not sure.

It'll all work out one way or another though, and with the blog, if anyone else has dealt with stuff like this, or deals with it in the future, we've started some "collective wisdom" here at the very least.


AKC

more odds and ends

This weekend we tied up a lot of the loose ends that have been bugging us.

Back unit:

• buy dining room chairs
• clean up the moving boxes
• buy a couch
• get a compost bin

It's looking like a real, functional house. We had James and Melissa over last night for a game of Descent and our new table and chairs performed admirably.

Front unit:

• motion sensor light
• replace gas line
• replace kitchen light
• clean bathroom
• arrange appliances

Now we just need to get the heat working, and get our garbage bins back, and we'll be ready to put our ad on Craigslist.

Fixing things makes me happy :-)