Work, New Cat, Temple Pictures, Garden, and Moving.

Work

I've been busy with work lately, which is a good thing.  A man in northern Utah asked me to manage his house for him.  He's moving out of the country.  Then, another man who has eight apartments and lives out-of-state asked me to manage for him too.  So, this month I've spent a lot of time showing vacancies lately, and also responding to maintenance issues at the apartments.  I've actually been busy enough that I haven't been doing any more marketing, although I plan to pick up with that again soon.

Jeff is back to work, too.  He has been for a little while now.  He did get multiple job offers again, but one of the jobs offered higher pay and really good benefits, so he accepted that one.  It's with a company that most people have heard of.  Jeff doesn't really like the job very much, because it's taking a long time for him to actually get started doing programming, and he is bored.  That should improve over time, though.  He keeps finding out about new benefits--we already knew our health care would pretty much be free, but on the first day of work he found out they were going to give him an iPhone--and pay for his service.  (Cool!  Although Jeff is kind of disappointed because he really likes his Droid.)  Then, Jeff offered to work later hours so that he can work some hours with the Australians that are on his team...so the company gave him a credit card and said they will pay for his dinner every day.  Nice!

New Cat

I brought home a new cat.  I was showing the home that I'm managing to some prospective renters and I asked if they had any pets.  (The owner allows up to two, with pet rent.)  They said no--well, they do--they have cats--but they're getting rid of them.  "Oh," I said,  "Are they good at catching mice?"  I explained that we've looked for a mouser before, but people always list cats online saying they would be good at catching mice, or saying they would grow up to be good at catching mice, but I want a cat that already catches mice. 

They said, "Actually, they are!"

So we talked some more about it, and after I showed them the rental home, they invited me back to their house.  I met two of their cats, and decided to take the one who had more of a history of catching mice.  Her name is Kitty, she is 17 years old, and she has long fur that started getting ratty a few months ago.  She is sometimes really friendly and sometimes really aggressive.  Perfect.

So I brought her home, and let her out in the barn, and then I didn't see her again.

Jeff thought I was joking when I told him I'd brought a cat home, but it didn't really matter because she isn't really our pet, she's just [supposed to be] living in the barn and we're feeding her.  We'd talked about getting a barn cat before, so it wasn't completely out of the blue. 

And then, after a few days of Kitty being missing, I was out doing some work in the barn and I heard a meow that wasn't Paley.  I walked around the corner, and (!) there she was!  So I showed Jeff our new cat.  And I fed her.  Paley does not like Kitty.  Kitty is disinterested in Paley.

Temple Pictures

This week my Relief Society (ladies church group) did a "Wonderful Wednesday" activity.  The main project was making temple pictures.  The pictures are beautiful (and popular up here in Utah) but if you just go buy one they usually cost about $200, so although I've wanted one for a while, I haven't bought one.  For the activity they charged us $53, though, and that was totally worth it.

I invited my sister Jessica, and we each did pictures of the temples where we were married.  (Jess did Salt Lake and I did Jordan River.)  It was pretty easy.  Basically, what you do is mount a print onto a board.  Let it dry.  Texture the print.  Let it dry.  Paint your frame.  Let it dry.  Add screws and little metal things to the back of the frame.  Insert the mounted, textured print.  Tighten the screws.  Wait a day and add the bracket thing that lets you hang it.  Then hang it.

Garden

My garden didn't go quite how I planned, mainly because I was unable to get a fence up to protect my garden from goats.  So I never planted my garden.  But, after I abandoned so many healthy plants at my in-laws' house, my father-in-law planted anything that seemed like it might survive.  This resulted in a lot of produce, actually.  We've been picking and eating purple tomatoes when we go over to my in-laws' on game days.  And, I've had a couple of the Rich Sweetness 132 melons.  They're small, but they're pretty delicious.  A couple days ago, my father-in-law tore out all of my garden and harvested what he could.  Frost is coming soon, anyway, and I think he is planning to plant some trees where my garden was growing.  It was nice of him to let my stuff grow at their house.  

Moving

We're only sort of moving.  We've been living in the back portion of our house, and we've had the front part rented out.  The guys living in the front have been there for over two years, but now they're moving.  So we're going to move up to the front!  I think it will probably need new carpet, and a little bit of work done...but we plan to move in the beginning part of November.  I am SO excited to have a kitchen(!) and a bath tub(!) and a bigger office area(!) and a fireplace(!).  Jeff is worried that moving will be a lot of work, and getting organized will take a long time.  It kind of will, but I don't think it will be too bad, because we won't have to pack, or load things up in a truck, or anything like that.  We'll just take things and put them in their new places.  Easiest Move Ever.  Did I mention I'm excited to have a real kitchen?  Because I am.  We finally got an oven back here a few weeks ago, though, and that's already been excellent. 

We're busy and we're happy and these are the things that are going on.

I Made a Felt Name Book!

Last spring I found some blog posts by a girl who made her kids name books out of felt.

I thought it looked like fun, so since I don't have any kids, I decided to make one for my nephew*. I originally thought I would make it as a first birthday present, but it wasn't done it time (November), so instead it became a Random Day in January present. Fun!

Here are some pictures of the finished book, which was opened today.

I tried to give each page different textures where I could. I felt especially clever about using beads for ants, a screen on the house, and fur for a rabbit. It was a fun craft.


Now J wants one too. We joked about keeping the book and someday when we have a kid we can name our baby Nathan Andrew (whether it is a boy or girl) so that we could keep the book and enjoy it.




* Here is a funny story: When I first started making the book, I showed J. He was very polite about it and thought it was neat, but at one point we were talking about it and I realized he thought I was making it for our nephew Nathan on his side. Who is eight years old. We enjoyed a good laugh over that one.

Big things: Fourplex!

Almost a week after my graduation, J and I received some exciting news: we had final bank approval for us to purchase our fourplex!

Months ago, J and I decided we wanted to buy a fourplex, but we wanted to get a good deal on it. We analyzed the different properties that were available (over several months). J made a spreadsheet that calculated anticipated mortgage amounts, evaluated the rent collected for each unit, and produced a decimal to indicate how well it would pay for itself. We realized that most of the really good deals seemed to be short sales.

We didn't know much about short sales.

We learned all about them.

Basically, in a short sale, the seller owes more on a property than it is worth. Usually, the seller is about to go into foreclosure because they are in default on their mortgage, and they can't sell the property (because nobody will buy it for the amount owed). So they try to sell it at the amount it's actually worth, instead. It's usually in the bank's best interest for a short sale to happen because if the property goes into foreclosure, it will still only be worth the current value, and having to sell it and deal with it will cost the bank even more money. It's kind of a win/win (or lose-less/lose-less?) situation, because the seller avoids foreclosure (which looks really bad on a credit report) and the bank avoids the extra expense of foreclosure.

In order for it all to work, though, everyone has to cooperate. A lot of times they don't. In order to do a short sale, the seller needs permission from the bank(s). Especially if there is a second mortgage, it's tricky, because sometimes the first bank would be totally paid off if the foreclosure happened (since the second mortgage is paid after the first one), so they don't have a lot of incentive to cooperate for the short sale.

Our real estate agent told us we should be prepared to wait a long time to hear back from the banks, even after our offer was "accepted" by the seller. It usually takes them months. And even after that, the price isn't always approved. We put in offers on a couple different properties. One of them was accepted, but we canceled that offer because once we got inside, there were cockroaches and mold all over the place. (No thanks!) We waited on the other offer, though.

It took about 3 months for us to hear back from the banks, and they said YES IT WAS APPROVED BUT WE HAD TO DO IT ALL IN 15 DAYS OR ELSE. If we didn't close (and fund!) in 15 days, it was going to cost us $2500 more.

So right right after I graduated we got approval, and we hurry-hurry-hurried to get everything together. We had the home inspector come out on a Monday, got the home inspection report on Tuesday, had the appraisal on Wednesday, finally got the appraisal back on Friday. On the following Monday I set up insurance. We met with the seller a few times to pick up maintenance stuff for the fourplex, and we were going to close that Wednesday, but it got pushed to Thursday, and then it finally happened. The whole thing was all such a whirlwind!

Since then, I have stayed busy with fourplex things.

- I started my own business (an LLC!) to handle J and I's property management stuff. I set up a business bank account and a PO Box.

- I read up on A LOT of different landlord/tenant laws, and became VERY familiar with our tenants' leases (we have to honor the previous owner's leases). I developed and had our people fill out Property Condition reports, and Tenant Update forms.

- I installed smoke detectors in all of the units. I bought seismic bands for the water heaters (and was going to install them, but it turned out I didn't have the right tool at the time.)

- I bought tools!

- J and I met with the previous owner to learn how to summer-ize the evaporative coolers. It was nice of him to show us. We realized that when we summer-ized our evaporative cooler*, we actually didn't. [More to follow about that...]

- The previous owner also showed us how to use the sprinkler system, so we turned the water on for the summer and found out a sprinkler was broken. (So I learned how to fix sprinklers! I replaced some broken pipe. J helped with part of it.)

- This week, I repaired a broken drawer and performed maintenance on a dishwasher. Then J and I replaced a dishwasher a couple days ago, and yesterday I replaced the elbow thing on the new dishwasher, and I used teflon tape for the first time.

- My next projects will [probably] be: making and installing a bunch of screens (a few of the units are missing screens) and re-painting the parking lines in our little parking lot.

I am becoming so handy!** Also, I am making friends at Home Depot and Lowe's.

It seems to take a lot of time to learn how to do each new thing, but after each repair (or repair attempt!) I understand so much more about how things work. In the future, repairs will be quick and easy, and soooo much cheaper than if we were to hire repair people every time anything breaks.

In the past, J and I have sometimes talked about having me do property management. Recently, we like the idea even better. Instead of looking for a job now, I am studying to get my real estate license.*** To be licensed, Utah requires people to complete a 120-hour real estate course and then pass the state and national license exams. So. I signed up for one of the courses that is available both live and online (to mix it up a little bit), and I've been getting started with that. I'm going to try to finish it over the next couple months.


* You know, by just changing the pads. (LOL)
** Also, I am making friends at Home Depot and Lowe's. Since their employees have to walk me through all of the steps of my projects when online instructions are insufficient. Actually, the HD master plumber knows me now. In the past couple weeks, he and I have talked several times, for probably a couple hours in all. What a guy! He really knows his stuff.
*** In Utah, in order to manage other people's properties you need to have a real estate license.

I probably shouldn't mention this...

but Jessica is doing...


HER FiRsT GiVeAwAY!!!!!!


I sort of hope nobody else enters because I want to win. But aren't they so cute?

(And doesn't it look like they're from a picture out of a magazine? I think Mitch's camera has Photoshop built in. Like he takes pictures and the instant they're taken, things are posed perfectly and everything is edited. It's just a theory, but I'm pretty sure it's true.)



Hm. Now I need to do a *-GiVeAwAy!!!!!-* too.
J and I have had a lot of *-cRaFt NiGhT!!!-*s, so I'll need to think about what I can make two of next time. I think my next cRaFt!!! will be to install some linoleum tile as part of sUpEr FuN cRaFt. I'm pretty sure I'll have some extra, but my craft is versatile, (ha! punny!) you know, so I'll have to decide whether to take pictures of it with sparkling cider (for a New Year's giveaway), or with pictures of Presidents (for a Presidents' Day giveaway), or with little hearts (for a Valentine's Day giveaway), or what. I guess it might be a little while before my giveaway is ready, so I you can enter Jessica's in the meantime.


My goodness, I have so much to blog about, it seems kind of crazy to finish a blog post and not mention anything else. Here's a quick overview (from the document on my desktop "To blog about."). I'll blog more soon, now that I'm FINALLY done with this semester.
1. I have been SO busy with school this semester. I should have taken one fewer class than I did. And not been so sick for so much of the beginning of the semester, which caused me big problems.
2. J and I went to CA for Thanksgiving.
3. I interviewed J's dad for my Folklore/ life story class. I think it ended up being like 9 1/2 hours long, in 3 interviews. I'm still working on that project. I have neat stories to tell from it, though.
4. We've had a couple exciting chicken incidents worth mentioning. I think all of the birds were laying until a couple weeks ago. We got a bunch of the green eggs before everyone stopped laying. That was fun.
5. I'M ENGAGED! Seems kind of funny to mention it like this, but when J first proposed, it took a few days before all of the family people knew. And by then it seemed kind of weird to set my status on Gmail or Facebook to that, so I just didn't. And I've been trying not to think about it too much anyway, because really, no, really, I had too much school stuff. So I promised I would Really Try not to think about wedding plans at all until after my school stuff was ENTIRELY done. Because otherwise I would pretty much for sure be repeating a class or two, and I just really don't have time for that if I still want to graduate in May. (Which I do.)
6. Another neat thing is, we had an awesome sacrament meeting in church a couple weeks ago, which I took really great notes about because I wanted to share it. It was a Christmas talk, so I'll try and post about it tomorrow.

Halloween!

While J and I were apart, I heard about Halloween at Chipotle. A guy from Jessica's student ward told us about it. Basically, if you dress as a burrito, Chipotle will give you a free burrito. The guy said that you don't actually have to dress as a burrito, you just need to wear some aluminum foil (because Chipotle wraps their burritos in foil). ANY foil. He said that last year he went as an Indian. He made a headband with a feather out of foil, and went in and got his free burrito.

I decided that if J and I were dating again by then, we would definitely need to go. J and I used to eat at Chipotle all the time!

So, when J and I started dating again, I told him we should go.

And then, we went to Chipotle together and they had little papers advertising it. And we decided we would for sure go. I told J we could wrap him in foil and he could be a burrito, and we could take a box and cut it in half, and add green tissue paper and pieces of red and brown paper (tomatoes and steak), and I could be a taco.


But as we talked more about it, J was worried that our costumes would suck. He wanted us to Google it to see past Halloween costumes for Chipotle. BEST IDEA EVER.

We did not find many pictures, but we did find a few that we used to inspire our costumes.

We decided to both be burritos. Foil was going to be a disaster (it would tear if we put it on ahead, and it would be difficult to assemble at Chipotle), but online people were using emergency blankets instead. Brilliant!

For our tortillas, I used duck cloth, which I already had. We bought thick yellow yarn for cheese. We used green tissue paper and red and brown paper for steak and tomatoes. J constructed them while I got ready to go.


Everyone loved our costumes. It was fantastic! In the parking lot we put our costumes on, and people pointed and grinned at us. These people near us who were wrapping themselves in foil told us we each deserved five burritos.


In line inside, everyone commented on our costumes. We were the coolest people in the restaurant. People took cellphone pictures of us on the sly. We loved it!


While we were eating our burritos, a girl who was working at Chipotle came out and told us we had the best costumes of the evening, and asked if it would be all right for her to take our picture. (Sure!) They also gave us chips and guacamole for free, since it was closing time.

Another craft.

HOLY SMOKES!!!

How am I so crafty?*

I made a fall wreath. Do you like it?

I've never made a wreath before.

Michael's is having a huge sale right now (50% off all of the leaves and stuff, plus grapevine wreaths are $1.99 instead of $3.99), so I went and bought a bunch of stuff. I didn't really know how much I would need. I just looked at the pre-made wreaths and picked stuff that I wanted, and kind of combined it all. (I think I got about 3x as much stuff as I needed. Oops.)

It was pretty simple. It took about 1 hour to make it. It has nice big leaves, smaller leaves that have glitter on them, big flowers, small flowers, little leaves that don't have glitter on them, and then a few gourds to add something. Plus a bow and then I used the same ribbon to tie it to the hook thing on J's front door. (His front door needed something because it is actually a back door, so I think the wreath will help people feel more like they are in the right place, instead of at someone's back door.) (I am also making him a sign with his last name on it, to put outside near the glass door that people need to go in to get to the back-front door.)

Now I want to make a wreath for every month and decorations for every season. Also, AUTUMN letters like Jessica's SUMMER and SPRING ones.

(P.S. I rotated the picture and saved it, soooo, not really sure why it's still sideways.)

* I'm not very good at being crafty, actually. Not yet. I decided I would use the glue gun to keep the ends of the bow from unraveling. You know, kind of like nail polish on nylons. So I put a line of glue on the bottom of one of the ends, and pinched my thumb and middle finger together and pulled them along the bottom, to spread the glue out in a pretty line and make it absorb into the ribbon and also remove the excess. Of course, right? Just like nail polish. Exceeepppt, hot glue is hot. So it HURT. And I peeled the glue off of my finger as soon as I could so that it would stop burning, excepppt, my finger came off with the glue. Ouuuuch! And gross! So I didn't pull the glue off of my thumb. I just left it on. And when it finally came off, it had a big blister beneath the glue. So no wonder my finger came off when I pulled the other glue off. I'll get better. I will. I'm learning.

*-cRaFt NiGhT!!!-*

J and I keep having SO SO many cRaFt NiGhTs, it's hard to even keep up with my blogging!

SO!

We've had this problem lately, which is, the roof leaks. J was thinking he needed to have the roof re-$loped, but we ended up deciding that the real problem is not actually the valley between the front and back of the house. [Actually, it's that the flashing (metal stuff) around the chimney is totally not up against the chimney right, so water can get in. (SOLUTION: put tar inside and use a special drill bit and special screws and uh, I forget what else, to reattach it better.) It's kind of confusing, but it will be wayyyy cheaper than having the roof re-sloped. We can do it.]

And then we had ANOTHER problem, which was, part of the skylight over J's part of the house flew off the roof a few days ago. (Whoops!) It's just the extra covering, but the actual skylight is cracked, so it is important.

So, it's not that big of a deal unless it rains.

And it's September, so no problem, right? Right?

We were on our way to church yesterday (on time!) and it started sprinkling. Like, sprinkling

big drops, though. So I said a prayer while J drove us back to his house so that we could put painter's plastic up. (Faith promoting story: It stopped raining right after I prayed for time to protect the roof! Neat. After we had the plastic up we went to church for the last two hours, and sometime during church it started raining again.)

We put plastic over the skylight and plastic around the chimney. We thought the whole thing was pretty funny. It looked pretty bad.

And then later in the afternoon, we replaced the skylight cover (because it's supposed to rain more today.) J mostly did that. I re-tarred the roof. I'm going to go back and finish it up, but I got a good start. There were a few cracks in the sealant they had used before.

We were up there for a little while, so Paley came up on the roof to check things out and see what we were doing.

Sometime later I'll blog about our FeNcE ~~~cRaFt NiGhTs!!!~~~

Soap's ready!

Well, I guess it probably seems like the only thing I ever blog about is our chickens. They're my favorite. I actually do still have hobbies other than chickens, though.

J is allergic to something in some brands of commercial soap, so he either has to buy the $6/homemade-style bar soap from Whole Foods or we get to MAKE soap. Guess which choice I picked.

This weekend the soap is finally ready! It's pretty exciting. We made it a month ago. J told me to pick a recipe and we would get the stuff. So I did.

We made the soap here, because it's called easy homemade soap, and having never made soap before I wanted to make a kind that was simple. For the scent, I chose lavender, because that's pretty much my favorite. I also like oatmeal vanilla soaps, and J said mint ones are nice as

well. This recipe called for olive oil (which he had, but we needed to get the cheap kind so we got more at Walmart), grapeseed oil (Amazon!), coconut oil (J already had this), and lye (which J also had).

We got some soap tools from DI-- an immersion blender ($3!), a glass bowl to mix the lye in (which ended up being wayyyy too small), a thermometer for comparing temperatures of oils (although, we were never really sure if it actually worked right or not. We did eventually get the lye and water mixture to match the mixed oils temperature).

We were both a little concerned that it was going to be a way harder project than it ended up being. I think we expected the lye and water to crackle and have terrible fumes. J stirred it out on the back porch with a wooden skewer and I think it did burn the wood, but that was really it.

And then all of the recipes warn us to DEFINITELY, FOR SURE, CERTAINLY wear safety goggles, or you would most likely go blind because it would splash into your eyes and lye is used to clean drains, not eyes. Buuut we didn't have safety goggles so we improvised by having J wear my sunglasses while he slowly combined the stuff, and I backed far away so that it wouldn't splash into my eyes...yeah. Totally nothing happened.

We used the immersion blender to mix the oils and lye to "trace", which is a special time where it's the right consistency and could harden at any moment, but that was uneventful also.

We poured the soap into our mould (a plastic box), put the lid on, and left it in a cooler for a day (because the site said to wrap it in blankets but J didn't want to accidentally ruin any of his blankets). The cooler worked out. It kept the mixture warm longer, so that the reaction could occur. The next day we used dental floss to cut it into bars, just like cinnamon rolls (but less tasty). I wrapped them in paper because they were supposed to sit somewhere cool, on brown paper, separated nicely. And then we piled them back into the plastic box and put them in a cool closet for two weeks. At two weeks we flipped all of the bars. And now that it's been a month, we can start using them. For fun, for fun!

*:*-...cRaFt NiGhT!!!!...-*:*

When we saw Jess for the Grand Canyon trip, she showed J and I her latest craft. Jess has been having craft nights every month for a little while now, but she always chooses times that I can't come and then flaunts it by sending me cute invitations by e-mail.

I told Jessica that J and I would have our own craft night.

So. We. Did.

This Friday I invited J and my girls [--BUT NOT JESS--] for my FIRST cRaFt NiGhT!!!!

Even though it was super short notice (like, 5 minutes), everyone came. We bought our supplies in advance and for craft night we painted. All six of us had So Much Fun! We loved being outside!

I left the girls in their box so they wouldn't get lost or painty, but they enjoyed the sunshine. J painted the sides of the chicken coop (which we've started calling "the barn") and I painted the doors and the nesting box thing. We painted with a waterproofing opaque wood stain thing, in the color "California Redwood" since I thought that sounded like the best option for a chicken coop.


We can't wait for our next craft night!!!