Happy Anniversary

We've been in our house for a year, this month. Although I have not been regularly posting in this blog, I thought about doing a catch-up post, primarily for us. We've been so busy that it's hard to remember everything we've done. What follows is a rememberance of items and activities since my last post in February. These items are in sort of chronological order...sort of. 

 New Lawn- I mentioned this in my previous post. We’ve got a lawn in...sort of. Parts of the lawn came in nicely, green and lush. Other parts...not so much. We started the lawn from seed and, in hindsight, should have done a better job of raking the grass seed in. I'm pretty sure the birds ate most of the seed. We kept after it, though, reseeding several times and fertilizing. With the onset of cooler weather, our grass has started spreading rapidly. I've got faith that we will eventually end up with a nice-looking lawn. 

Here’s the front of the house, showing our not-so-great lawn and rose garden.

 Fence - We finished the fence along the west side of our property, probably some time in late March or early April. We struggled with a means of keeping the fencing taut while we fastened it to the posts. Every YouTube video we saw shouwed a guy with either a tractor or a forklift holding the fencing tight. We figured out how to do it with a cable come-along and a clamp that I rigged up. It was fairly labor-intensive but the final results were worth it. 

Garden - We hauled in some topsoil and then fenced off a 24' square garden plot for Cathy. We had already run an irrigation line to the site, so Cathy took the ball and ran with it. She planted a bed of dahlias, knowing full well that they might not do well in this hot, dry climate. After a slow start, they gave us a spectacular display of flowers starting in late summer. Additionally, she grew tomatoes (they did great), peppers (not-so-great), zuchini (great), potatoes (pretty good for afirst effort) cantaloup and melons (great) and sunflowers. All in all, it was a great first year for the garden. She is still harvesting tomatoes and zuchini in mid-November! 

New Year...New House...LOTS of Work!

 I've decided that I'm going to keep posting in the blog, even though we are no longer full-time RVing, or even still have our Big Country home - more on that, below. I like writing, and these blog posts serve as a journal of our life in retirement, and, hopefully, you still enjoy reading.

We have been SO busy! Here's a look at what we've done since the first of January:

1. Sold Our Home: Our old home, that is. I talked about this in my last blog post. 

2. Bought a New Car: It's been on our radar to buy another vehicle. Our beloved truck, The Beast, does a wonderful job on heavy-duty pickup stuff: hauling a trailer or loads of gravel, for example. For simply running around town, it's not optimum. Also, we live 8-10 miles from town, and, sooner or later, both of us are going to have something going on that takes us to town at the same time. We ended up buying a 2021 Honda Pilot with only 18,000 miles from CarGuru. We couldn't be more pleased with the car, the price, or the whole buying process. 

3. Bought a New Trailer: Yep! Cathy spotted this bad boy on Craigslist. We sold our Big Country on a Tuesday and the following Sunday drove over to Corcoran, which is in the Central Valley about 80 miles from here, and looked this guy over. It's a 2020 Keystone Cougar 27SGS. It's 3/4 the length and 2/3 the weight of our Big Country. Despite the smaller size, it is still very well-equipped. Despite it being fairly new, there are a number of minor repairs that it needs; additionally, it isn't nearly clean enough for Cathy! We've got it parked on the side of our garage while we get it ready for travel; we've got a trip planned for early March!

Our new trailer. The hatch cover is laying on the ground - work in progress.

4. Installed Gutters: We really needed gutters on the front of the house. The way the roofline is configured, rainwater just pours onto the ground right in front of the house. One problem: about all you can buy today is the white vinyl stuff from a big box store. This wouldn't look well on our house, where the trim is a very dark gray, almost black. We ended up buying the white vinyl stuff from Lowes and spray-painting it black. One can buy spray paint formulated to bond well with plastic, so that's what we used. Painting it was fairly straightforward, although it took six cans of paint to finish the job. Installation was fairly easy, too, although there's a lot of up-and-down on the ladder. Of course, since we finished instillation, we've had almost no rain!

This is not a great photo, but does show how the black-painted gutters blend in with the trim.

5. A Rose Garden for Cathy: We ID'ed a location in front of the house for roses. Sherry was up for a weekend and she and Cathy planted 11 bare root roses. We can't wait to see them in bloom.

Here's the master gardeners. The area to the right will be grass, eventually. 

6. Sprinklers and Irrigation: We are planning on putting grass into the area right in front of our house. So, we installed a sprinkler system first. While we were doing that, I also installed a separate irrigation line that will be used for future plantings further out in the front of the property; we tied into this line for a drip irrigation system for the roses. Not being complete idiots, we rented a trencher to dig all this stuff. What a gas! This beast dug all of the trenches we needed, plus two, 75' long trenches in the back yard for future use, in about 90 minutes! I wish we had more stuff to trench. With the trenching done, putting in PVC pipe and sprinklers was fairly straightforward. 

6. New Fence: We are splitting both costs and labor with our neighbors to install a new fence along our west boundary. We are running the fence from the back fence line up to the back of our neighbors house; that's almost exactly 300' of fencing. We split the cost of a power auger to drill the 40 or so holes we need for the fence posts. Right now, we've got 20 posts set in concrete, so we're roughly halfway on that part of the job. After the posts are all set, we'll run 5' tall wire fencing. Here's what it looks like so far:

What's Next? Right now, we are focused on two projects: 1) getting our trailer ready to travel; 2) getting a front lawn planted. For the latter, we are finishing up some borders, then we'll bring in some topsoil and get some seed down. 

Beyond that, we'll start working out back; Cathy wants to get a garden in, plus she's got some dahlia bulbs to plant soon. I want to try my hand at growing hops, and those need to get started in the next month or so. We've started looking at what we want to do for a deck, out back, too. Stay tuned!

End of an Era

 Earlier today, we sold our home - our old home, that is. Camping World both buys and sells RVs. So, this morning, bright and early, we drove our beloved RV the 100 miles or so to the nearest Camping World, in Fresno. 

Prior to that, we had completed an online questionnaire that covered the basics of the trailer, as well as the amenities, damages, additions, etc. to the unit. With that info, Camping World gave us a quote for an outright purchase, subject to onsite inspection. 

We pulled in there and expected the guy to go over things with a fine-tooth comb. After all, the RV was almost four years old, with it being occupied almost all of that time. We knew it was in good shape, but it certainly was not in brand-new condition. It had all of the usual dings, scrapes and dents that everyday living seems to generate. 

So, we were expecting the guy to open and close all the cabinet doors, check the operation of both TVs and fireplaces, the refrigerator, microwave, AC, heater, etc. We expected a detailed exterior inspection, including climbing on the roof to look for damage, examining the tires for wear, opening all of the outside storage compartments. WRONG. He did almost none of that. He checked that all six slides operated properly and sort of just took a good look around; I don't think he spent five minutes inspecting the whole thing. 

We were in and out of there in an hour! They're mailing us a check. Anyone else, and they wouldn't be getting the title to the vehicle that easily. However, this is Camping World, which is part of Good Sam, of which we are members and have been for years. We have complete confidence the check will arrive as promised in a few days. 

We have zero regrets or sadness about this happening. We were ready to close that chapter in our life as we start a new one. We are already starting to look for a smaller fifth-wheel trailer, something in the 28-30' length range. Such a length will be significantly lighter and easier to tow, and gives us many more options for camping in campgrounds, instead of just RV parks.

We loved our Big Country home. Despite a lot of early mechanical problems, we found it well-designed, comfortable, and spacious. I don't think either of us would have done anything differently if we were doing it all over again.