Update Nov 2007

It's been a little while since I've made a post. Sorry, been catching up on items here in Arizona.

I wanted to show the latest photo of our project. It was taken in October by our neighbor across the street. It was a pity that we were not there to enjoy the fall colors.

Other News:

Fall is the time of Garage sales here in Lake Havasu and we have been busy. Funny thing, You never have any expectations when you go out at a Garage sale. It's just random luck when you find something that you can use. Well, we hit several items that we needed to take up to Canyon City at a couple of the Garage sales. We also purchased a lot of stuff at Lowes (at the clearance table). All - 'Deals of the Month', as I say.

We have scheduled another trip to Oregon with another load of stuff. The Haulmark Trailer is beginning to fill up....

We'll keep you posted. Thanks Imogene, for the beautiful photo.

Drunken Sailors and the Hangover Afterwards

We all have heard the phrase, 'You're spending money like a drunken sailor'. Our trip to Oregon was a three week spending binge. Every day had a purchase of sorts. Either at a local hardware store or builder's supply. None of which were minor (under $30) purchases. As I found out today, little by little - it all adds up. We made provisions for this earlier, building up both the Checking and Savings Accounts. I had this all planned out too...

Before we left Oregon we paid off our main contractor. Big Hit! Shortly after, the insulation contractor shows up. Boom! Another hit. Third contractor, the gutter guy. Bang! We drive home. Pick up our mail. Bills. Stacks of 'em. Mrs. G (our comptroller general) starts to write checks. Lots of checks.

I think that we survived all the hits we took. As thrifty as we usually are, there are times when money literally flies out of the door.

The hangover has begun.

Speaking of thrift and buying stuff from the hardware store. I never really appreciated how much money you actually save on supplies at places like Lowes and Home Depot as compared to the local supplier hardware store. Case in point: Tubes of Latex Chalking. Price at Ace Hardware = $3.99 per tube. Price at Home Depot = $1.99 (for the same stuff). There are other examples too numerous to post here, but I'm sure that you get the idea. Long story short, I make a list of all anticipated items I need and take a couple of trips down to the closest Home Depot. In this case, Ontario Oregon (120 miles away). I hate saying this but buying supplies locally normally costs nearly double on most common items. The best comparison I can make is doing shopping in an AM-PM Mini-Market verses a Kroger Supermarket. I understand that the local guy has to make a living. Just don't understand the large gap in pricing on common items.

We have become very aware of where the best shopping opportunities are located in Ontario. They consist of Wal-Mart, Bi-Mart and the Home Depot. Honorable mention is the dollar store and some unnamed pawn shop (that has a great selection of dirt cheap Chinese tools). We save money in Ontario.

It will take me several months to rebuild the accounts back up. We have other expensive jobs to do on the place next year. Retiring isn't cheap.

The Deal of the Day...

Everyone loves a bargain. I'm no exception. When I come across a great deal I have a term for it. I call it the 'Deal of the Day'. If we take this concept a step further we find that there are several levels of exceptional deals. Let's define 'em:

• Deal of the Day - The entry level prime deal. To qualify as a 'Deal of the Day', in my book, is where we get 50% or better off the normal price. At a retail store like JC Penneys this means getting that $30 shirt for $6.99. The more common 'Deal of the Day' usually happens at a garage sale. The typical 'Deal of the Day' is normally on something you weren't looking for but couldn't pass up because of the killer price. I rationalize that sooner or later, I'm gonna use it.
• Deal of the Quarter - More rare. Usually on an item you can use right now. Usually from a garage sale. Usually more discounted.
• Deal of the Year - Extremely rare. Exceptional deal on something you were looking for. Normally in the color and style you wanted. I also hang this title on big ticket items that I have purchased pennies on the dollar.

Shopping for these deals is an art. I apprenticed under a master. Mom taught me all I ever needed to know about ferreting out the good deals. My first recollection of a department store sale happened when I was about five years old. Mom took me to one of the larger department stores in downtown Minneapolis. The event was a 'Washington's Day Sale'. I remember standing outside the main doors of the store waiting for the place to open. There was a large group of women waiting along with us. At 9AM the doors swung open. In charged the masses. It was something like the game show called 'Supermarket Sweep'. In this show the contestants ran frantically through the store stuffing their shopping carts. Same principle here.

Mom also took me to Salvation Army stores searching for antique furniture. Except, in the early 60's the antique furniture that ended up there was stuff that was made anywhere from the 1880's to the 1930's. At the time, hardly anyone wanted the stuff. Mom would cruise the stores on regular intervals and cherry pick the best pieces. She never went over $20 on anything. Once acquired, mom would refinish the piece. At the time all of us kids thought she was crazy wasting her time and efforts restoring this junk. Today, everyone wants her stuff.
Here is a picture of Mom with her sister Violet. Mom's the one on the left. Mom still shops at the Salvation Army. Every winter she visits Violet in Southern California and they both cruise the thrift shops in the greater San Fernando Valley area.

Getting back to the 'Deal of the Day'. I got one today. Dunlaps Department store in Lake Havasu was being closed. Time was short. They were discounting items 75 to 90%. Too bad Dunlaps was a 'woman's store'. However, they were liquidating the store fixtures as well. I got two oak tables for $40. Not the cheap type but ones made from solid oak. I saw them last week at $150 and $80 each. Today, $40 for the both of them.

I think that this one qualifies as the Deal of the Quarter.

Time Management & Other Stuff

Before we left to go to Oregon in August, my wife & myself make plans. Extensive plans on the jobs we should do while we are in Oregon. She wanted to do internal painting and hang curtain rods, etc, etc... I figured that we would get some of that done, time permitting. The real truth is that you never really get those things done - as planned. One of the things I found out real quick is that there were tasks that needed to be done right now. No time for those curtains, no time for painting. Not this trip anyway.

Have you ever wondered about your home's past history? In the case of our home, the date of construction was in 1948. Did I mention that our home borders a creek? In 1862 Gold was discovered on Canyon Creek. Canyon City was a gold rush town. Sometime in the early 20th century Canyon Creek was dredged on a large scale to extract the remaining gold. Mounds of tailings bordered the creek. During the late 40's someone bulldozed the tailings and developed the property where my house now resides. You would never guess it by looking at the neighborhood that this was the site of a major gold strike. I found out first hand about the tailings the first time that I crawled under the house. The foundation was built right over what could best be described as a gravel pit. I also discovered on my first trip under the house that I had a lot of work to do. Work that I had not anticipated nor welcomed. So much for the planning done earlier.

You can tell the history of the house in a couple of ways. Painting the house tells you about who painted it last and the order of painting jobs done. Just look under the cover of any AC outlet or fixture for the story. The painting job in our laundry room confirmed four earlier paint jobs. The order went like this, White, Lime Green, Forrest Green, Salmon and Off White. I speculated that these colors were popular during the time of application (remember back in the early 60's when Harvest Gold or Avocado were a popular colors for appliances?). The other place to reveal the home's past is to go in the crawl space under the house -or- the attic space. In the case of our house, the crawl space revealed that this place had not been visited in quite some time. The ground was littered with junk consisting of construction debris, rusted cans, some bottles and a large assortment of old soup bones left by a former resident's dog. The first order of business was to clean out this junk. Six hours later and enough assorted stuff to fill my Pickup's bed, the house's crawl space was now junk free. Second order of business, reapply all the insulation batting that had dropped from the joists. I had to run down to the builder's supply to buy a box of retaining rods. these rods are wedged between the joists to hold up the batting. The box contained 100 rods. I used every one. I also bought a roll of R19 insulation batting to place in areas where there was no insulation. Time spent on this endeavour, another four hours. Third order of business, correct all the 120v wiring boo-boos that I saw. More lost time, more history revealed.

My real goal was to insulate the water pipes under the house. This sounds simple bit isn't simple at all. First, I have to wire up a 120vac outlet under the house. This is needed because I want to wrap the water pipes in heat tape first, before the fiberglass insulation wrap gets applied. Heat tape plugs into a standard AC outlet like an extension cord. Adding standard insulation to the water pipes without having the heat tape is marginally better than having no insulation at all (in a vacant house). The heat tape becomes active at 38 degF or below. The combination of heat tape and insulation wrapping on the pipes should protect the place if we ever have that spell of 20 below weather. Assuming that I don't lose power to the house that is. This job is time consuming indeed. Total time on this job is about twenty hours. When the deed is done, I've had my fill of crawling under the house. I've also had my fill of dealing with fiberglass and working on my back on hard rock. I feel that I've been in a prize fight and have had the crap beat out of me. I'm also itchy from dealing with the fiberglass. At least I didn't have to pay anyone to deal with this at $45/hr. Small consolation here.

When finished with all the jobs that I had to do on the place to winterize it - We leave Oregon one day later than planned. Lessons learned: No matter how much pre planning we did before the trip, everything changed and the plans flew out the window. No interior painting was done, no curtain rods were hung and some of the other tasks that the lovely Mrs. G had planned didn't happen. I guess that there is always the next trip...

Canyon City is a small town of 600 people give or take. Everyone knows everyone here. They also know what goes on in the neighborhood. You get that feeling when you run into several people in town that have lived in our house at one time or another. My first encounter is when we opened our account at the Electric Cooperative. The lady that took down our account information said, "Sure, I know the property. We lived there ten years ago...". She then relates to us how they had to replace the Hot Water Tank. The latest was with our contractor, Andy. "Yeah, we lived there too...". Andy then gives me his history with the place. In both cases, they told us something about the place. Something physical about what happened while they lived there. Both thought well of the property. They just outgrew the place and moved on.

We got great neighbors too. Terry down the street keeps an eye on the place in our absence. She has been invaluable in helping us in one way or the other. Our other neighbor across the street has also kept an eye out for us too. Terry is our age and clues us in on the goings on in the neighborhood. Without her, I think that we would be somewhere in the ozone as far as local information is concerned.

One of our latest purchases from Home Depot was a patio table and chairs set. They were closing them out at $69. Great little deal on a plain Jane patio set. I set them up in the back yard under the Cherry tree. The perfect place to take that late afternoon break (sitting under the tree in the shade and having a cool one). One of the few pleasures I had on my last trip, I think. Mrs. G & myself sitting under the tree and discussing her plans for the next day - we hear someone walking on Hwy395 (behind our house) uttering random nonsense as he walks past. Looking at him, it's someone who lives 'outside the box', so to speak. You can tell by his mutterings that something is not exactly right with this dude... I look at Mrs. G and think WTF.

We later ask Terry, what's the story here? "Oh, that's bottle Dave. He's harmless." Terry gives us a tale of how 'Bottle Dave' was once a millionaire, now a bum. Brilliant, but unstable due to some chemical imbalance in his brain. Makes his living now by picking up bottles and cans from the highway. Even a place as modest as Canyon City has a character everyone knows about.

Lake Havasu had a character like this sometime back. Everyone called him 'Elvis'. Yes, you guessed it. Elvis thought that he was the long lost son of the real Elvis. A harmless fellow. Said to be taken advantage of by some of the company he ran with. We once shared a table with him over Thanksgiving dinner at St Vincent De Paul a few years back. As much as I wanted to ask him several questions over dinner about his relationship with daddy. I thought better of it. The lovely Mrs. G was a honcho at Vinnies and I would have been in 'trouble' if I had asked. I last saw Elvis talking on the phone outside of Wal-Mart in Havasu two years ago. Perhaps, Elvis has bailed out of Havasu. Who knows?

Canyon City is a quiet place for the most part. Our house sits behind the Shell Station on Hwy395. 'Bottle Dave' yells 'Hi' to the girls that work at the Shell Station. Except 'Hi' doesn't come out as 'Hi' but as almost as a yell or cadence call. Terry unravels this mystery to us. Dave hikes down to Chester's Thriftway in John Day to cash in his sack of cans. We hardly know that the Gas Station is behind us except for the fact of Dave's rants and their telephone ringing off the hook after 9PM every fifteen minutes.

Little by little, I am learning the quirks about Canyon City.

We Take a few Trips to Oregon...

May 2007 - We take our first trip to Oregon. Our renters have moved out. Mrs. G says, "No more renters!". I can't disagree with that. It was nice having someone care take the place but renters are hard on the property. Before we take possession of the place, We buy an enclosed cargo trailer. I never expected to invest in a cargo trailer a year ago but after looking into the charges U-Haul wanted just for a simple rental - I decided that shelling out the $3000 for this trailer would be a good investment. I figure that I have to make several trips over the next several years. I do the math. I buy the trailer. Besides, it has proven to be a great place to store stuff before we shove off to Oregon. We opted for the 6X12 ft model. I had reservations about my Toyota Tacoma 4 cylinder being able to tow the load through the mountain passes. The Toyota was able to tow the load - however we couldn't go very fast (55 mph/avg). My first load up there is modest and light. We take a sleeper sofa, the oak table & chair set that we've had for the last 30 years and a small buffet. We also take the usually filler stuff (lamps, dishes, pots & pans and bedding). Still a light load. We get up to Oregon and spend the week cleaning up after our renters and moving in our first (of many) loads. We also go through the house and take measurements of rooms, windows, doors, etc. I also take dozens of photos of the place for planning purposes. We also make some arrangements to have the place worked on.

Fast forward 90 days later. Summertime in Lake Havasu. I'm getting burnt out from work and the Lovely Mrs. G wants to do something on our house in Oregon. We've been going to Home Depot and Lowe's buying items for the property. We made a 'list' of items to get on our last trip in May. She talked me into buying a bedroom set, a washer & dryer combo and other items too numerous to post here. I packed the entire kit 'n caboodle in our trusty Haulmark trailer. The photo above shows you my 'rig'.

In the first week of August, I manage to get three weeks off from work. I've coordinated to have my time off while some construction work takes place on the house. Best be there in case of any problems, I say. We get up to Oregon without any towing problems. Good thing too... I had a heavy load to haul and it's been hot while we made the trip. I worried about the trip. Hwy 93 through Nevada is a lonely stretch of road. Bad place to break down. Guess that I worry more in my old age.

We roll in to Canyon City late on a Saturday afternoon in good spirits. It's cool up here in comparison to what we're use to. We start unloading the Haulmark. First order of business is to unload the Washer/Dryer combo and the bedroom set. I start unloading all this stuff solo. The Washer & Dryer are easy. The bedroom set is a bear. The damn dresser weighs close to 400 lbs and is almost impossible to handle alone. Somehow I manage to get all of the stuff into the house without damaging it. Now comes the task of assembling the bedroom set.

The bedroom set. My wife is accustomed to having 'good' furniture. Have you ever noticed the the vast majority of the furniture produced today is made from something other than solid wood? When we looked earlier at furniture - we made sure that we were going to buy something 'solid'. We bought a nice set from Ashley. The stuff was solid and well made. It was also imported from Vietnam. It was also very, very heavy. I had to assemble the pieces into the final product. I have to admit, I was pretty impressed with the quality. No problems with assembly. Sunday night we finally had a 'real' bed to sleep in. Sweet.

Little by little, the place was becoming more like home. When we first bought the place, we slept on the floor on an air mattress. Oh, what a joy that was. Our last trip, we brought up a couch with a pull-out sleeper (a minor upgrade of sorts to the air mattress). This trip, a real bed. One with a nice mattress. Like I said, "More like home as time progresses.." Ginger immediately staked out 'her spot' on the bed.

Next came the Washer and Dryer. For this I had to do some prep work in the Laundry/Utility room. By Prep work, I mean that I had to paint and do some other tasks before placing the the combo in there. After doing an electrical inspection. I come to the conclusion that I need to re-wire both the 120v and 240v circuits. Damn. You never plan for all these small details to crop up just to install something simple. I forgot to mention that I had to re-route the dryer exhaust venting too. Will this ever end? The small jobs take two days. Mrs. G has been putting on the pressure to install the washer dryer combo. "I refuse to go to that Laundromat!", she mutters at me. The local Laundromat being somewhat dingy and a place where local ranchers are more apt to launder Horse blankets. She is really really pleased when I get the washer and dryer in place.

Next job - correcting the wiring boo-boos of the previous residents. Wow. Where do I start? The illegal wiring or the stuff that needs to be removed and redone? Although I bought a ton of stuff at Home Depot and Lowes, I become a 'regular' at Ace & True Value Hardware stores in John Day. My main concern is to make the place 'winter proof' as it is going to be vacant during the freezing season. This equates to exterior painting (where wood is exposed), fixing the porch and car port roofs for leaks and most importantly, insulating the water pipes under the house. After hearing from the locals that it has the possibility of dropping to 20degF below during the winter. The thought of busted water pipes has a scary ring to it. Going under the house has a scary ring to it too. The crawl space under the kitchen is small. Too small for me to navigate. I've talked to the contractor about someone (other than myself) to go under there is discussed. A second contractor I hired with will do an insulation job at the house. He's going to blow in insulation in my exterior walls and attic. I ask him about insulating the pipes (and anything else the under side of the house needs). When I get to Canyon City, I see that he has done the insulation job, however no evidence of anyone going under the house. I get a bad feeling in my stomach.

My main contractor, Andy Lane has shown up to re-side the house in Vinyl Siding. We opt for Vinyl for the maintenance aspects. Personally, I would have liked Cedar or some other traditional siding. I select Vinyl for it's low maintenance in the long run. Andy has preprepared the house prior to our arrival for the siding job.

The siding needed to be replaced . This is what the house looked like before Andy started his work. Not only did the siding need to be replaced, the front window(s) were still the old single pane type. The doors needed replacing too. We had Andy replace both front windows, replace both front and rear doors and add storm doors.

Notice the new windows. We were very pleased with them. The new siding gave the place a different character as well. The change was more pronounced on the back side.
Although the picture does not give it justice, this before picture shows just how nasty the old siding really was.
Here, Sam (Andy's dad & business partner) is installing siding on the back of the house. See the little white door at Sam's feet? That's the dreaded crawl space access. Speaking of this, I asked Andy to cut a trap door in the utility room floor to access beneath the house. Good thing I did. Andy cut a hole in the floor. Much to my delight, I could now access the 'basement' of the house. Yes, it was cramped - but I can now access the area under the house. I take a 'first look'.
More bad news. Well, not bad news in the sense. The pipes do need wrapping and several other nasty jobs also need to be done as well. Better plan this job out...
Here's a photo of Andy & Sam when the siding job got finished. Watching them work, made the siding job look easy. However, I have my doubts how easy the job would have been if I had to do it. When done, the house looked completely different. I did a side job of repainting and residing the front entry way. As you noticed, the house was painted in a 'battleship gray' when we bought it in 2005. We had to eliminate all of the gray trim and Lattice. Right before we left Oregon for the trip home - all of the battleship gray was removed from the front of the house. At least the house now looks 'presentable' from the street. I never got around to taking a picture of how the place looked when we finished. I ran out of time. Actually, I should tell you something about time management and this house. That will have to wait until the next entry (as I'm out of time).

Is 'Security' making us into the USSR?

Who reads this stuff anyways? I mentioned earlier that I had developed several web pages. Only one web site exists today. That is the one about our Poodles. The others were removed due to some complaints that I had from my employer about the content of the sites. Security was the reason given. I had photos on my site that some people thought were inappropriate. Photos that showed a disassembled generator, the insides of a Penstock, a panoramic view of a communications site, some high voltage transmission towers in the middle of nowhere, some river gaging sites (also in the middle of nowhere), a picture of my work bench, etc. Nothing of a real security threat, actually. No references on where the photo was taken, where the keys to the gate were hidden, which switch to turn OFF, etc. Just someone didn't like it. I wondered about the thousands of pictures floating on the internet that some tourist took of places (the same locations of where I took the majority of my shots) and the hundreds of photos that my employer has on their website for anyone to down load...

What I found interesting was the depth of the searching they had to do to locate the pages. Some of which I forgot about...

My websites are now history. They're gone. Game over.

Who's looking over your shoulder?

The Road to Retirement

The very first step in the process was looking for someplace suitable to settle down. Someone from work told us about Ely, Nevada being a great place to look. Ely is about 400 miles North of here on US Hwy 93. We thought that we would check it out when driving through. I wanted to visit my cousin in Portland OR and swing back down on the Oregon coast - checking out any and all possibilities. Well, as luck would have it, we looked at Ely and Mc Gill and decided that it wasn't our 'cup of tea'. We also looked at Southern Idaho (via I84) as well. We hit the Oregon border at Ontario and thought 'which road to take?' Stay on the Interstate? I was interested in considering the Bend area as a possible place to retire. I knew that Western Oregon was probably too expensive to consider (little did I know how expensive Bend was).
We figured that either Hwy 20 (via Burns) or Hwy 26 (via John Day) were the best ways to get to Bend.

I selected Hwy 26 as the route solely on the basis that it was the prettiest drive according to the map. The first 60 miles out of Ontario (the drive to Unity OR) was rather unremarkable. Nothing... Just lonely high desert. Shortly after Unity the road climbs into the pines and the drive becomes beautiful. From Austin Junction we dropped into the John Day Valley in the town of Prairie City. I took one look at the Strawberry Mtn range and told the wife, "Let's look here". We poked around the town for about 30 minutes to get an idea for the layout of the place. We stopped of at a gas station and asked the attendant where was the Real Estate office was. "John Day" was the reply. The drive to John Day ran parallel to the John Day river. The place was absolutely beautiful compared to the areas that we've been driving through the last three days.

We got to John Day, located a Realtor, and began to look at properties. Something that we learned is that Location is Everything. We looked at properties in several towns in Grant County and decided that only John Day or Canyon City were the best bets for retirement properties. It boils down to this - Close to shopping and the Hospital. Both items may seem small to some folks but makes a big difference when you have to consider driving an hour to go shopping or see the Doctor. Living in Lake Havasu City, we learned that any good shopping usually meant a trip to either Phoenix or Las Vegas. Here in Eastern Oregon, good shopping means a trip to Ontario, Bend, or Baker City. Shopping to please the wife means Portland or Boise. After looking for about a week we decided that this was the place for us. We ended up buying a house in Canyon City. From our home we can be at the best shopping in the county or the hospital in five minutes.

This picture shows our neighborhood on Humbolt Street. Our house is on a quiet street. The type of street where little kids still have Kool Aid stands. There is no grafitti. No gangs. The biggest complaint anyone had was that the Deer was eating their plants.

Our home borders a small creek in the back yard (and yes, we have water rights to the creek). Best of all - the home prices were still considered reasonable compared to what we have seen else where.

We bought the house two years ago for under $100K. Today, the price has nearly doubled in the area. The Real Estate market in the John Day area is still reasonable as compared to the Bend area. As you can see in the photo, there is a new housing tract going in 'up the hill' from us. I don't know the price of these lots but you could probably find out here. We used Franklin Century 21 in John Day. I'd recommend them to anyone who was considering moving into the area.

Looking at the current real estate conditions in Bend, it wasn't the place to buy into.