Coker & Co. of Granbury, Texas is close to breaking ground, God willing, on the house we hope to construct. We are working through the final design with Brad, the owner of the company. He is just amazing. We were very pleased with the design made by Larry, our designer, but Brad has added touches that will fundamentally improve the livability of the house. He made the pantry, living room, and laundry room bigger, added a sink to laundry room, added a closet to the office, and did it all without changing the footprint of the house. We are truly enjoying working through this process with him.
There is nothing really earthshaking to report today. I had a good day at work, a good day with our (Lorena and my) exercise programs, a good day with advancements in the completion of the apartments, and I did not gain a ton of weight. All is good. Today was just a regular day and I am grateful for it.
Lorena and I spent the night in sleeping bags in this spectacular, now empty house in Godley, Texas that is no longer our home. We have lots of great memories and loved just about everything about the house. Lorena did her exercises on the rowing machine and the treadmill in the media room with the huge windows looking onto the back yard. She took naps there on the sofa in the afternoon and we watched Midsomer Murders there just about every evening for the last six months. We loved the fireplace and used it whenever we could find an excuse–sometimes when it was not even cold outside.
I loved my office with its diploma wall, overstuffed sofa and chair, variable height bamboo desk, three huge monitors, and so much more. The office is where I did the last half of my PhD, met via video conference with my colleagues at Thrive Bioscience, read my Bible first think every morning with a glass of water, a cup of creatine laced coffee, and checked out the news on X and Telegram. Before we got the projector and big screen in the media room, Lorena and I often sat on the sofa and watched the British mystery series we like so much. We never did get around to installing bookshelves in the office or on either side of the fireplace, but we hope to do that at the very beginning in the house we hope to build in Granbury, Lord willing.
All our worldly goods are not safely in short term storage while we wait for our hose to be built in Granbury, Texas. The house is empty, so Lorena and I are spending the night in sleeping bags on the floor for one more night after which we will drop off a few things at our builder’s office (Coker & Company) before our favorite airport shuttle driver picks us up to catch a plane to Monterrey. If every thing works as plan and God is willing, Lorena’s brother Lynn will pick us up tomorrow night and install us in our apartment where we hope to stay for the next four to five months until our house on the hill, five blocks above the apartments is currently being renovated. Stay tuned for pictures!!!
All our stuff is moving into the trucks and, God willing, it will all be safely in storage by the end of the day. We plan to sleep in sleeping bags tonight and then be out of the house and on our way to Mexico late afternoon tomorrow.
The packers came to get everything in the house ready to move. There are three guys and the hope to be out of the house in 3-4 hours. Lorena has been a real champion in preparing and organizing everything so it will be a fairly easy job for the packers to make everything move ready. We got a bunch of snacks, water, and protein drinks for the works and plan to do it again tomorrow. I think we might run down and get some KFC to bring back to the house for tonight because we really do not have any way to prepare food in the house. I cannot believe we are only two and a half days from flying to Mexico. We can hardly wait.
I am very grateful to my brother because he reminded me and reminded me until I got the Living Trust, Last Wills and Testaments, Financial Powers of Attorney, and Medical Powers of Attorney completed, signed, and notarized before we head down to Mexico for a (relatively) short stint. It was just not that hard. We have the hard copy version of all these documents in a safe place along with soft copies for everyone involved. Our good friends, James and Janet Coker were kind to take the time to witness a bazillion signatures and their son, Brad’s, administrator notarized them for us. To top it off, it gave us an excuse to take James and Jan to Baked for lunch. It has been a busy, but amazing couple of days.
With only a few weeks to go, the preparation to move has accelerated. We are tearing down beds, making hard choices about what to put in storage, what to take to Mexico and what to throw away. I am truly married to an anti-hoarder.
This is close to the final design for the house we want to build in Granbury. The color is not quite right–it will be blue rather than gray, but the floor plan and the rest of the exterior are complete. The next step is to go before the Historic Preservation Committee. Larry, our designer is submitting the final renderings for that process sometime today for a meeting later this month.
Since Larry, our house designer, has to submit our stuff by Wednesday to get on the Historic Preservation Committee meeting agenda later in the month, we have been frantically scrolling through house pictures to find the exact combination that meets Lorena’s approval. We think we have found it. Lorena wants it to look like the house in this image, but with maybe a slightly lighter blue and a slightly whiter white. Picking something that is already in the neighborhood makes it easier for the committee to give their approval. We really do like the colors and Larry says we should be able to test it out on a little portion of the house when we get to that point and adjust the brightness a little. We also think it will go nicely with the red window frames our builder and designer want to use.
This Fourth of July weekend has been relaxing for Lorena and I. Our main goal this weekend has been to decide what colors we want for the exterior of the new house so we can take it to the Granbury Historic Preservation Commission for approval. We think we have decided but are going to sleep on it for a couple more nights. One of the things we found out is that a free trolley runs a loop to all the hotels and tourist spots around town on holidays and weekends. It stops wherever you want it to stop and it runs right in front of our house, so that is going to be handy!
Lorena thinks she wants a the new house to be yellow. She likes something a little bit on the brighter side of pastel. We have to pick the exterior colors for the house by Monday so our new friend, Larry the house designer, can present them to the Granbury Historic Preservation Commission. God willing, the process has started. My understanding of the way it works is that, as soon as the plans are approved, the construction drawings can start. When the construction drawings are complete, two processes that both take about a month will kick off in parallel. Engineering drawings for the foundation and all adjustments needed for that will start. In addition, a very rigorous costing of the house will be formulated so we will know how much money is needed. There will be a big meeting at the end of that process with spreadsheet in hand to determine what kind of trade-offs are needed to meet budget constraints and/or add some “nice-to-haves” if the money is available. When all this is done and all goes well, the house starts getting built in earnest.
Lorena rented climate-controlled storage space for all our worldly goods today. I worked through the insurance for the things in storage and for Christian’s car which should arrive here, hopefully before the end of the month. He has little use for a car in New York City, so we will keep it here in Texas so we can use it when we come back to check out what is going on with the house as it gets built. I also figured out how to earn some interest on the money we get from the sale of our current house to help us pay for the new house. There are a lot of moving parts in all of this and while we do not feel like we are in control of it all, it seems less harried than in previous moves. Maybe it is because we have been through it so many times before. We will see what happens when it is time to actually start moving things. Lorena has gotten a big jump on packing things, so when the hired packers come, maybe there will be a little less to do.
Yesterday we received notice that a couple liked both our house (Lorena is the queen of staging houses for sale) and the price and plan to make us an offer today after figuring out some financing options. It that happens, then the clock starts ticking on a move to the house in the picture in Mexico. Lorena’s brother, Tío Lynn says he will have the first floor of the house turned into an apartment with an operational kitchen, bathroom, and office with broadband internet by the time we get there. We were told we will have 4-6 weeks from the time we accept the offer. In that time, we have to pack up and move everything into storage, fill the car up with the essentials I will need to do my job, set up our new address at the property where the house will be built, God willing, and figure out how to manage finances from our place in Mexico.
Gerardo put some extra lawn in an area of our back yard for erosion management today. He had previously put in the sprinkler system to support the new grass. We were totally humbled by how he did his work. He and and two brothers and their high school aged kids are the people that do the work. We were amazed not only with the quality of the work, but the work ethic and profoundly positive attitude of Gerardo and his team. God willing, if we sell our house, we want to work with him to do the landscaping at our property in Granbury. Lorena wants a water feature and I want low maintenance. We have a lot of confidence Gerardo can give us both.
I think we are getting about three house showings per week on our “for sale” house. It seems like everyone likes the house and thinks the price is just fine, but finds some defect that prevents them from making an offer. That would be great if all the cited defects were the same, because then we could do something about it, but all the cited defects are different, so we do not know what to do. At the same time, it has only been about three weeks now since we put the house on the market. We still feel pretty good about our prospects and we are excited to get started on building the new house so we remain optimistic. It is kind of a hassle to have to vacate the house for a showing and random times, but it is also kind of exciting because we ARE getting viewings. Our worst fear is that we will not be able to sell the house for a year. Our second worse fear is that we will sell it tomorrow and have to get everything move to storage and move to Mexico for six months–not a BAD thing, but one that will require a bunch of work.
We are trying to sell our current house. We have been here over three years now and I was thinking there were fewer memories and events of note that we lived in this house than previous ones. Now that we will need to move in a short amount of time, we are feeling some nostalgia. We have had Thanksgivings with the kids, Lorena has learned to grow flowers in Texas (see the spectacular one in the image on the left), we have enjoyed watching rabbits, huge hares and Golden Eagles, and birds learning to fly (see the image at the top of baby birds sitting and flying on and off a porch beam, long horns, burrows, many, many cows, fantastically beautiful fields of Indian Paintbrush and Bluebonnets, and much more. We will very much miss this place if we ever sell it.
Our house in Godley is officially on the market. It hit the websites earlier today and we had our first visitor in the early afternoon. We are not sure what that means, but we think we have it priced right and hope it sells pretty quickly. We will be moving to Mexico between when our current house sells and the new house is completed. We have done a lot of work getting ready, but now we are in the hurry up and wait mode. Even though some of our houses have sold very quickly in the past this period gives Lorena and I anxiety!
This is the time of year when we have lots of turtles and rabbits in our yard. We are really hoping we will have them at our new house, but because it is in town, we are not so sure about it. We are close to a couple of fairly large parks by a lake so, if we do not have them at home, there is a good chance we will be able to see them when we walk. When we first got here, we found a really big turtle on our back porch which Lorena promptly painted with a red spot. We were hoping to see him come back and we have had lots of turtles, but none with a red spot.
Lorena was quite pleased to learn there is edible cactus growing on the new property. I was hoping it would be the type with the sweet tuna (cactus fruit), but it was not, so we will have to start that on our own. Fortunately, they do not take a long time to grow. We walked the property again today and, while it is not big in absolute terms, it really is about as big as we think we can handle. There is plenty of room for the house, some lawn, a garden, a small greenhouse, and an out building we want to use as a workshop.
