Category: House and home Page 2 of 14

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.

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.

We were supposed to have the kick-off meeting with our house designer this afternoon at 1:15, but we started getting tornado warnings pretty early in the morning so we bumped the meeting until 11. There was a little bit of a storm and a good amount of wind at the specified time, but thankfully, it passed us up.

The meeting was great. We had it at the designers house. He is just a little older than me and he and his wife have very similar ideas about what they want their house to be as Lorena and I. Of course, it is nice to think about all the great things that are possible and that is fun, but the disconnect between what one can afford and what is possible is often very wide. Fortunately, Lorena and I have done this enough times that we know where we want to spend a little more money and, mostly, where it is OK to skimp. We liked the designer a lot and are looking forward to working with him.

The closing for the property where we want to build a house in closer to town (within walking distance) is on Friday this week. The preliminary meeting with the house designer is tomorrow and, hopefully, our current house will go on the market before the end of next week. With all this happening so fast, Lorena was quite pleased that she could harvest this spectacular Texas sunflower to enjoy while we start to prepare the house for showing and, also hopefully, a move. Houses in this area are currently staying on the market for 2-3 months, but the traditional school year ends mid-May and the buying season kicks in because people want to get moved in time to enroll their kids properly into their new schools, so we have lots of hope that the house will sell within that 2-3 month time frame. We are doing a little bit of a balancing act because the house in Mexico where we want to live while the new house is being built is not quite ready for us.