most excellent.

Groovy!

Visitor? I'm moving in!

congrats smooth!

Wow, the time has flown by. Here are some completely random thoughts:

I've been crawling under and over and through every inch of this house. It's our first house, my first time being the fix-it guy, learning as I go. There are 7 decades of repair work, wires and pipes going everywhere. I'm a fairly OCD guy when it comes to work-flow, so just learning where everything goes has been frustrating. Today, finally, I figured out how the sprinkler system works, where all of the control panels route to, and how the pipes are actually run.

We really love this place. We've been in apartments and condos and a small house in Burbank for our entire married lives, and none of our furniture has ever seemed to fit right (mostly wood antique stuff, lots of shaker and craftsman). We moved it in, and suddenly it was like everything in our lives had been gathering for just this house. The wood everywhere is perfect.

We've made lots of changes to our financial priorities. No home phone, just cell. No cable TV (and no reception up against the hills), so everything is streaming off of an old Dell setup with Ubuntu Linux. I've started riding my bike to the University on days when I'm there - it’s 9 miles, and it saves me about $30 a week or so in driving costs. We eat a lot of beans and rice.

I'm amazed at how cheap homeowners insurance is, compared to car insurance.

Our downstairs bathroom basically needs to be torn out and rebuilt from the studs up. Rotted wood, leaks everywhere, just a mess. Fixing everything would be about $15k. Pulling it out and putting in the dream bathroom is about $20k. Everything, everything is so damn expensive.

You know what sucks about pools? Pool pumps. They have to run for 2 hours a day, and it ends up costing over $100 per month in electricity. Just for a damn pool pump!

Our house backs up to the Angeles mountains, and we have all kinds of wildlife roaming the area. Bears, deer, big cats, coyotes, and so many birds you wouldn’t believe. They nest in the spanish tiles on the roof, and the light up at 5:30 in the morning. Day 1, it was like a Disney miracle! Day 60, I wanted to buy a shotgun. A couple nested in the beams over our back patio, and we got to show our kids the whole nature unfolding thing, from building the nest to eggs to chicks. It was pretty cool. My wife saw a bear chasing a deer down the street at 5 am a few weeks back. Crazy wildlife.

When I started teaching at the University, one of our dreams was to open up our home to students, to have them be involved in our lives, and to form connections with them that extended beyond just the classroom. We’re only 10 minutes away now, and since we bought the house in the middle of the Spring semester, we’ve have a flood of students over, every weekend, dropping in for dinner, hanging out with my kids, staying up until 3 am talking about music, philosophy, faith, SNL skits, anything and everything. It has been a real dream come true.

It’s late, my knees hurt from crawling under the house today, and I need to get some more bourbon in me, so I’ll leave it here for now. We love this house.

Excellent, glad you found the dream instead of the nightmare. :thumb2:

...waits on pics......

Thats so great smooth. I'm very happy for you & your family, but we do need some pics or, even better, a house tour video

Sounds amazing SM! I'm glad you seem to like the fixing-up rather than just hating it. Lotso students over? Creepy to me, I'd never dream of visiting a prof, at their home nonetheless. 'Cept for my english 1301&1302 prof, but I'd known her since 2nd grade.

Pictures if you can swing it, please!

Doesn't sound like such the fixer-upper to me. It sounds really nice.

And does the bathroom really need to be gutted? Sure, there may be some rot in the walls, but is it so bad they need to be ripped apart? You don't always have to fix every defect in a house. Just stabilize things so they don't get worse, and fix things enough so that they work to your liking. If the plumbing isn't working well, focus on that. If there is a leak somewhere that's rotting out the walls, fix the leak. But if the walls still seem sturdy and support the load above, then who cares if there's a little rot? It will stop once you dry it out. Obviously, you can see it, and I can't, but it's something to consider.

I don't know anything about pools, but have heard that salt water ones are much cheaper and easier to maintain. Have you looked into that?

We never went to a professor's house, but my roommates and I routinely had professors over to dinner at our house. We were steeped in that academia culture, deep philosophical conversations over wine and whatnot. It was a lot of fun. Couldn't imagine doing it with my kids running around getting in the way, but more power to you!

My Dad is a prof (retired) and is still having students over to his house. He had one student from the 70s over this week. When I was growing up, there were always college kids around. Sometimes sleeping (passed out) on the living room floor on a Saturday morning when I was ready to watch cartoons.

The most important things I learned in school were outside of the classroom, when I was hanging out with professors in casual settings. I really want to recreate that.

I'll see if I can round up the before / after shots of the repair work we've done.

One of my Mom's profs used to babysit for me once in a while when she was teaching a recitation.

I ended up actually getting a house in Florida. It's a 3,000 square foot house, built in 1986. I paid $70,000 cash for it, but we've put about another $30,000 into upgrades...

Spanish tiles throughout the house (other than the bedrooms), hardwood floors in the bedrooms, new oak cabinets with marble counter tops, new roof, new water heater, removing wallpaper and painting the entire interior and exterior for a more modern look, mosiac tile design on the front porch, etc...

Before adding the new entertainment setup, furniture, etc. we're spending about $100k and getting WAAAAY more house than I could have gotten in California and I'll have NO HOUSE PAYMENTS!!!

After we homestead the house, our property taxes will be about $1,300 per year. This means with home insurance, property taxes, and garbage, we'll be paying under $200/month.

We don't have to pay for water because we've got our own well and it's filtered.

The house is very energy efficient. The deceased former-owners used to pay about $60/month in power bills. I suspect it will rise a bit with me since I'm such a tech head. Even so, I think with all of our utilities, food, etc. we'll be able to fully support this house and our family with $1,200 - $1,500 per month because I paid off all my credit cards, the car, student loans, etc. last year. We are debt free, including the house.

The best part is that in addition to opening the hot dog biz, I am in the running for a swing-shift IT job that will pay about what I was earning in Los Angeles. My wife's job doing nails can support us and I can save my entire salary.


Anyway, when all of the work is finished on the house, I'll post up pics.

Radar, you should post before and after, so we can appreciate the work you did.