House shopping, projects, Alfredo

Mama and I had a pretty restful weekend for the most part. It was good to be off yesterday; not that a I got a lot of things done but more that we all got a much needed day of rest and recuperation. We did go to Decatur to look at a house but we were disappointed by the layout of the rooms.

We expected it to be a small house but it is always a bit of a surprise to see just how the house has been arranged. This one would be fine for a young family since all the bedrooms are connected – literally. The master was built into what had originally been a porch and it had a large walk in closet. The next bedroom was directly connected to the master. They had even taken out the doorway to give more access to the room. It was being used as a nursery.

The third bedroom was adjoining the nursery. They had left that doorway in place. Victoria, who was a bit ahead of me and Mama, opened the door between the third bedroom and the nursery and was quite surprised to see me and Mama standing in the nursery. She has expected to be opening a closet door. Monsters, Inc. would have had a hard time making this house work for their enterprise.

While we were there we signed papers for the property we are planning to buy. The proposed closing for that will be on Mama‘s birthday – the 29^th. Mama and I are each going to separate banks today to see if there is a way to secure financing to build our shop/home on the property. I do not have high hopes for a positive answer but we need to find out what we are up against financially.

One of the projects I have been working on at the farm is to remove all the clamps and lumber I had put in place to roof the tall part of the shop. The buyer does not think we wants to go that route and as we talked last weekend, he told me that he would be talking it all off and if I could use the materials I was welcome to them. I am almost done. The heat has slowed me down quite a bit – that and running hither and yon looking at houses.

One of the small projects that has been interspersed in the removal of clamps and lumber is modifying the gate we have in the doorway of the chicken coop so that it will keep Mama’s potbelly pigs out. They would head to the coop as soon as they were done eating their feed and eat all of the chicken feed they could get out of the feeders hanging there. Keeping them out has turned out to be more of a challenge than I had thought.

When I first modified the gate I was successful in keeping the pigs out but the chickens could not seem to get hold of the idea that they could hop over the gate and kept getting stuck trying to go through the small, slatted openings I had left. I redid the openings keeping it pretty solid at the very bottom and leaving a larger opening at the top. That has seemed to work. Only the pigs are unhappy about the barrier.

Brittany was able to contact Alfredo through Facebook and he is now planning a trip to the US to see us – all of us. I think Mama is getting the particulars and hopes to get it all worked out for the week of Thanksgiving. We have no idea where we will be at that time but it is a good step forward just to get the trip arranged.

Mama and Alfredo are thrilled about the proposition.