Month: March 2016

11:20 – Several people have suggested renting/leasing the Winston house rather than selling it. I’d actually considered doing that, on the idea that I’d rather have an income-producing asset than the equivalent cash in the bank, which produces essentially no return. But I’m also fully aware of the downsides to renting: landlord hassles, damage to the property, dead-beat tenants that are essentially impossible to evict, and so on. I brought up the idea with Barbara this morning. She is not just opposed to renting/leasing, but adamantly opposed. As in “ABSOLUTELY NOT.” So we’ll sell it.

I just ordered a two-pack of those Costco LED shop lights and a pair of Adidas running shoes. The 4-foot shop lights are rated at 3700 lumens, which is about the equivalent of 2.3 100W incandescents. There are four 100W bulbs in the basement lab area right now, so two shop lights should provide a bit more light than those four incandescents. If I’m happy with the shop lights, we’ll get rid of the incandescents and install two more shop lights. That’d give us the light output of about nine 100W incandescents, but with only about 150W of power draw. Or I may just install three of the shop lights in the lab area and use the fourth one to supplement the fluorescent fixture in the garage.

Among the easter eggs I found on our last trip down to the Winston house was two bricks of .22LR ammo. It probably dates from 1978 or 1979, and at the time I probably paid $6 or $7 per brick. Call it maybe $0.014 per round. Nowadays, if you can find it in stock, it’d be $0.07 or $0.08 per round, five times what I paid. In today’s dollars that’s roughly the same amount, or perhaps even a bit more. There aren’t a lot of things that hold their value that well.

09:31 – We made a run down to Winston-Salem yesterday. Frances was working yesterday, but Barbara had arranged with Al to meet us at the house with his pickup to load up on stuff for a dump run. She’d also arranged with Goodwill to meet us at the house. They provide only a day and a three-hour window, which in this case was to be 2:00 to 5:00 p.m., so we figured we’d be getting home later than usual. But when we were on the way down, still 20 minutes out from Winston, Barbara’s cell rang. It was the Goodwill driver, calling to ask if they could come immediately. Apparently, they had several cancellations. I told him we could meet him at the house, but it’d be 20 minutes or so until we got there. He pulled up in front of the house about two minutes after we arrived. He and his helper unloaded a huge rolling bin from the truck and made short work of picking up the stuff, which was probably two or three full pickup loads. We then got to work in the basement and my lab. We got Al’s pickup loaded to overflowing with stuff to go to the dump, including stacking large boxes on the tailgate and securing them with bungee cords. We got mostly finished in the basement and my lab, including pulling down shelves and brackets.

We probably have another two or three Trooper loads worth of stuff remaining to be hauled up, not counting a full pickup load of yard equipment and various miscellany that Al is going to keep for himself. Then it will be back to work for us, getting the house cleaned up and ready to go on the market. We decided to do the relatively quick, cheap stuff ourselves. In addition to a general deep clean, we’re going to paint ceilings and walls and do various minor repairs. The deck is only a couple years old and we replaced the front windows last year. The other windows are about due for replacement, and the kitchen and bathroom could stand updating, but those are things we’ll leave for the eventual buyer to do. My goal is to get the place looking reasonably decent, in a state where someone could move in without having to do anything. If they want to do bathroom or kitchen upgrades or refinish the hardwood floors, we’ll leave that to them. But we’ll do stuff like punching wall anchors through, spackling, priming, and putting on fresh coats of a neutral paint like eggshell or whatever women call it.

07:42 – More moving-related stuff today, getting ready for the next batch of stuff we haul up from Winston. Fortunately, there isn’t much more of that to do, because we’re running out of places to put it. But Barbara has done well getting everything organized and decluttered around here, other than in my office, which still needs a lot of work.

We decided to build our own firewood rack using concrete blocks and pressure-treated wood. That has the advantages of being fast, cheap, expandable to any size, and probably longer-lasting than one of those steel racks. We already have the blocks, so we’ll pick up the pressure-treated lumber at Blevins and get it built.

09:30 – I took the weekend off. We went down to Winston Saturday and hauled up a bunch more stuff. Frances and Al hauled a pickup load up for us, and stayed overnight. We had Frances’s birthday party up here.

After they left yesterday afternoon, I started doing laundry. The dryer died. It and the washer are 15 years old, and the washer is also getting rickety, so we decided just to buy new ones. The problem is that we’re very tightly constrained for space. We’re going to head into town today and visit Blevins, which is the local equivalent of Lowes/Home Depot. We may buy a stackable set, rather than a traditional side-by-side set. As Barbara said, we can just do more, smaller loads.