The Empty Cabinets of my Mind

What is in Chico?

OK, this is another paid post and I love it when the advertisor chooses in-post disclosure.  That makes it easier to deal with assignments where, for example, they ask you to use the word Hignell naturally in a sentence.  If you are like me, you would have to look that up.  HINT:  The link takes you to Chico, and to a very imaginative graphic image that I wish I had drawn.  Be sure to mouse over the doors and windows on that building.

Speaking of neat buildings, I thought I had concluded my  search for a tenant for my condo in Arizona last week.  The applicant seemed really nice and obviously loved the property, but after agreeing to my terms, she called up later and said she had changed her mind.  I love the property too and had a hard time bringing myself to even think about letting someone else live there, but one can only have so many favorite places to live.   My other favorite place is at the base of a wonderful mountain and less than an hour's drive from some of California's most beautiful beaches.

If you are a Northern California property owner looking for a management company, click here and see what you think.

 

Out of Control

I am delighted to be living in a small town again after being in an urban environment for many years.  My community is delightful.  However, a neighboring town has been having a lot of trouble with gang-related incidents and especially with vicious attacks on police working on the local drug task force.

The gang suspected of booby trapping devices attached to squad cars and security gates and that sort of thing in an effort to kill officers is said to be selling drugs as well as specializing in identity theft.  If they are not afraid to commit acts of violence against armed uniformed police officers, then where does the average person stand?

As you can imagine, there are a lot of  Drug Rehab facilites in this neighboring town.

I used to know a woman whose teenage daughter was out of control and therefore I tried to help her research some Rehab for Teens resources.  This mom could afford to put her daughter in a nice Drug Rehabilitation program.  But she was concerned about some of the methods these facilities sometimes have to use.  This mother never restrained her daughter growing up and did not want staff to confine or restrain her.  Mom just could not face the reality that that kind of parenting may have caused the girl to turn to devant behavior in the first place.

Rain, Rain, Rain

Driving through Oklahoma and Texas we hit some rain, but the most memorable part of this area was the great big puffy clouds.  We don't get clouds like that in Southern California.  Never.

The rain made me keep thinking about that leaky shower, though.  Maybe I need to think about remodeling that one bathroom. 

If it were bigger, maybe I would check out some luxury bath vendors.

They would surely know more than I do about bathroom shower remodeling.

There are quite a few companies that can help with this kind of project, even as far away as Spokane Bathroom Remodel.

Living in a small town, I like to see what people are doing in other parts of the country. Some things are the same, but different places have different styles, too, and my community is rather provincial in its taste, whereas I am more cosmopolitan.

A friend and I were discussing the relative merits of dining at restaurants where they buy the food locally.  The result was a pretty good local steak at a restaurant here in Texas.  The milk was good too.  I am very fussy about the quality of milk, having been reared on a dairy farm.  So far the milk in Texas has been excellent.

This has been a great vacation, full of adventure but also relaxing.  In fact, it is starting to get so relaxing that I had to look up the spelling of a couple of words herein.  Let me know if I missed any!

Drip, Drip, Drip

Those who know that I recently moved have heard about my nice neighbors and the fun gardening projects I have in my back yard, but this is the first time I've mentioned the leak in my bathroom shower.  Fortunately it is in the guest bathroom and I don't have many overnight guests.  Those I have can use my shower, as it is nicer anyway.

I am on vacation and have not been online much, but when checking email this morning I found an invitation therein to introduce you to Richardson Plumbing and how timely that is. 

I used to do my own plumbing and electrical, but when I retired from the daily grind I decided to retire from most of my "do-it-yourself" activities too.  Maybe I should think about retiring my tool collection, too.

My bathroom is not in Texas, but I am, and that is presumably why my Google phone targeted ads for this area.  The other locations are for Plano Plumber and Mckinney Plumbers. If you have a drip, check them out. By that time I will be half way across New Mexico, on the way to my vacation home in Arizona. Life is good. No drips in that bathroom :-)

Rent to Own is a Win-Win for Buyer and Seller

Rent to Own, or a Lease/Purchase Option is in my view the best way to buy or sell real estate in just about any market. When you sell with a Lease Option you take a deposit which may be roughly equivalent to first and last month's rent (or more) and then your buyers pay rent, a portion of which is set aside as a purchase credit. If your buyer/tenants exercise their Lease Option they will have locked in the purchase price agreed upon when the contract was entered into, and if they do not, then the seller gets to keep the deposit and all of the purchase credits, too. This is sort of a win-win situation for all involved. In addition, if the tenants have a good payment history during the lease period, that might give the seller incentive to carry back their loan when the time is up and the tenants turn into buyers.

One of the homes I have on the market now was HUD.. 

Here is their Overview on Buying a Home. The first home I ever bought was an FHA assumption.  I still remember how hard it was to wait for our approval to come through and then how excited we were to finally be owning our own home.  We had some really nasty landlords prior to that and I resolved to be nicer to my tenants, especially when we got decent and responsible tenants just like we were when we were starting out. 

Finding a Furnished Apartment When You Need It

The last time I needed to find a furnished apartment in a hurry, I could have used something like this: Furnished Apartments

The process I used instead didn't work and I ended up buying an inexpensive mobile home instead. The apartment search thing was just too complicated to do from a distance, and I figured that I could just turn around and sell the home when I was done not renting it.

But after I blogged about the ForSaleByOwnerHub website a couple of posts ago, I then learned that there is a similar resource for apartment hunters.   They also have a link to  Fair Housing Initiatives which has information I could have used last summer.  I had gone to help a bed-ridden friend who was in the hospital and I had to make living arrangements for my friend after release.  There were some mobility issues and some social service agency complained that the ramp I secured for my friend was not of the right dimensions.  It is kind of a moot question now, but probably some of the information that the staff at FurnishedApartmentShop.com worked so hard to put together would have been beneficial at the time. 

Like the other site I mentioned, Furnished Apartment Shop has a plethora of nice photos of apartments for rent, along with good information and many convenient ways to search. 

Wood Shutters Look Pretty on a Vacation Home

These weeds come up after the spring rains and cover the little back yard behind my vacation home:

They are probably brown sticks by now and I should make a run up there and weed them out.

One of my neighbors has the prettiest outdoor wood shutters and when she goes away for a while they help to keep the blinding summer sun from heating the interior of her home to the boiling point.

I have the dark film on my windows, which is great because when I am there, I can see out without anyone looking in and therefore do not need sheer curtains. They are a little dark on a rainy day, but seldom does it rain in the Mohave Desert, especially at the times of year when I am able to visit. Still, I would like to enhance the appearance of my place by putting some shutters up in the front at least, as the dark windows look quite black from the outside.  Of course that would be a give-away as to whether I'm home or not, but it is a gated community, and my neighbors on either side are year-round residents and not nomads like me. 

High in the Sky

In the previous post I mentioned having lived in a high rise in the San Francisco tenderloin back when hubby and I were starving students.  The internet had not been invented then, nor had we taken any photos of that place, so I decided to look it up and found this link:

A Photo of Our First Studio Apartment

If you have never been in the tenderloin, you can find it with your nose.  But our apartment was up high enough that the air was pretty fresh back then. 

But it was interesting to learn from online reviews that nothing has changed at street level.  One person mentioned that the whole area smells like an old greasy chicken and another mentioned the loquacious drunks.