Two Offers

Our home is officially on the market and today we made offers on two houses in Montana. 

The original one in St Regis that we both love and its perfect for what we want, 

and one in Plains that's close to what we want 

BUT its got a 24 unit storage facility that's part of the deal. 

That would make our house payment for us right there.

Our house & farm are on the MLS and 

FOR SALE

with an asking price of $629,950.00

Its a holiday weekend and its been on the MLS for 3 days and exactly ZERO people have come by to see it. That's a good thing because we're still completing projects.

We had never finished the stair treads with the hardwood flooring so realtor suggested I paint them, so I did, the turquoise you see here. It ties in with the color in the bathroom.

And this evening we're hanging up this sliding barn door Lan made for the downstairs bathroom. 

In this photo its just standing there, not complete. 

In about an hour its going to be FINISHED

and the white door should be gone.

We will save the white door for the future owners of the house 

in case they dislike the barn door and wish to remove it. 

That makes them total losers. 

I hope whoever gets the house and farm love it and continue to improve it.

I've been painting a lot, off white on a bunch of spots where there were either marks on the walls 

or entire places I hadn't finished before. 

I'm also busy painting the porch swing again, its hard to get something orange enough!

NO PHOTO!!

Lan removed a couple busted posts in the cross fence, removed a gate and built this new gate with electric fencing on the top. 

No more horses reaching over. 

Assholes.

I've been painting the metal on the pony cart. I know I'll never teach Gussy to pull it so I'm going to let it go for $500 to another gal. I'll include the leather and nylon harnesses and a whicker basket that I picked up somewhere along the way. I'll get better photos of it tomorrow, this morning I actually painted the arms and back supports. It looks good.

More Soren

Ain't gonna lie, I'm going to miss this guy.

We had a lot of fun riding bikes at Banner Forest.

The Bug Museum in Bremerton was a big hit.

This is what I liked, getting him to lick the salt block.

This is what Soren liked the most, leading Joey around while everyone else rode Mack.

This is pretty much a fake smile, he didn't enjoy this pony ride. Mack is huge though and its really high up there.

Soren goes home to his dad tomorrow. He has to fly alone to Alaska and live in a new house and go to a new school. He makes friends very easily and that's good.

I helped his mom pack his luggage, made sure he had all clean clothes and when we weighed his bag it was still good for another 11 lbs so we added some toys. 

His mom got him a cute little carry on bag so we put 1 change of clothes into that along with a bunch of grub to munch on and toys to play with.

Drone

A friend brought his drone over today and did a preliminary video of our farm

He got several videos and many photos

The horses weren't impressed with the buzzing and ran for the hills

Mostly we were looking to see what it currently looks like and what we need to do to improve it looks. Theres still some cleaning up and putting things away but for the most part, it looks pretty good.

The machine itself was much smaller than what I thought it would be

Here he is, doing his thing

Photo taken from the back of the property towards the front

Too bad the so dry out now

The bright sunlight was drowning out a lot of the color

When he comes back, we're planning on it being in the early morning so the sunshine is on the front of the house. I also want to know when it will be beforehand so I can make sore the barn is clean. He flew the drove through the barn! twice!

In other news, I have purchased additional plane tickets for our trip:

 London -  Carcassonne, France $35.01

Dinard, France - Dublin, Ireland $63.27

Dublin - Newcastle, England $38.94

Then I realized Michelle & guy aren't planning on going to Ireland so I cancelled that leg of the trip.

 We'll be staying in France for the first week and will see MUCH more of it. South for 2 days, then middle eastern section, Paris (Mona Lisa!!)

We will go to Omaha Beach, where Lans grandpa was at during the war and then back down to Carcassonne to fly back to Stansted, England, $43.84.

Returning the rental car to Carcassonne airport and having it for a week costs less than having it for 3 days & returning to Dinard airport and negates the expenses of the cancelled plane tickets.

I'm not actually cancelling the plane tickets, we'll just not use them unless we decide we'd rather go to Ireland. But they drive on the wrong side of the street there & we'd crash.

More Soren

We've done some more fun stuff

Here is a farm kid licking the salt block

Watching fireworks on Independence Day

We took the bikes out to Banner Forest again & this is him by the old VW van

We took a visit to the Bug Museum, where he got to touch this Boa Constrictor

We've done a few other things also. Every day I make sure he gets outside for an hour of fresh air, his mom takes him to the park once in a while and last week there were a couple other boys that came over and played with him. I wish we had a boy closer to home.

Home Looks Great

Who doesn't like gravel?

OK, so lots of people don't.

It does look a lot nicer than tall grass growing up the side of the house and rotting the outside wood. 

No one likes rotten porch rail either

So its now repaired and painted with a fresh white coat

And the floor is clean and treated

Inside the house I took down Uncle Mels blanket and put my favorite horse picture up on the mantle, Its called 

Morning At Lumahai Beach by Kim Star

I need to vacuum the bricks and clean the fireplace

And the driveway is about 20% bigger now that Lan has cut the grass off the asphalt. We knew it was a bit bigger but in the 4.5 years we've lived here we never bothered to clear it off. Now its all spiffy.

Took this yesterday morning and sad that my phone didn't get the actual colors of this BEAUTIFUL sunrise. It was blue & gray and the cloud made it so we could look directly at the sun for a minute.

I'm going to miss this when we move.

Aw, here's Gussy. It had rained on him a bit and I had just spent and hour giving him a spa treatment. He just GLOWS with good health.

It was so good to have quiet time with him. He was nice and calm and enjoyed it. He didn't call out to the other horses and paid attention to me.

I haven't been able to spend much quality time with him with Soren here because he is so loud, he runs in the barn, screams, makes a ruckus. The other day he chased Gus out of the arena and made Gus slip on the concrete & hurt his legs. I was pretty fucking mad since I had JUST told him NO RUNNING in the barn. Sent the kid into the house screaming.

Gus has a muzzle he wears when hes out on the pasture but he got it off twice while in the back pasture so I've been leaving him in the barn in a run with a little grass in it. Tomorrow I'll leave the big horses in the middle pasture and hope no one does anything stupid.

I emptied the water trough in the front pasture yesterday and it had an inch of sludge in the bottom of it. Tomorrow I'll scrub it all out and refill it. Its so icky I don't know if the horses were even drinking out of it. There were two 6" gold fish in there a month ago, they were 4 years old but gone now. I'm sure that was local raccoons; little assholes.

Soren

Soren is 7 1/2 years old and he is staying here for the summer. 

He is my great nephew, grandson of my twin brother.

His mom has to work a lot so I get to spend massive amounts of time with him.

I'm trying to make this a memorable time and Lan & I both hope he leaves here happy and with great stories to tell. 

Here I had him help groom the horses. Every day he enjoys helping to turn the horses out to pasture and its now his job to turn the chickens out and give them their scratch.

Last week we went to Waterman Dock to look for the Orcas that were in the vicinity & while we didn't find them, he still made a monkey out of himself.

Soren likes Spiderman so when we went to the dollar store we picked up a Spiderman kite and he learned how to fly it. I should take him back down to the dock, it was perfectly windy there. Here, it would blow every different direction so he ended up running with it.

But it flies.

On Sunday, June 30, 2019

the might ferry M/V Hyak ran her last crossings Bremerton-Seattle so I made arrangements for us to go up into the wheelhouse and visit with Captain Steve. It was SO MUCH FUN and all of us got a chance to drive the ferry.

WE DROVE THE FERRY!!  

And Soren got to blow the horn.

This next photo is cool because just as Steve let go of the telegraph, Soren accidently moved it & a chime sounded, in the wheelhouse and in the engine room. We all gasped in surprise, Soren was scared & almost cried but Steve just communicated for them to disregard. Then we all laughed.

We got him a bike. 16" used, perfect. 

Lan built him a jump.

Then we got him a new bike and its perfecter.

Today he & I went out to Banner Forest and had a blast riding tails.

If we have enough warm sunny days, we can go for more rides in the 65 Mustang. 

We've got about 5-6 weeks until he goes back to Minnesota to live with dad for the school year. I wonder how many more really cool things we can do until then?

36 Hours To Montana

At 6pm June 27th, 2019 we headed out on a quickie trip to Montana to check out that house we like.

We stopped in Coeur d'Alene at midnight and with arrangements to meet the realtor at 1pm we had time for a side trip to Cataldo Mission. It was beautiful outside and inside the buildings

Some of these photos are from the two previous times we were there but I only took 153 this time so had to borrow.

This triangular shape building is technically a fruit cellar I think but for shits & giggles I call it the UNDER GROUND BUNKER.

 The owner used it for storing paint and it doesn't have built in shelves. I does have a drain in the floor but the floor is still damp/wet. 

Going down...

It was about 70* outside and a good 20* cooler inside

It measures approximately 8' X 8'. If we could find a way to get it dry inside, I think adding a bunk bed on the back wall and maybe a teensy chair & table + overhead bare bulb light would be fun. I think people would pay for spend the night there.

The Columbine & Iris along the front side of the house are beautiful

We took a hike up to the top of the ridge on the back of the property and kept finding jaw bones.

Not entire skeletons, just jaw bones.

Many, many jaw bones.

Like 50 jaw bones.

This awesome gate blocks the road so not just anyone can drive on it. It goes through our the property and winds up the hill to the ridge.

This is the view up there, pretty amazing.

We followed the road to its natural end, at our the neighbors house.

This is the view of the front pasture from his place.

And this is the view from the road at the corner down from the entry gate.

We took John Henry with us and she must have run about 10 miles. I know she went farther than I did and I got more than my 10,000 daily step goal.

She was one tuckered out girl.

We returned home Friday night just before midnight.

We are more than ever ready to move and have been packing more boxes. Lan thinks we're 2 weeks away from listing our house & making another offer to the owner.