It’s been a crazy week and a half here at Ridinkulous HQ. Here’s what’s been going down:
We Has A Storm
The weather this July was historically hot. Remember me writing about all the snow being dumped in our backyard back during this historically cold February? Well, now it’s reversed and we hit 100 degrees here a few times in July. We smashed one daily record of 97 degrees by seven degrees! Being Irish, that kind of heat makes my skin actually melt, so it has been pretty unpleasant. Weather this hot also begets thunderstorms, and we’ve had a few doozies.
Rafter jig on shed floor
One Sunday two weeks ago, I was working outside on my shed project, putting together roof rafters in that blazing heat and it started to rain, which was predicted, and I was glad for the rain to help cool things down. Then it started to storm. Then it got incredibly windy and we watched the storm from inside the house. Then the power went out. Then we saw what caused the power to go out:
Fuuuuuuuuhdgge.
Yup, that’s the neighbor’s tree. The fence we put up. The shed I was building. The patio we finished. All of our work, ruined! Or was it? We had to take a few days to figure it out.
Thanks to neighbor guy’s tree, our utility company had to cut power to the entire block since it was too dangerous to leave it on. So everyone was stuck without an air conditioner, hanging out on their stoop. Well.. everyone except us.
One previously unrealized benefit of Marge living so close to her awesome office is that we could walk over there, watch tv and make dinner in their full kitchen. I’ll admit, I felt a little bad that everyone else on the block had no power, while we moseyed over to the office, made some Trader Joes frozen meal and watched Adventure Time on Hulu.
The next day, we got a better look at the tree damage. Miraculously, the trunk took out one eight-foot wide fence panel, leaving the posts on either side of it intact. It broke one roof rafter. It took out a few “tail ends” of the rafters. The rest of the tree mostly just caused a big mess, but didn’t cause any other damange. Luckily I had gotten any shed walls up yet!
There were two points of contact where a branch came down perpendicular to the ground, and you could tell the destructive force of it. One branch narrowly missed my shed floor and went a full foot into the ground. Another branch did go through some scrap plywood and actually shoved a granite block a few inches into the ground. Yikes.
Everyone’s Gone At Work
The storm that Sunday was just the beginning of a crappy two weeks at work. This is just regular work complaining, but it’s summertime, and that means everyone wants to take weeks of vacation all at the same time. (Except considerate me, of course. I’m a shoulder season fan) So I covered another person’s job for two weeks and basically did two jobs, plus my supervisor was out so I could’t ask her any questions. And during the same time period, the boss of our whole office left for a new job, and the one employee I supervise also left for another job.
It was a skeleton crew, and I struggled just to keep up with the flow of work, while having no one to ask for advice on the job that I don’t normally do.
Camping!
Yes, in the middle of all of this, we took our own little mini-vacation. Bizarre timing, but that’s how it goes. We have to reserve our special camp site nine months in advance because it is in such high demand. So whatever dates we manage to get, those are the dates we get. This year, Margie could only afford to take two days off from work, so it was just a long weekend. I have a big post about our frugaltacular camping trip coming this week.
Home Closing
What more could we possibly cram into these two weeks aside from tree cleanup, long days at work, and a three night camping trip? How about closing on a house?
Our camping trip ended on Monday, and we were scheduled to close on our very own rental property on Tuesday. We got back home on Monday, unloaded the car, and pretty much immediately went to the final walk-through on the rental property. Then we closed on it the next day at 3:00.
Soon after, I was at the new house by myself, feeling weird about being a landlord for the first time, and testing out the 30 different keys we were given. (I figured out half of them, including all of the important ones!) The place has two apartments that are pretty much ready to rent out. Sorry I don’t have any photos yet.
So since Tuesday, we have been figuring out what we want to get done at the rental and how to do it before we rent it out. I fixed a big hole in the drywall today, and Margie painted moulding, gouges in a wall, and old wood subflooring on the landing. There are some niggling little details like needing two more smoke/CO detectors, putting in a programmable thermostat, and putting a door on a bedroom. Fingers crossed that one of the doors in the attic fits. Who doesn’t put a door on their bedroom?? We need a plumber to replace a corroded vent letting CO into the basement. After all that is done, we start the process of finding tenants.
And hopefully thus hasten this whole early retirement thing.