Saving money and moving

Moving can be expensive. We have tried to move and be frugal about it. I suppose we could have saved even more by doing somethings differently but I'm just going to write about what we did do to save money.

The more you can do yourself, the less you have to pay someone else to do that task. In order to sell our previous home we did most of the repairs ourselves. There were a few things that were beyond our abilities: like the time the roof leaked in the garage and it needed to be fixed fast. No time there to research, learn, and accomplish that task. In that case it was time to find a qualified repairman that didn't overcharge for the job. But for the most part we did all the work on the house to get it ready to sell.

Moving itself was researching which way we wanted to do it ourselves. We came up with the POD system that would work the best for us. Yes, there are cheaper ways: rent the truck yourself and load it up-usually the less time you have the truck the less you pay so you're now in a hurry to save money, move-driving it yourself, empty it in a house or storage (pay for storage too), take truck back, then find a house to buy, rent the truck again, load it up, move, empty contents in a house-don't forget to hurry, take the truck back.  Or rent a POD, load it up-cost for keeping the POD to load it up was the same whether I took 1 day or 25 days, they take away the POD and store it for you close to your destination, then find a house to buy, call for the POD to come, empty contents in a house-I had the time of my monthly contract to empty the contents, call for them to take away POD. One of the factors in our situation was that there are no storage facilities that have room in the areas that we were looking to move. It's hard to find an empty storage because so many people move at this time of the year. One rental place told me that some people even rent a storage out of state in order to have something close to this destination. I had another company tell me that people who live here and know that they will be moving in the next year, rent a storage space and leave it empty for months-just so that they will have it when the need it. Knowing that helped us make a decision for the POD system. At least we didn't have to scramble to find a storage facility that could take our possessions. Yes, the POD was about $500 more than the rental truck option, but not having to worry about a storage facility and being able to take our time was an expense that we were willing to do.

We set aside money for moving expenses, relator costs, inspections, title company costs, and we set aside money in case we found a "fixer". We found a "fixer".  So this part of moving is costing some money. Most of the things we try to do ourselves. We did hire out the carpet cleaning, fixing the roll up garage door, roofing, and patching the siding, cleaning the heating ducts. But the rest we have done ourselves: painting, cleaning, plumbing, electrical, landscaping, locksmith. Part of our strategy is to save money and part of it is to be aware of what we can physically do-as we are now older.

And we knew that we would be spending some money on household items. This is one of the places where our "frugalness" comes into play. Every new home owner is besieged with ads and coupons telling them how to spend their money to make their new place feel like home. The only ad we used was the one to the local Home Depot. It was for 15% off, better than our usual 10% veterans discount. So we bought as many big items that we needed in order to save the 15%: washer, dryer, portable air conditioner, paint-those things we did not want to buy used. We still go to Home Depot for many other things because we are doing things ourselves. Too bad some of the ads and coupons don't include the local thrift store because that is a great place to find some of the things we need. Other great resources are our local Buy Nothing Group, and the local Freecycle group, Craigslist, and Facebook Marketplace.

Our local Buy Nothing Group has been a great resource. We have been able to get rid of all our moving boxes and packing that way. We also had a "garage sale" one Saturday morning for about an hour at a local park. It was a great way to meet some people and to pick up things and to get rid of things. Yes, we moved with things that we found we didn't need.

Next month we will have our trucks here and we will be able to do even more things ourselves. The trucks will help us to haul some of the things that we will be looking for. We are trying to get most of the fixing and hauling done before winter. The pacific northwest winter weather will be preventing us from doing many of those things.

Lost Garden

When we moved in the gardens had not been touched since they took pictures to sell the house. They had mowed the lawns but had left the vegetable garden in the yard and flower gardens along the borders alone. There are still projects to work on in the house but we will tackle those later in July. Since the house is mostly in order we decided to put some effort into the yards.

One of the things we did was to find the lost garden. It was dug into the side yard and comes out even with the fence. It had 2 blueberry bushes in it when we bought it but the renters dug up one and took it with them. Bad!!!! The seller's relator bought us a new one. They also took some other plants but since I can't identify them they are history. There is also some strawberry plants, a viola, 2 rose bushes, and LOTS of grass/weeds in the garden. It took us 4 days to find the garden...here it is



I don't know the name of all the plants at our new house so I spent a few hours at a local nursery identifying some of the plants so I could take better care of them. This is just a list of some of the plants:
Calla Lilies
Salvia, purple
Rhododendrons
Sedum (stonecrop), Autumn Joy
Japanese Aralias, Japanese Paper Plants
Primroses
Columbines
Lupines
Heavenly Bamboo
Clematis, Piilu
Peonies
Bleeding Hearts
Daylilies
Lilies
Wintercreeper, Emerald "n Gold
various bulbs
Hydrangeas
Lavender
Spider Plants
Hostas
Daisies
various ferns
Irises
Camilla
Roses-I counted 26 plants!
8 Pine trees
Volunteer Cherry trees-they are coming out and other fruit trees will take their place
Weeping Cherry tree-also coming out
Beech Tree-also coming out
Maple Tree
various bushes yet to be identified

I won't put up pictures of all those plants but here are some pictures of the roses. Some pictures I took while they were blooming on the bushes. And some pictures are just some that I picked. You can see some of the different varieties of roses in the bouquets. I can pick 1 or 2 bouquets a week and still have roses to look at on the bushes!

 






More pictures and stories to come.

Pictures of adventures

These were taken at Tryon State Park, it's in the middle of Portland. The Portland area has a lot of parks in the middle of the cities.




These were taken on our trip to Fort Stevens. A picture on an old battery, and a picture of the shipwreck, Peter Iredale. The star fish were huge!





A trip to Silver Falls was well worth it! You can walk behind many of the waterfalls.

Moving in to our house. As you can see we have 2 helpers! More pictures of the house to come.

OCD

Its commonly known amongst my friends that I'm a person with OCD tendencies. It's starting to catch up with me again. Now that we have a house to live in, I'm getting picky about things. My current fetish is cleanliness. As previously stated, sellers here don't put much effort into fixing things about their houses. I'm not talking about huge things, like roofs, siding, plumbing issues, I'm taking about things that should be done on a regular basis but are not done. I'm spending an inordinate amount of time taking care of things that should be "small jobs", like cleaning the bathroom (3 hours for one and 2 hours for the other), cleaning the fridge (2 hours), cleaning the stove top (1 day and counting). The inside of the window jams are dirty, that's going to take days. I figure in another 2 weeks I'll have it much cleaner, and OCD friendly!

Moving in

Moving in day was last week. My son-in-law came over to help. We needed his help moving some very heavy pieces of furniture and replacing the wax ring on a toilet. He stayed and helped empty the whole POD. It was cloudy and cool for most of the day and we did have an occasional rain shower, it turned out to be great weather for moving in.
Within 9 days we have managed to move most of our stuff in this house. Before moving we purged our possessions in order to fit what we thought we needed into our POD. Now that we are unpacking our possessions I'm wondering if we can purge some more. Two reasons draw me to this conclusion: I've lived without these things for 6+ months and I haven't missed some of it, and we moved from a 1354 square foot house to a 1060 square foot house-less space for what we thought we needed. So I think I will be purging again.
We also had to buy some things. We had set aside money for these purchases, it was just a matter of agreeing on what to buy. Curtains, rugs, shelving, a kitchen cart, were some of the bigger items. We will be waiting to purchase some things, looking on line at my free cycle group, or my buy nothing group, or FB marketplace to find items. It would be nice to have more seating in the living room. And I just realized that we have never bought a new couch, they have always been used-interesting, I wonder if we will find one.

Keys...and paint

The renters are gone and we have full access to our house. Now that the house is empty, we can see that the whole inside needs to be painted. Originally we were just going to paint the bedrooms.
Thanks to my brother-in-law we had some ideas for paint colors. He is so good with colors and sent us paint chips. We wanted to get most of it painted before we filled it with furniture. This lead to a painting frenzy. Within 5 days the bedrooms, office, hall, living area - large room that encompasses a living, dining rooms and a kitchen - were all painted. The previous owners had purple and blue walls, with dark blue carpet, in the smaller rooms and green walls in the living area. With that color scheme I felt like is was living in an Easter egg. So we put Kilz, a great primer, on first then the paint color that we wanted. I will have to post some before and after Picts. The only thing left to paint is the bathrooms, doors and trims, kitchen cabinets, and the closets. It was enough painting to get the furniture in the house. We also had the carpet cleaned, it's a newer carpet so we will be living with it for a while.
We bought a new washer and dryer and had them delivered and installed by 2 wonderful guys. Only they couldn't install it, they tried but the hot water valve broke off spraying the nice installer with piping hot water. I didn't see all of this. The only thing I saw, as I was painting by a window, was 3 guys- installers and Mr. UAW-running all over the yard looking for the water shut off valve. I said to myself, "that doesn't look good, just keep painting, just keep painting...." Water was finally shut off, installer dried off, garage floor moped up, Mr. UAW made trip to Home Depot, valve replaced, washer installed and I just kept painting. Appparently the previous owners had a less than ideal hot water valve set up. It's a wonder that it didn't break years ago.
While we were painting, our POD was delivered with most of our belongings in it. Getting the roll up door open was interesting frustrating. Everything had shifted towards the door, so the rollup part of the rollup door was compromised. They, the driver and Mr. UAW, could only get it up 18 inches. At that point they could take a few things out of the bottom creating enough space for a tall thin person to squeeze in and figure something out. I was elected so I wiggled my way in. With just enough room to stand, I could figure out the problem. A mattress and a chair were pressing on the roll up portion of the door, hence the door was stuck. I could not push everything back, but could pound on the mattress enabling the door to raise up 2 inches at a time. Then we got enough door open to remove some more boxes so we could remove the other problem-the chair. Now the door could open. Phew, back to painting.
It's great to be here in our own house. There will always be obstacles to overcome, building confidence, patience and providing some good stories. More to come as I need to be off unpacking my POD....