Category Archives: goals

Selling our Garden Bounty

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One thing we love to do in Colorado and that we are excited to try in Puerto Rico, is growing things and selling them. I sell our chicken eggs to a friend year round and I have some other people who like to buy them from time to time in the summer months when we get 5-6 eggs a day (or almost 3 dozen a week!). But when all of our plants start coming in, we also like to sell those, or the fruits from them.


At the Greeley Farmer’s Market a few years back (Selling tropical plants, but of course!)

We used to sell some of our plants at the Greeley Farmer’s Market, but now they require all sorts of expensive insurance and crap, so small backyard growers like us have been pushed out. But there is one great marketplace still around: Craigslist! We love Craigslist and use it to buy things we may need and we list our rentals as well as things around our house and from our garden and greenhouse.


One of our comfrey plants


Tomatoes and lots of other plants in the greenhouse this year


We are finishing up with the strawberry season at our house, but had a bumper crop this year!

Just tonight we sold some tomato plants that were overtaking our greenhouse floor. We also have some people interested in buying some of our comfrey plant crowns. We love doing it. I like writing up the descriptions and waiting for people to contact me. Britton is good at digging up plants and making them look good. Selling our garden bounty feels more like fun than work! We would be working in the garden anyway and so when we get paid to do it and we see how happy people are with our plants, it makes us all the more pleased.

For instance, the woman who bought our plants tonight had had all of hers torn apart when we had that hail storm a few days ago, so she was super excited to be able to start her tomato garden up again -and for way less than it would be to replace them with plants from Home Depot or a nursery.

Britton says lately he has been having dreams of planting an acre or so of our land in Rincon with rows of pepper plants. I am not sure how well peppers grow there, but I would imagine fairly good. And in Rincon, we would still be able to sell them -and eggs, palm trees, coconuts, mangoes, etc, etc- at the Farmer’s Market! There’s so much opportunity everywhere you look. We are really excited and summers in Colorado make us all the more ready to live a summer-lifestyle year-round.


At the Rincon Farmer’s Market

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We Sold a House!

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Today was our closing on one of our rentals. It was definitely a bittersweet feeling. We have come a long way since we first bought the house with the rainbow cabinets, pink rooms, carpeted bathroom and out of date style. (If you missed it, you really should check out what it looked like before…and after we were through with it.)  Overall, we have had 95%+ occupancy rate with it, and we always said that we would live in the bungalow ourselves. We’ve made good income on it, and our purpose of it was for income when we are living in Puerto Rico.

However, last summer, we also had tenants from hell who only stayed there for about 5 days, but really traumatized us. We just couldn’t ever satisfy them and I think especially Britton tied that feeling probably unfairly  to the house. So when we talked with our real estate agent and she told us we could easily get $30,000 more than we paid for it a couple of years ago, we thought it was a no-brainer to take it.

We figure that this lump sum sale will help us in Puerto Rico just as much if not more than the smalll monthly rent checks could. We can transfer the funds from this property into improvements in Rincon like fixing up the concrete cabana, the wooden house AND build another cabana or pool. With those improvements we should easily make more monthly income there than we would here from the rental house.


One last moment with our first-ever sold house

Still, I was of two minds about it. Britton was ready to let go of the burden. He said he already feels lighter, like letting go of baggage. I am excited about the prospects for Puerto Rico, but still hadn’t quite let go of the house. Today, though, we visited the house one last time and thanked it for all the lessons it had taught us, and all the people it had housed. We blessed it for the next people to live there, and released it. It felt really good.

At the closing today, we met the young couple who bought it. They are super-excited to live there. It is their first home and their energy was contagious. I had a strange feeling of birth and death and rebirth. For us, our chapter of life with that house is closing -dying- but for them it is just beginning! And from that energy transfer, the loss of this property to us will bring forth a new life -our new life in Puerto Rico. Pretty cool.

Anyhow, we decided we should commemorate this day with something that is a reflection of it. We bought a piece of authentic pottery/art. To us, it represents something from Greeley that brings something tropical. And it is usable as well! We loved the colors and glazing technique the artist used.


Our pottery fish platter


Close-up Details

After the closing we also celebrated by going to our favorite restaurant: Bisetti’s in Fort Collins.


Outside Bisetti’s in Fort Collins

After dinner we walked around downtown Fort Collins, went and played at an old school arcade called Pinball Jones, found an outdoor community piano (!?) and had a great time. Things are really coming together for us and it makes us super stoked for the next chapter that is to come.


Man, I’ve forgotten most of my piano lessons!

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And Fixing Houses and Saving Money

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There seems to be a theme lately. Things break and sometimes we fix them and sometimes we have someone else fix it. I suppose that I like to pick my battles.

We were over at one of the rentals and the current tenants are moving out at the end of the month. The management company we hired suggested that the yard be cleaned up a bit. Mulch, weed removal and turning on the sprinklers. All pretty basic stuff. When we were working over there, we noticed that they had the AC on (compressor outside was running). It wasn’t a very hot day, and we wouldn’t have had our AC on, but we just kept about our yard work and didn’t think much about it.   Cassie was a weed pulling, rose and tree triming machine!

One thing about Colorado is we have tenacious weeds.  They grow even when it’s hot and there is no water.  As a result anytime we put down rocks or mulch the standard operating procedure is to put down some kind of weed barrier.  The landscaping stores sell a fabric that is supposed to keep the weeds down.  And it does…For a while.  Then the fabric starts to break down, or the weeds just start growing in the fabric.  I’ve come to find that it’s worthless as a weed deterrent.


Plastic was used along the fence, landscape fabric on the left

Instead what I have found works really well is the thickest plastic you can find.  It seems to last years and NO weeds come up thru it.   I removed a bunch of rocks, removed the remaining fabric and put down the plastic weed barrier then put the rocks back.  It’s quite a bit of work, but it should be good to go for a number of years now.


After all the rock was moved back in place with plastic instead of the fabric

After we put the mulch down in other areas of the yard,  the fertilizer and replaced the fabric with plastic we noticed that the A/C compressor was still running!  I figured this indicated a problem so we took a closer look.  There was ice forming on the coolant line!  I have no idea how long it had been running for, but it needed closer inspection.


Ice Growing on the Compressor Line!

I found that the blower motor on the furnace wasn’t running!  This caused air to not move across the AC coil which meant that it just iced up both outside and inside! Who know how long that AC had been running and not shutting off! Good thing we just happened to be working at the property. The tenants were clueless!

I looked up some info on the internet and from previous experience I figured it was the run capacitor.   They are prone to failure, but also are the cheapest/easiest part to replace.  I pulled the capacitor and got a replacement at a local store here in Greeley.  Rick’s Appliance.  The guy who works there/owns it, Rick, is super honest and every time I’ve gone in the store he has been very helpful.  So for $6 I got a new capacitor.


Run Capacitor for the Blower Motor

I got to the house the next day and the ice had melted off the AC parts and I threw in the new capacitor.  Turned the furnace on and….fan still wouldn’t kick on.  The blower motor fan just buzzed.  I did get it to start by pushing it by hand once but it never worked on its own.  I figured the next part to replace was the motor.

Finding HVAC parts is I think, intentionally hard to do online.  It’s as if they have their own club and if you’re not in it, you aren’t going to find what you need online.   They want you to pay someone to fix your stuff. I found a motor at a place near work.  It cost $80 and is a universal Mars motor.  I was a bit skeptical about using an aftermarket part; I almost always want to get a direct original equipment manufacturer (OEM) replacement.  This causes less hassle with things that don’t fit correct or that might have small differences.  In this case however it was nearly impossible and would have cost ~$400.


Blower Motor in the Furnace

I put the motor in, wired it up and turned it on.  Worked like a charm!  It did take my time and $86 total (plus tax) but I learned a lot in the process and I had time to do it.  There was no great rush or pressure since the weather here is between seasons and we don’t need AC or Heat. Estimated cost to hire an HVAC person to do what I did: $500!

And it was quite apparent what had caused the motor to burn out: the furnace filter hadn’t been changed in a year! The filter was all bent and sucked inward. Remember to change your filters often, monthly even, if you use your furnace year-round.


Yep, back in the garage on the floor with my blue shirt on..lol

All in all it was a productive few days.  We saved a lot of money by doing things ourselves and we had the time to do it.  I think I want to turn the old motor from the furnace into an electric wind generator.  We’ll see.  As is I am learning all about furnaces and that’s something I won’t need in Rincon…but it never hurts to learn.

The Honda Civic is small but can hold quite a bit! (removing debris from the yard)

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And Fixing Houses and Spending Money

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We try to do a lot of work ourselves when we can. In the case of the house that we have a contract to sell, this week we just couldn’t. We went through the inspection process and because the buyers are buying with an FHA loan, they had some requirements we had to fix in order for them to get the loan.

Some of these are repairs that were definitely a little past due, others, like drywall in the garage and covering the kitty door seemed a little like overkill. And when we bought the house, most of these were never even mentioned by our home inspector…hmm. In any case, we hired out the work because we didn’t have any time this week; Britton was on call, and we had a quick deadline. But they are all done and will be writing check instead. Our contractor was an old school guy that our real estate agent knew. He made quick and good work of these tasks that would have taken us much longer to do!

Here are some of the before and after pictures of the work he did on the little house. I think they turned out really well!


Kitty/doggie door between garage and house was not allowed due to “firewall” requirements


Door after with kickplate filled with fire retardant


Above the door in the garage was built with wood -another firewall issue apparently


So he put in drywall


The hot water heater vent cap was old and rusty


So he installed a new one


There was an old window on the outside of the garage. Inside the garage it was drywalled in, so it was not useful. The sill was all rotten out.


So he just took it out and sided it.


After it was installed and painted


The siding by the window before- we could slide our hand under it


With the new siding you couldn’t


Another part of the house had some siding problems from leaves and the water soaking the area over time

So there was quite a bit of siding repairs on this side of the house too


After the repairs were made and it was painted


A bit of soffit needed repaired


Soffit repairs after

We’ve come to find that anything can be fixed on a house, it just depends how much you want to spend. These repairs were a bit spendy, but like we said in the post about the car repairs, it really depends on if you want to do it yourself, and if you know how to (and also the time factor). We figured with these repairs, it was just a part of the process to move the closing along. At least we had a cushion to pay for it since the offer was full price. Next major step is the appraisal. As long as that goes fine, we’ll be closing and selling this house in less than 3 weeks! Phew. Selling is much more difficult than buying.


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