Going Back to Work in Texas…

With our time ending in the hill country we sadly started heading east (instead of west as we would have preferred) to head back over to College Station Texas. We are back in Aggieland and have returned to our old home town because we need to do some work on our rent house.The last tenants have been in it for over 8 years and since they were two guys with three dogs you can imagine how much work needs done on the rental.

After soliciting many bids for the work we finally decided it best to go back to College Station to do much of the work ourselves to save a bundle of money. The bids had come in at around $13,500 to have everything done and we figure to save at least $6500 doing much of it ourselves. The only thing we for sure won’t do is the replacing of the concrete driveway at a cost of $4500.  

We pulled into Holiday RV Park with a plan to stay until at least July 7th and perhaps longer if we need to extend to get the work done. Thankfully our being full time RV’ers allows us the luxury to change plans as needed at a moments notice. We can simply point our home (RV) in a different direction to take on whatever it is that challenges us.

One of the first tasks I chose to tackle was replacing our very old and dilapidated privacy fence. Two sides of the fence needed replacing and one neighbor agreed that if I did the work they would pay for materials, meaning the fence would cost us no money. Fifty feet of privacy fence on open bid would have been over $1100 to have built.

Well, it has been 8 years since I have done any kind of hard work and this is some very serious manual labor. The first day I spent tearing down the old fence, digging new holes with a metal post hole digger and finally putting in new posts in concrete. The following two days were spent framing the fence runners and screwing in the pickets.

It took a little less than 3.5 days to build which saved us at least a grand but man that was hard work. After the first day I felt like I had been in a car wreak. Fortunately Sharon offered to give me a deep massage that evening and friends of ours offered  the use of their hot tub which I graciously accepted. I didn’t feel great the next day but I also can’t imagine how I would have felt if I hadn’t had the massage and hot tub therapy.

So here we are a week into our work and we still can’t get in the inside until our tenant leaves later this month. A hell of way to spend your birthday but at least Sharon made me a fantastic carrot cake!

NOTE: We are back in our old home town until July 7th…