Leslie and David's Wanderings: April 2025

Saturday, April 19, 2025

17 April 2025 House Design Complete

Today we wrapped up the house design with our architect, Home Designs by Marcy. Marcy was great to work with and really helped resolve some design change issues. One of the big changes was we pushed the house back on the property to open up the view from the back porch. That of course made the driveway longer which will impact the cost due to the extra concrete. We may have to compromise and shorten the drive to bring the costs down. We will have to see. We have 8 copies of the plans. This coming week we have appointments with three builders to get estimates. They may also request some tweaks to the house design. We have started trying to work with the HOA to get our plans reviewed by the HOA Architecture Committee (HAC) which must approve our plans before we can break ground. But as of today, they still have not gotten the check for the HOA transfer and title transfer papers from the Title Company. The HAC will not look at our plans until the transfer is complete and they get a $650 check from us. Then they need 3 weeks to “review” the plans and submit any change requests. Arrrggg. We had hoped to break ground the beginning of May but it looks like that won’t happen until mid-May. Once they start, we are estimating 5-6 months to complete. So hopefully before Thanksgiving. Meantime, Leslie is getting bored sitting in one place so she has started to apply for jobs in the area. She interviewed for a position at our favorite winery, Lost Oak Winery, which went well. She just needs something to keep her active that is fun as well.

9 April 2025 Texas Land Barrons Again

We closed on the property in Cougar Mountain Estates today. Most money either of us has every spent in one day! We had pushed up the closing date by a week, which the title company did not take into account when they generated the financials. So when we showed up with the Casher’s Check to close, we did not have the correct sum since they had to adjust the HOA fees and Taxes for the earlier closing. Luckily, Leslie had her check book with and we were able to write a personal check for the additional amount and close out the deal. We are the proud owners of 2.15 acres of Texas land!

Sunday, April 6, 2025

18 March – 9 April 2025 Break through on our house hunt!

When we met with a house builder we liked to get a feel for a house we liked, they mentioned a new development off Old Granbury Road south west of Cresson that they had heard about. The next day we checked out a house in Bear Creek Hills that had a lot of potential and on the way back went and investigated the Cougar Mountain subdivision. As we drove through, we saw most of the properties were already sold but a few were available through real-estate companies. The subdivision was formerly a part of the True Grit ranch and all the streets were named after characters in the movie True Grit. Since John Wayne is Davids favorite actor, it seemed serendipitous that we found several properties that we liked. We had our agent, Laurie, gather information on both areas. The property in Bear Creek Hills did not have a view, but it did have a perfect shop building, big enough to hold the Wanderer and give us plenty of room for David’s wood working. The house had solar install and a nice pool. But the house was 25 years old and was in need of $100K of renovations to the kitchen and bathrooms. We had Donny and Diane come over and tour the house to give us a second opinion. We decided to make an offer but it was well below what they were asking because of the renovations that would be required. We also picked out a property in Cougar Mountain we liked that had a wonderful view out over they Brazos Valley and made an offer on it. After some back and forth with both owners, we decided the house in Bear Creek Hills was not going to be able to come down to a price we were willing to pay. So we signed a contract to buy the lot in Cougar Mountain (Lot 80). We were able to negotiate a good price for the 2.15 acres. We had the property surveyed to make sure we knew where the lot lines were and found out the lot was further west than we thought and there was a dirt road running through the middle of it. After much angst, we were able to verify there was no easement and that it was just an old ranch road. So, we are going forth with the buy of the land this week. We will need to drill a well which should be about $20K to reach the first water layer called the Paluxy Aquifer. We have started working with Home Designs by Marcy based on a model home design of hers we saw that we really liked. We will get the house plans defined, then shop it around to several custom home builders to see what kind of price we can get.

Sunset from the new property

8 March 2025 We Almost Learned to Fly

We were woken up at 5Am this morning when the whole trailer shuddered and then began bucking wildly in extremely high winds. We have experienced high winds before but nothing like this. For the first time we were worried we might actually flip and were holding on to the sides of the bed for dear life. Poor Keira flew up into our bed for reassurance. Then we got hit by extremely heavy rain and dime size hail that made it impossible to talk over the noise from the roof. We had received no warning this storm was coming, nothing from our weather apps on our phones or from the National Weather Service. We later learned a man had died a few miles north of us near Cresson when his trailer flipped and rolled multiple times. After the sun came up, we went out to inspect the damage. The trailers on either side of us suffered significant damage (Broken sky lights, tail lights, etc). One lady claims she heard the sound of a train believing it was a tornado. We found a few shallow dents in the hood and side of the truck but nothing broken on the Behemoth or Wanderer. A few days later, David got up on the roof and found the cooling fins on both air conditioners had taken a beating and would need work to open them back up for air flow. The rear air conditioner took the brunt of it. The front air conditioner seems to have been sheltered a bit by the TV satellite antenna. The antenna case for the Cellphone amplifier was broken, but we don’t use the system anyways. Otherwise, no damage to our vents, solar panels or sky light. Some of the RVs in the campground suffer over $8,000 damage. David later got on the roof and spent a day straightening the cooling fins and performed the yearly maintenance work on the air conditioners. Overall, we were lucky and the good Lord was watching over us.