24 - 30 June 2026 Good Bye Betty.

On the 24^th we left for Maryville Tennessee. We drove 9 hours the first day to Memphis and then 7 hours the second day to arrive in Maryville. We traveled there to attend the funeral of the mother of our friend John Johnston. Betty Johnson was a wonderful woman who adopted John’s friends as her own sons. We were always welcome to stop in and visit. She passed in May at the age of 98 in Waco but wanted to be buried next to her husband in Maryville. She moved to Waco several years ago to be closer to John and his family. We met up with our friends John, Cheryl, Davis, their friend Gala and Darrel for dinner the night we arrived. The memorial and interment were held on the 26^th.  On the 27^th we all met at their AirBNB, drove over to Smoky Mountains National Park and drove the Cades Cove loop before heading back to Maryville for Lunch. On the loop we saw some deer and black bears. The 28^th, after dropping Gala and Davis off at the airport, we had lunch and went over to their AirBNB and just hung out, watched movies and caught up. The 29^th we headed back for Texas but took the southern route. We traveled along with Darrel for the first half, but he peeled off after lunch and we stopped at Jackson for the night. We arrived home in the late afternoon of the 30^th. It was our first trip with Kiera staying in hotels rather than the RV. Every hotel had different pet restrictions and most had an additional pet charge which we had not been informed of at the time we made the reservations. Kiera did really well with only a few incidents of barking at noises in the hallways late at night.  

Dinner in Maryville

The Smoke in the Smoky Mountains

Grist Mill in Cades Cove

15 - 23 June 2026 Working on the punch list.

 They finally got the floors fixed after David stepped in and showed them how the floors were moving and how they could remove the stress points by putting in transitions at the doorways into the  bedrooms to allow the main room to move independent of the bedrooms. He also suggested they pull off a couple of baseboards and cut the floor at the doorways. When they did that they found the floor was all the way up against the door jams. Once they did that, the floors fully relaxed and finally lay flat. Then the base boards had to be reinstalled and the painters brought in to fix the holes and caulk and paint them.  Kelby came in and changed the ports in the burners in the stove. They had incorrectly installed natural gas ports when they did the installation. When they changed them to the propane ports our soot problem has gone away and the stove works much better.  They also came in and worked on the front door which was sticking badly. The had to remove the trim around the door to access the lag bolts holding the door frame into the jack studs. After some investigation, they figured out how to widen the steel door frame and secure it enough the door could close easily. No more sticky front door! Then they had to reinstall the door trim and caulk and paint them. They also installed the bolt lock on the shop door. We are STILL working through a few other items on the punch list.  Can you believe it has been almost a year since we broke ground! 

Our backdoor bullfrog

7-14 June 2026 New Critters

 We are STILL working through our punch list with the builder. But were down to just a few items. Luckily it looks like they may have a final fix for the floor buckling. This week we discovered several new critters on our ranch. We have seen deer, mice, hawks, wild bee swarms, wild turkey, barn swallows nesting in the shop rafters, humming birds and signs of bobcats and coyotes. This week Leslie found a scorpion in the house (dead), we had a large turtle come through the yard from the stock tank out back, found a huge toad at the backdoor one night and finally a cute tarantula on the porch! The fun of living in the Texas country! We continue to work on the landscaping when time permits. Added a new bed out front for our address stone. Still a few boxes to unpack and plenty of items to find a new home for. 

Turtle in our yard

Cute tarantula on the porch

10 May – 7 June 2026 Alot completed!

 We are STILL working through the punch list with the builder. It has been 12 and a half months since we signed the contract to build this house and it is still not complete! Leslie ended up staying with her sister for two weeks to get her over the hump from her surgeries. Once she got home she went on a decorating binge! The HVAC people have been in twice to adjust the system to attempt to reduce the humidity in the house. We bought a dehumidifier from Amazon which got lost in the shipment to us, so we had to cancel that one and order another that also was delayed in shipment. The builder finally sent someone out to close the portal between the garage attic and the main house attic. That produced a noticeable reduction in the humidity in the house. Once we got the dehumidifier and set it up, we were able to pull the humidity in the house from the high 70% down to the upper 40%. Just the first few days we pulled 10 gallons out of the house! This had a noticeable impact on reducing the floor buckling. But we still had them come in and put a transition with an expansion joint between the primary bedroom and the hallway. That immediately fixed the floors in the primary bedroom and the hallway. After a few days, the floors in the foyer were noticeable better, but it identified a different issue. Instead of the floor panels being pushed up widthwise, the ones in the foyer were now showing they were being pushed up lengthwise. There is also some lengthwise buckling by the fireplace in line with the foyer. The floor guys are coming back this week to see what they can do to alleviate that issue. We found that the circuit breaker for the outlets in the primary bedroom kept popping when it should not have. David called the electricians that he had developed a working relationship with early on and they came out the next day to replace the faulty circuit breaker. Much faster than going through our builder. We noticed our pots were getting a lot of soot on them from the propane stove indicating the fuel/air mixture is not right. Either they did not put in the correct valve for propane (IE they have a natural gas valve inside) or it needs to be adjusted. The builder is supposed to get the appliance installers out to look at it. We still have issues with the door locks that need to get resolved and some issues with the masonry work on the outside that needs fixing (they still have not fixed that conduit that we have been on them about since last September). One evening we saw a big Tom Wild Turkey in our backyard in full display mode trying to woo three hens. We had seen the turkey around the neighborhood and even in our back yard before, but not with his feathers all fluffed out. David mowed the majority of the 2 acre lot with the hand mower over the last few weeks. We had hoped that when the native grasses got cut they would go dormant for the summer, but it just reinvigorated them to grow. We decided to spend some more of our savings and get a lawn tractor a few months earlier than we had planned. We got a Toro Timesaver Zero Turn lawnmower with a 54 inch deck. Where David had spent six hours mowing each time with the hand mower, that lawnmower did it in only 2 hours! We also started laying out new flower beds in the from that the tractor will be a big help with hauling material. Besides which it is fun to drive! We put up Plantation Shutters put up in the front windows, curtains on the back windows and got pictures/paintings put up on the walls. We found places of honor for our family heirlooms to remind us of where we came from and the sacrifices made to bring us to this point.  It’s starting to feel more like home. We have adapted quickly to having all the extra room! We have unpacked the Wanderer and gave it a thorough cleaning so it is ready for our next trip. We are thinking this fall we may take the wanderer out to Big Bend for an extended visit to our favorite National Park,. Meantime, we are planning to visit family this summer, but not with the Wanderer since RV sites are hard to come by in the summers up north if you don’t make reservations early. 

Antique Accents put on the brick wall

Welcome to the Ranch sign put up over the front yard

The big Tom in our back yard

The hens the Tom was after

Curtains up!

Flag is up!

Antique mirror from Bergholz in a place of honor

20 April – 10 May 2026 Its coming together!

 We are still working through our punch list with the builder. The floor buckling is back. We had the flooring installer in and they are scratching their heads trying to understand the cause. David suggested a solution to put in some transitions to reduce the pressure but they are not sure they want to go that way. Our landscaper, Weston Gardens, came and install the two trees toward the front of the property and the landscaping across the front of the house over three days. The rocky soil is an issue. But the plants we picked are made for our soil conditions. We had another swarm of bees come in. They landed on a boulder by the driveway. We have the bee keeper on speed dial now! He came out and vacuumed them up, and took them home to add too his hives. David had made it a point to go around the house and make sure there are no holes the bees could get into again. Leslie’s Sister and Brother in Law (Cynthia and Felix) came up to stay with us for a couple of nights and helped push us along in getting the boxes from the storage unit unpacked. We found stuff we had forgotten we had, and other stuff we wondered why we had kept it! We are still also unpacking stuff from the Wanderer. David swears he can hear the Wanderer sigh with relief as we pull stuff out! We went down to The Woodlands the first of May to see Cynthia and Felix. Leslie was staying with them to help Cynthia recover from surgery for a couple of weeks while David went back home to work on projects and his consulting work. One of the big projects was building the Barnwood headboard in the primary bedroom. It took three days to finish it up but it came out great. He also worked with the contractors coming into work on our punch list. One funny incident was with the plumber. We had an issue where when the water filter/softener would backflush, water would shoot out of the utility sink drain and sewer gases would leak past. So they sent a young plumber out to fix it. The pipe for the flush fluids was put between the P trap on the sink and the drain. So, the water flushed both ways (up out of the sink and down into the drain)! His solution was to put a separate P Trap in for the filter flush line. David did not think that would work because of backpressure in the septic line since that branch did not have a vent on it. It had an ACV valve that allows air in to relieve suction. But he held his opinion to himself. So the plumber installed the new P Trap and declared it fixed. David looked at what he had done and said, “Lets test it! Let me put the system into backflush”. David went out to the garage and started the backflush and got back to the utility room just intime to see a geyser of water shoot out of the sink drain and hit the young plumber in the face! I am sure it is an experience he will remember for a longtime. Fortunately, his boss came up with the better solution that fixed the issue. They ran the flush line across the attic to a plumbing vent and connected it in there. That problem fixed. Got to have a few laughs out of this experience! 

Second Bee Swarm 

Landscaping installed

Barnwood Headboard

One of our beautiful sunsets

7-20 April 2026 Getting moved in!

 It has been non-stop! The company we ordered our mattresses from (The Original Mattress Factory) in Fort Worth call Tuesday morning and asked if they could deliver today instead of the originally scheduled Wednesday. David’s customer called with an emergency task needed before the end of the week as well. The mattress delivery was supposed to have a couple of guys to manhandle the mattresses into the house. But when they showed up, there was only one guy in the truck, so David had to help him bring them in. In, addition to coordinating with the builder and their subcontractors to get things finished up. On Thursday we had the new couch delivered. But they also decided to put in the sod that day. And David was meeting a company (River Wind movers) up in Fort Worth to load up all our “stuff” from the storage unit and move it down to the house.  They were also delivering a hutch and bed frame we had bought at Rivers Wind. Then to top it off, a swarm of 20,000-30,000 honey bees flew in, scattering the guys laying the sod and descending on the roof of the house! The swarm did not sting anyone, but it sure gave everyone a scare. Unfortunately, they found a hole (that David had asked the builder to plug back in August) into the eve and settled in. We called the builder and sent them pictures and all we got was “not our problem”. Then I pointed out that they still had to put the gutters up and those bees were not going to be very happy about that. We suggested they call a bee keeper to come sweep them up, but all we got was silence. On Friday we packed up the Wanderer and backed it into the shop since they were forecasting severe storms over the weekend. Storms rolled through Friday night and we did not even hear them tucked away in the shop. We started trying to unpack stuff from the storage unit and get it organized in the house. Leslie decided she did not like the arrangement of the furniture, so we arranged for the guys from Rivers Wind to come down and spend a half hour moving things around to a better arrangement. Then the real unpacking started as well as moving stuff out of the Wanderer and into the house. A week later the gutter installers showed on Friday morning with two cans of wasp spray thinking that would take care of the bees. They killed a bunch but they just kept on coming out. They finally decided that they needed a bee keeper. One of the guys knew one and the builder called him to come out. David met them outside and showed him the hive location and told them what the builder’s guy had done. He said he could not touch them as the pesticide would contaminate the hive and if he went in, it would contaminate his equipment. He said the hive would probably die out over the weekend from the residual pesticide at the entrance. But if there were still bees on Monday to give him a call. On Saturday, we attended a neighborhood crawfish boil. Sunday, we drove up with Samantha, Rick and Alan to the client appreciation event at our mutual financial advisor. The weekend was cool and rainy, so the bees were not very active. On Monday we had the bee keeper come back out and he brought equipment that he was not worried about getting contaminated. They cut open the eve to get to the hive and pulled out an amazing amout of comb for it only being 10 days. There were even larvae already. He was really surprised and said that was the fastest he had ever seen a hive grow like that. We watched through the window as they were swarmed by thousands of bees. They vacuumed up the bees into a bucket, pulled out the comb, then sealed the eve back up, sealed the original hole they had come in through, and painted it. You can’t even tell they were there. Hundreds of field bees that were out harvesting are still coming in but have no way to get in. Those will die off over the next couple of days. The ones he vacuumed up, hopefully including the queen, will be released out in a very rural area, miles from here. With any kind of luck, they will be able to establish a new hive somewhere else. But it cost us $425 to fix what should have been the builder’s problem after they failed to do what we had asked them to do months ago. At least this way the bees might be saved. Meantime, we continue to unpack. 

Pantry

Kitchen and Dining room

Living Room

Entrance Hall

Study

Kitchen

Primary Bath

Utility Room

Bees entering the new hive

Neighborhood Crawfish Boil

Bee Comb

Bee Comb

Bee Comb

6 April 2026 On the Ranch!

 We pulled up the Wanderer and moved to the Ranch! The poor Wanderer almost had roots in site 43! We got all set up and connected into our own utilities! It’s so quiet! We’re not sure we will be able to sleep without the constant sirens and horns from US377! We have started to prepare the house for our move in. We made arrangements for our new furniture to be delivered this week and our “stuff” from the storage unit moved to the house. We are working with our builder to take care of the remaining punch list. Time to start our next new adventure!