Interesting, 2 days ago, we woke up and saw my next door neighbor, closest to the park, has put their house for sale by owner.

Details of this house:
3800 Sq Ft.
Fully Finished Basement
Built 2001
6 Br/3Bath
central air, natural gas, wood laminate flooring, carpet, gas fireplace w/tile surround, vaulted ceiling/9ft ceiling on main
floor 1 has 4 bedrooms, 2 full baths. Basement has 2 large bedrooms, full bath, storage, office, large family room (wired for surround) kitchenette with custom tile counter/bar and mosaic tile backsplash
Price: $425,900

If they are able to sell at this price, that would mean my house has gone up in value 17.9% since I purchased less than 2 months ago. Sweet!

I just can’t blame people for selling right now. You can get so much money out of your house, clear all debts including vehicles and credit cards, and still put a huge down payment on your next house. I call it a moving refinance. This only works though if you move from an expensive housing market like California to a cheaper market.

Cedar City is going to become just as expensive as California really soon. Glad I moved when I did! I wouldn’t be able to now, this house I own would be way out of my league as far as price.

Categories: Misc Stuff
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This is to anyone who thinks home siding is a great thing, not always!

Here in the desert, we have very very strong winds. Gusts easily get into the 60MPH range, especially here in Cedar City 6000 ft. elevation.

I have watched two houses have their siding simply ripped off the side of the house due to high winds. To top it off, we have a severe lack of contractors willing to come out and repair it due to the housing boom here.

Right now, we are having really bad winds. Guess what, I just went outside the house with my high power light and watched as the siding is bowing in and out when gusts come through.

It isn’t “if” the siding will rip off, it is “when.” I wouldn’t be surprised if tomorrow morning, when I go outside, there will be siding damage.

So now, I know I will need to rip off all the siding on this huge house and redo it with brick and stucko. How fun! I am going to need to figure out how to do this myself to reduce costs.

Any tips? Email me please!

Categories: Family Updates
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As of yesterday we got the Articles of Corporation for our newly registered S-Corp in Utah. Immediately we went right to Zions Bank about 1 minute away from us, across from Wal*Mart and got our personal and business checking accounts established.

This is awesome for us because we no longer have to drive 40 minutes to St. George to go to their Washington Mutual to handle simple banking matters like deposits and withdrawls.

Now all we need to do is establish records with the State of Utah for taxes then close out our business in California.

Categories: Projects
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As of today, we have our complete bedroom set in our room, built, and we are using it.

We have our pool table and gaming set in the garage on crates. Waiting for someone to come set it up for us (part of the Costco price).

We have the guest room pretty much done. Twin bedframe + pop-up trundle in with both twin Sealy mattresses in as well. Waiting for bedding.

The entertainment wall unit, carpet, and sofas for the basement are still not here. No word on when these will show up.

We got a new dinner table that is smaller for the dining room and 2 out of 3 bar stools in along with another 100% wool area rug from Big Lots. Our other fancier dining room table is in the den room now.

Tammy and I have been busy getting paths along the side of the house ready for these basement furniture deliveries. It will be a lot easier for them to walk them around the house then go down stairs. That’s the great part about having a walk-out basement!

Categories: Family Updates
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New Home Sales Plummet in February

Well this is good news, prices are falling and less people are buying. For us up here in Cedar City, it would be nice to find a contractor willing to show up and do any job. Before I bought new furniture online, I actually tried to have a contractor come in and build in our office permanently. After 5 attempts and 3 no shows, I just gave up and bought the furniture linked above. This set is awesome, looks killer, and I can’t wait for the delivery!

Now that the housing market might be cooling off, I might be able to find a contractor willing to do a job or two!

As far as house prices falling, they haven’t here in Cedar City. The house prices have gone up since moving in. Just looking at available homes for sale, there is nothing even close to what we have for the price we bought it for. We found similar homes for sale that have about the same size we have but the basement was completely unfinished and no landscaping. That’s at least $50,000 of additional work that needs to be done!

Categories: Family Updates
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The kids have been complaining about their slow computer so much recently, we decided to buy them a low end computer. After shopping parts, looking at ads, we weren’t sure what we were going to do. Anything we wanted was either bundled with a monitor we didn’t need or was too expensive.

Today we went to St. George to buy a twin mattress and decided to stop in to the Best Buy as see what they had available.

Needless to say, we found a good computer for about $570 with no monitor incl. tax. It’s a Gateway Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2Ghz or close, can’t remember) with onboard video. Brought it home, took out the Wifi PCI card in the old computer and installed it into the new one and now, they got a rocking PC with the works. I had no idea it came with an awesome multimedia keyboard, infrared mouse, AND speakers too!

Their monitor was just about dead so I gave them my older 19″ NEC Multisync monitor that I was using before I upgraded to my Dell 21″ LCD Widescreen monitor.

I thought this was a pretty good deal because it came with good graphics, 1GB RAM, Athlon instead of Sempron, and a 200GB hard drive. Never thought I’d buy a gateway but at this price, why not! The closest competition for the price has a 3400+ Sempron and 512MB ram. Pentium is to Celeron as is Athlon is to Sempron.

I still have one monitor left that my friend Josh gave me, a 21″ CRT monitor, that I will use as a dual screen once I get my office furniture in.

So here I am, with the slowest computer in the house and *I’m the one working from home*. Something has to be wrong with that. If the business does good enough, I have to upgrade to a new $2000 gaming rig just to keep up with the Jones’!

Other than that, we got our bedroom set from Ashley Furniture coming here tomorrow. Can’t wait. Gotta go to bed to be ready for them in the morning. G’night!

Categories: Family Updates
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It’s always fun to pick on my nephews.

In Utah, to pass the driver’s license test, they hand you a book, tell you it’s an open book test and then give you an unlimited amount of time to take the test.

You are allowed to miss 5 questions out of 25.

Who in their right mind can fail such a test? LOL. To top it off, Tammy got the exact same test I got (which I told her about) the next day when she went to take the test.

Needless to say, we both have our licenses coming (I missed 1… Tammy, knowing about a trick question, missed 0) and our vehicles have Utah plates.

Ahhhhhhhhhhh, now there will be no more “So where are you from in California” questions that follow up with… “(stumped look.. he’s too young to own this house) So…. what do you do for work?” Priceless!

Categories: Family Updates
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The “Sites I Read” section to the right has been updated to include Cedar City news sites I know of and frequent.

Categories: Projects
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