Lauri Ann's New Life

I cannot believe it has been a little over 2 months since my last post! Fighting City Hall and the Park Owner have literally taken over my life! My status in the mobile home park is still "non-resident", after him collecting rent from us for the last 7 months. We also have been trying to get some help from the City since changing their rent control ordinance against the mobile home owners, but that hasn't seemed to get anywhere either. The park owner and his attorney sent a 252 page income verification and lease packet to many of the residents in the park. Besides the fact that it takes an attorney to go through the lease, many of the provisions seem to be in conflict with both the City Ordinance and the Mobile Home Residency Law. Yet the City of Capitola has done nothing in the way of coming to the rescue. Part time City Attorney Barisone originally said he would charge the owner with a "Breach of Contract" if the lease and new ordinance conflicted. Like all the other bologna the City gave us before the ordinance was passed and lease packets were handed out, it appears this too was just a line.

In the meantime, I am happy to report that we have obtained most of the major appliances we needed. Tom and I were going over the costs so far and we figure the rebuilding costs are less than $100 so far. I had put an ad on Craig's List in the "wanted" section, and this wonderful gentleman that owns "HoneyDo Services" here in Capitola dropped off a very nice gas dryer to us. He said the lady he was working for, after testing it decided she didn't want gas, and told him to get rid of it.

Not too long after we got the dryer, some very dear friends of ours were cleaning out a house and asked if we would like the washer, dryer, and gas stove. Needless to say I was thrilled! but we had no way to haul them. It turned out they were doing some things on this side of the hill, so they delivered them. Who says there's no God? LOL. Even Tom doesn't say that anymore with the way we have been so blessed!

 Once we got the washer it took me days before I could see the bottom of the dirty laundry. LOL. It's amazing the things I did naturally when I was younger, like going to the laundrymat, are such a bother now. It works like a champ!
This was the second dryer we received, but I think it needed a new thermostat. It took forever for the clothes to dry. Actually the first one we got looked more like it went with the washer anyhow. We donated this and the money will go to help fund Grey Bears, a non-profit for seniors to receive fresh produce, etc.







I couldn't ask for a better stove. It didn't take me long to get used to cooking with gas again. LOL. This thing is so great! It's self-cleaning, the digital clock tells you the oven temp, and the timer gives you a 1 minute warning before it goes off. All the bells and whistles. I just love it. I would have taken a picture of the kitchen, but after cooking last night I swear I used every pot and every available counter space there was.






I added a "wish list" to the right hand side. There isn't a whole lot left that we need. I need to add some measurements. I always thought sliding glass doors were just a standard size, but I have since found out that was not true. The office still has the ugly green tarp on it versus a doorway. Tom hooked up the TV and VCR/DVD player out there and I would like to have a door before it rains again. LOL.

So what have we spent the almost $100 on? Mostly things like pipe for the kitchen sink, vent hose for the dryer, screws for the shed, things like that. The biggest part of the money went to our lovely queen size hide-a-bed for the livingroom that we just acquired from a neighbor. I'll post a picture of that next time. In the meantime I'm off to write another letter to the park owner's attorney. He's trying to call our space rent "storage fees" and triple what we're paying without giving the proper 90-day notice. May be time to call Senior Legal.

I am a pretty old broad. If anyone ever asked me, I would not say I am a perfectionist about anything. But at this late stage of my life, I have found out I am a perfectionist about one thing. Contact Paper.

Now I remember why in recent years I had switched to just laying newspaper for shelf paper. Of course usually there is already contact paper on the shelves that is too much trouble to remove. I wash it down with Pursue disinfectant cleaner from Amway to kill all the germs, and then I just lay newspaper. No stick (so it does move, which is a bummer) but no hassle. Perfect.

The cupboards we're putting in the mobile home either don't have any shelf paper, or they have shelf paper I don't want, so I actually used the real stuff. Contact paper. Problems with that are:

1. It sticks. You lay it down and if you don't get it right the first time, you have to very carefully lift if up to shift it. At least it's not like the old stuff where once it touches the surface it is stuck as if it were part of what ever you were covering. Once you laid it down, you were stuck with it, or destroyed it and started over. LOL
2. You may run out before you are done with your kitchen (unless you are a math major). If the contact paper you started with is older, you may not be able to find the same pattern, like what happened with me. 
3. You mention to a girlfriend how you have to go to the store for contact paper and she offers you 60,000 feet of contact paper that is totally different in color and pattern than you already have. You have to make a decision. Do you go on using her contact paper, or do you use her contact paper and redo everything you've already done hoping you don't run out of that pattern too? 

I found some contact paper that has a backing, but doesn't stick like contact paper, but doesn't move like newspaper, while at the same time it's that easy to lay. The only problem with that is I found it at the dollar store and it costs about a dollar a piece to do a drawer. I'm used to paying $3.99 for yards of the stuff!

I haven't decided what to do yet, but it's looking likely that I'll switch to the pattern my girlfriend gave me. It's green and white which goes with both the brown and the white cabinets, AND, I've seen more of it at the Dollar Store. LOL. That's a win!

cupboards in original kitchen

When you're rebuilding a kitchen on a shoestring budget, you have to have a little vision. Between having two different and incomplete sets of cupboards, and all the rain we've had ruining a few before we could get them in the house, my vision was becoming a little blurry. LOL.

my hodge-podge of cupboards

I consider myself somewhat of a traditionalist and rather conservative. I'm one of those people that when you're putting things together they should match. Needless to say I was not a happy camper when Tom told me my upper cabinets were going to be the beautiful wood cabinets I love so much, but the bottom cabinets were going to be the white cabinets we had originally found on Craig's List. Due to the rain over the last couple of weeks, the project had been delayed, so in the meantime I have searching Craig's List like crazy to find more wooden cabinets to save me. No luck. As the cabinets are getting attached to the kitchen walls, I'm thinking "man, this kitchen is going to look like just what it is, a hodge-podge of cabinets off of Craig's List". 

As if to tell me what an ungrateful brat I was being, over the last few days I have come across 2 kitchens in other people's homes that were a combination of cupboards just like mine will be, and they actually paid to have them that way! One of my neighbors happened to have her sliding glass door and drapes open that peer right into her kitchen as you pass by. I immediately noticed that she had brown, wood-like cupboards on the top and white cupboards on the bottom.Actually didn't look so bad. Then I went over to another neighbors, and her cupboards were white with wood-like doors, and even this bright blue paint around some of the upper ones. (No, we're not going that far. LOL).

As a final, final, I looked up images of kitchens online. That really made me feel better because I could have actually paid someone for this:
This is another kitchen that has been "designed". It blends the wood and the white. I don't think I would be really big on the red.

As I wrote on March 1st in "15 Days Are Up. Are We Tenants Or Not" the owner of the mobile home park here has been fighting us all the way as to whether we may live in our mobile home or not. As of March 2nd, the answer was still "No". So we have gone back and forth now a couple of times, me submitting more information, him not accepting it, etc. I handed him my last attempt on Friday I believe, so I am currently waiting for his next move. It is actually eerie as to how polite he's been each time I have handed him a rebuttal compared to how irate and condescending he was when we first got here. Of course I'm sure one reason is because he has the final say regardless of how much information I submit, but at the same time I'm submitting it to his lawyers, so hopefully that may pull some weight, at least to what he can do legally.

In the meantime, we are continuing to repair and replace inside the mobile home. After all the rainy weather we had and the bad storms, the original cupboards which are really nothing more than press-board are not considered very sturdy. My girlfriend down the road knows a handyman that we just happened to run into at the grocery store. He mentioned he was doing a kitchen remodel for some folks and they were getting rid of everything in the kitchen, including the gas range, refrigerator, and dishwasher. I got so excited! I thought "This is it!" LOL. Silly me. Nothing is ever that easy.

I wasn't really interested in the cabinets, as we already basically had some even if they weren't the best, but I was definitely interested in ending my quest for appliances.

Of course it turned out to be exactly the opposite. When I went to look at everything prior to it being taken apart, I have to say I was a little disappointed to say the least. The gas stove looked halfway decent, but the broiler didn't work and all the burners needed new igniters to light. Needless to say it required a lot of work so I decided to pass. After all, a new one wouldn't be that much more expensive by the time we put all the repairs into this one. The dishwasher turned out to be a bust also. It obviously was leaking under it and had ruined the flooring, not to mention the knobs were gone, and it was just plain ugly. Tom didn't really want to give up the cupboard space for a dishwasher anyhow. This didn't help my case any.

Our Newer Cupboards

What we did end up with was a microwave that goes over the range, so the hood is already built in, and more cupboards. Tom's son was telling me that I might want to reconsider as the microwave is old and will draw a lot of energy, plus it's extremely heavy with not really any way to brace it. Scott also said the inside of it was a mess even tho the people said they only used it to heat coffee. So that is still kind of up in the air as to what we are going to do with it. I think we also scored an upright freezer, but I haven't seen it yet. The Mr. says they don't use it, so as soon as he cleans out the stuff that's in it we can have it. I'm thinking if they "don't use it" there can't be much to "clean out" right?

As you can see from the picture above of the old kitchen the cupboards are coming from, the cupboards don't go all the way to the ceiling. Besides being able to put stuff on top of them, there is a "few years" of dust and grease built up there. Of course while they were hanging, I never thought about that. I did notice how badly they needed cleaning on the front. Most cupboards have residue, etc from people's hands opening and closing them, etc. Trust me, these were no exception.

Tom's Wood Magic

We brought the first batch home after they had been taken out of the old kitchen and Tom went to work on them with some Murphy's Wood Soap and a little magic crayon he has. The difference in how they look is phenomenal! The boys were teasing about how I better not put a picture up of how the cupboards look now or the people we got them from may want them back. LOL. (They're getting new cupboards from Ikea).This picture really doesn't do them justice because the light was poor, but I'll put up a better picture later when there is more to see.

It took a couple of weeks from the handyman saying he was doing the kitchen remodel to us finally getting some cupboards, but I think it was well worth the wait. These are just beautiful, and they are real wood opposed to the ones we originally were going to put up. The grain in the wood comes out so nicely.

If you are going to remodel the way we are having to remodel, on a "less than" shoestring budget where the purse strings are already pulled way too tightly, it helps to see not only "what is" but "what is possible". A little elbow grease and these cupboards are as nice as anything I would go out and buy, but you have to be willing to wait for the right stuff to come along. Patience and vision are necessary and still a virtue, just like they say.

Well it's March 1st and we're still working away here at the mobile home. As I mentioned before in the post on February 13th, the park owner has been fighting us the whole way, though things have been very quiet lately. I had to get my lawyer involved (another expense) and he worked out a compromise with the park owner's lawyers just to get us an application for tenancy. We met the park owner's pre-conditions and I turned the application into the park manager on Feb. 11th. He's supposed to have 15 days for processing. I expected him to use all 15 days, but now it's past that and I don't have an approval or denial. I'm hoping he loses by default, but have a call into my lawyer to find out. In the meantime...

Old Bathroom Set up

New Medicine Chest

The same lady I told you about on Day 13 that was one of the first to help us with some stuff from the remodeling of her house, also had a medicine chest that I bought from her. She gave me a really good price and I just fell in love with it. It works perfect color-wise in our bathroom and it's wood instead of one of those (ugly) metal ones. You know how I mentioned about "cheap labor"? It hits me where I live. LOL. No, that is not a design around the new medicine chest. That is where Tom disliked the rock that the Perp had put on the wall so much, that he pulled it off. When he saw the look of horror on my face, he said "That idiot didn't have a wall or anything behind the rock. I'll figure out something to go around it. Don't worry." Honey, I am looking at insulation of the mobile there. Oh well...LOL.

He totally redeemed himself with this one though. I now have my kitchen floor. Yeah! And it looks so pretty!  We went from this:                                                                                
                                                                                                to this:

Before Laminate

After Laminate..

Not bad aye? Thanks to Tom and our wonderful flooring guy, Bay Area Flooring Broker.

Look here. There's a little bit of the wall so you can see the color, and then see that baseboard? That's not cheap rubber or plastic, Baby. That's a nice wood base. Pretty cool! I thought about sleeping on this floor I was so happy!

Colors Coming Together

 Just for kicks, here's a picture of the "Sidewalk Superintendent".  

Bear At Work

 If anyone is remodeling in the San Francisco South Bay or Santa Cruz County area and wanting to get rid of the old stuff, we are still looking for:

• A gas, free standing oven and range, and possibly range hood
• Cupboards (we have cupboards, but not enough. If you have some like these or you have enough to do the whole kitchen in something else, that would be terrific!)

Scott, Tom's son is fixing the gas and water lines as we speak, so, till the next step...             

Living room to Hall Jigsaw Piece

When I posted a few days ago I said I would be back with the story about the carpeting. Now I'm going to show you what I meant when I posted about "The One Place To Spend Your Money If You Have It". Trust me, we have now learned in the case of remodeling, the cheapest labor isn't necessarily the best labor.

I had put an add on Craig's List in the "wanted" section for someone to lay the carpet we had picked up for the mobile home. Figuring with the economy the way it is I would get a few responses. I got a couple ranging in price from $130 to $600 for the labor. We had the carpet and bought the tack strips, and let's face it folks, we aren't talking the Taj Mahal here. By the time you take out the kitchen and dining area, it's only about 500 square feet. To be exact, it was a small room (my office), the living room, hallway, and two small bedrooms. Even though something told me to go with the guy that bid $250, we were short on cash and $130 looked a lot better. He said he had about 8 yrs. experience laying carpet so I thought he couldn't be that bad. WRONG.

Second Living room jigsaw piece

I should have known when I first met him and he told me he had to help shingle a roof in the morning the next day, but then would be over after that to get started on the carpet. He didn't tell me that would be the story every day. When and if he showed up, it wouldn't be until about 2:30 or 3:00 in the afternoon and there wasn't a whole lot of daylight left to work. This was before we had anything in the mobile home so there wasn't much lighting. The first day he seemed really gun-ho and I paid him almost half the money, told him I would pay the other half when he got done. We're still over the hill at this point trying to get packed, and so I wasn't here every day checking on him. I did call though.

First he didn't answer. Then his wife answered and gave an excuse that he just forgot his phone, but he had come over to the mobile home to work. Then he was sick. Then he said he had about an hour left to do. Then I never heard from him again and I haven't called him either. We came over with the huge truck full of all our "worldly goods" and the livingroom, hallway, and one bedroom had been done. No carpet in the office or the second bedroom, and what had been done had been totally screwed up. Oh well, live and learn.

I think the only tack strip he layed was in the living room the day he started. You can't tell hardly any is gone out of the box and I'll be returning the second box to Home Depot for a refund. LOL. This is a picture of where he cut and laid it down the hall. Notice along the edge the blue padding showing through.

Then, where the hallway goes into the back bedroom, that's another piece of work. I circled the seam, or where a seam would be if he did those. The X is where our door to the bedroom is. In otherwords, he cut the carpet to put a seam about a foot and a half past the doorway entrance to the bedroom.

Bedroom door back here

And last, but definitely not least, our living room. Now the day he did this, or at least laid it all out to cut it, etc. I was actually here and showed him about how the pieces should go because of the nap, etc. I don't know what happened between the driveway where we had it figured out, to the actual living room floor, but he's got them going in opposite directions with a pretty obvious "would be" seam down the middle. This isn't counting all the little jigsaw pieces shown above. The picture really doesn't do it justice. LOL

Living room center seam

What really got me was this guy had been going through a hard time, he had a little family, and I was telling him I would help him once we got this done to spread his name around and help get him some work, use him with other stuff we may need around here, etc. He just friggin' blew it.

So, take my advice and my examples and don't skimp too bad on the labor. Sure some are going to charge you outrageous prices for something that most people of the same trade can do, and some are going to offer to do it for next to nothing. I would pick "middle of the road" on pricing, and ask for references, another place I screwed up. LOL. As you can see, the cheapest labor isn't necessarily the best!

Here we are 41 days into our new project and this is where we are and what we've been through.

We moved out of our place in Santa Clara. Here I was hoping to get out about a week early to let the landlord have some time to paint, etc. before the new tenants moved in. Instead it took us up to the very last hour of daylight on the 31st of January to get all the stuff in the truck and for the guys to get it over the hill before dark. I stayed behind to continue cleaning for a few hours after everyone else and everything else was gone. I didn't have a clue how much stuff we had packed into that little 3 bedroom duplex in just a little over a yr. After all, we had virtually emptied 3 different storages of "stuff" at 3 different times, so I sort of lost track. LOL.

From this...

Leaving Santa Clara was sort of bittersweet for me. I had found a church home I loved and my neighbors on both sides of me were fantastic! In fact while I was cleaning there the last night, the neighbors on one side of us came over and brought the cutest little ice cream cake that said "Farewell" on it and wished us luck. My neighbor and walking partner on the other side stopped by to say good-by and brought me a couple pieces of pizza thinking I might be hungry since I was working so late. While coming back home, so to speak is wonderful and living on the coast seems like a luxery, I will miss the people and wonderful friends I've made over the last year. I'm just lucky to be close enough to stop by and say "hi" once in awhile.

So we rented this huge 24ft. truck and in my dreams, I thought we would load it, unload it, and turn it back in the next day. Our total bill at the end was to be 4 days, and the guy gave us a break because we were 20 minutes late getting it back. He could have charged us another day, but didn't. Luckily the guy at Budget was pretty good and pretty reasonable.

In order to get the truck back when we did, we unloaded a lot of stuff in the mobile home, but then filled up the whole carport and the front porch. The storage shed is still laying flat out there somewhere waiting to be rebuilt.

We are on a side street in the park that has 8 mobile homes on it, including ours. Only ours and my girlfriend at the beginning of the street have anyone living in them. 2 are "vacation" homes, 1 is rotted out and needs to be taken out of the park, and 1 the owner passed away and his son has it up for sale. We are like at the end of a court if it were a housing track. The street light across from us doesn't work and the park owner is angry so he's declared the two spots at the end of the street that have been used for parking for the last 30 yrs. are a "Fire Lane" and no one can park there.

To this...My new kitchen

We ran into sort of a snaffoo over here in this land of Paradise. The park owner who had been so nice the day I auctioned the mobile home and got it back, has turned out to be quite a bitter and nasty man. The day of the sale he told me he didn't know if I needed an application for the park because I had lived here before, and because the mobile home had always been mine legally. He gave me a disclosure concerning the park, about how he was in a battle to close it, (he wants to turn it into a condo conversion), and said he would fax me an application and I could fax it back. I hadn't received the application so I had left a couple of messages for him, but he never got back to me. I didn't think there was any problem, so I just started moving in. Silly me. LOL.

Our street-all our stuff on the right

The next thing I know, this man is yelling at me for having some of the furniture in the street (remember, there's not another soul down here), telling me I have to move everything back out of here, and then he serves me with a 5 day notice to give up possession of the space my mobile home sits on. Now mind you, before I sold this mobile home to the Perp almost 5 yrs. ago, I owned and lived in or vacationed at this mobile home for over 10 yrs. and never gave the park any problem. The way this guy was acting now I was Enemy #1. Needless to say, I had to call my lawyer and have him intervene. Another expense I didn't need, but help I did.

So now we have complied with all his wishes. I have gotten a copy of the title showing me as registered owner, as that was one of the conditions to me even getting an application for tenancy, and he has 15 days to process it. So we are here waiting with baited breath.

In the meantime, I found my laminate for the kitchen and dining room floor. We're supposed to pick it up Tuesday. I found this guy in San Jose who is a "flooring broker" and has basically factory direct pricing. If anyone is thinking about remodeling or redoing your floors, I would highly recommend him. He's located in Willow Glen and you can visit his website at Bay Area Flooring Live. com 

I have such a story to tell you about our carpeting, but that will have to wait for next time. This has already gotten rather long. If you have any suggestions for cheap remodeling, I'd love to read them in the comments below.