Paul & Jenn's Adventures

Since we bought our house, we have been working on the yard little by little. At the moment we are focused on reducing the population of unwanted plants. There are weeds in the lawn, overgrown bushes in the back yard, and aggrasive species climbing on top of trees and power lines. While we pull the weeds out, we are also interested in learning what they are and what makes them grow. Here is a few things that we have identified so far. Wisteria sinensis (Chinese Wisteria) blooms with purple flowers in April and is fragrant. They have wrinkly leaves with pointed tips. They like to climb onto things and choke trees to death. If there's nothing to climb, they send off shoots on the ground in all directions until they find another thing to climb onto. When we first moved in, we find that it has climbed onto every tree in the back yard and over the power lines which also runs along the property edge. Also to note is that this plant is toxic and can cause nausea, vomiting, stomach p...

We have been saving up to take a trip to visit relatives who couldn't make it to the wedding in Taiwan and China, and we finally found a good deal for airlines tickets for April 8-26th. Paul and I took most of our vacation days for the year to make this trip happen. We were able to forget about work and obligations at home and enjoyed 2.5 weeks of packed meeting, greeting, eating, and having as much fun as we could. Here we will share some highlights.

The oak hardwood floor in our house was old and looked dirty, with many scratches that showed the traffic pattern of the people before us. There were places where the protective coating had worn out and the wood turned gray and black, which didn't look nice. We wanted to resurface the floor before we move in to make it look new again. Since sanding the floor will create tons of dust, we wanted to do it before we move things in. We began on Veteran's Day, Nov. 11 and rented a floor sander from The Home Depot. These sanders are very heavy and uses a very large sheet of sand paper. The base moves in a small circular motion to sand the floor and we started with 24 grit to remove the old finish, followed by 60 grit and 100 grit. I pushed the sander around for 10 hours that day and returned the sander the next morning. It didn't come out perfect because there are some deep swirl marks that we couldn't get rid of. For the most part, the floor is a lot better than when we start...

We bought our first house and closed the deal on Nov. 2, 2009. The search process seemed long because we were going out to open houses almost every Sunday and we saw many houses in the area we wanted to live. The general requirement was that it should be within 20 minutes driving to work. Then there are other requirements such as 3 bedrooms or more, 2 bathrooms or more, 2 attached garages, among other things. We looked for houses in the $200k to $300k range, as well as some that are in the 400k range. Each time we see a house, we would rank it from 1 to 10, where 10 being the ideal house. Each time Jenn and I will be pretty close; 5, 6, or 7 are common, and a few that gets the 8 rating. We began to realize that price does not necessarily correlate to quality, and the 430k house is not ranked higher than some that are $280k. By September, we were not seeing many new listings, so we felt we should make a decision at that point. What we did was making a trade-off matrix in Excel, with e...

Jenn and I are thinking of buying a house these days. In fact, it constantly occupies my mind. Jenn had been looking at houses ever since she moved to the Capital Region, and we have been looking together since summer of 2008. Jenn was looking to buy a house because of the notion that renting is like throwing money into the toilet. I don't completely agree with that concept, but in the long run, paying a mortgage and end up owning a house is better than paying rent and still don't own anything in the end. Jenn didn't buy because of many reasons, such as having to take care of maintenance by herself, under-utilization, snow removal, yard work, etc. Last year we were looking because Jenn was deciding whether to renew the apartment lease or buy a house. She ended up moving to a different apartment. Now that we are married, there's even more reason to buy a house. Our population has doubled, our stuff is doubled, we want to do things that living in an apartment cannot offer...

Sunday was the last day of our honeymoon. We booked a flight back to New Bedford in the afternoon, but we still have many things that we wanted to do. In the morning we went on a Van Tour by Gail. She said her mother started the tour business on a buggy in the 1920's, and she took over the business many years ago. She drives the van around the island and tells stories about the buildings, landmark, the people who lives around there, and where are the things worth seeing later. One interesting thing we learned was that Nantucket has a cranberry industry. The way they harvest them is to flood the growing area with water so the berrys float on the surface and that makes picking them much easier. Gail also explained that the island is constantly being eroded away and many houses on the edge of the shore either get washed away or had to be relocated. Those houses are very expensive, and sometimes they will pay another owner to move their house so they can move the house from shore to th...

In the morning we went downstairs to get breakfast served by the inn. They actually have a menu for breakfast, so we get to pick from among a few different choices such as sausage or pancake or fruit platters. I forgot what we ordered but it was delicious. I asked if we could stay one more night there, but the inn was all full. The innkeeper helped us find three other bed and breakfast places and we picked Centerboard Guest House as our next lodging. Because we cannot check-in at the Centerboard until 3 pm, we put our stuff in the Union Inn lobby and went out to tour the town. We got a map from the Union Inn and the innkeeper had told us about a walking route that will take us to see different parts of the Nantucket town. We followed that route and went towards a historic light house on the beach. People were waiting in line to go up the tower. We also waited in line and got up there to see the view from the higher vantage point. For lunch, we walked to a sandwich place that the...