Money grumbles and house projects

Had a good and long conversation with F last night about the cost of the roof and how much more I could put in on the house (basically nothing right now). I am also worried about what happens when my truck dies. We discussed what we're both doing for a bit more money and what actually was significant. F is getting a promotion next year (hopefully) that will come with a 12k increase, which will help a ton. I'm looking at decreasing some of my expenses and I'm keeping an eye on the job market, although it's not looking amazing. I'm hoping the sheep shearing will pan out in a few years. I'm planning to start selling some of the fiber stuff at farm stores and I suspect I will actually set up some kind of small LLC for shearing and fiber stuff, hopefully not too expensive. The weaving looks like pretty reasonable profit to work ratio so I'm listening to the Professional Weaver's Podcast (very cool anyway) and going to do some time tracking. 

Other than that, we also talked about the basement and potentially if we could get it renovated, we could rent it out, which would help a ton with the mortgage. So we set up a plan for some house projects. The goal for December is to do at least one truck load of destruction from the basement. In order to do that, F's stuff needs to be out of that side of the basement, so I'm going to get the shed worked on to empty the basement of tools and stuff, so F can put her stuff in there. 

So order of stuff is:

1. build shelving/storage in shed for tools/misc stuff
2. hardware cloth up
3. F's stuff gets moved out of basement
4. destruction of basement

The whole basement needs to be torn down to the studs on that side so there's a bunch to do. I'm also going to see if my parents want to come up for a visit, my dad would have a lot of fun with that sort of thing plus some outdoors projects too. The rebuild is pretty doable, we might need to get someone with plumbing experience in, but everything else should be doable by us. The floor is a big issue, we need to put moisture barrier down, level the floor, raise the doors slightly, figure out how to put a ceiling up that is not a hideous drop ceiling, although we need some kind of drop so we cover the electrical and pipes. Lots of work. 

Then the project for January is to replace the kitchen counter surface. It's currently stick on linoleum that has duct tape covering the corners. It's gross and difficult to clean. I can borrow a tile saw from C, so F is going to stop by Habitat Restore in the next two months and pick up any and all tiles. It doesn't matter if they're ugly, we just want a different counter top. The grout and tile stick mixtures are inexpensive and the whole thing is pretty easy to do and quick, so we're just going to do it, half of the counter at a time. 

In the next two weeks, I'm going to get the generator and the snowblower started up to make sure they work and are ready for winter. And the balcony electrical is in the December to do list. 

Projects Will Happen.