Moving or Organizing

I really should tidy up the spare room

April 19, 2008 by Tricia

Considering how nice the weather has become I’m almost tempted to move the tropical plants that I keep in one of our sunny spare bedrooms (actually the only sunny spare bedroom) over the winter to the enclosed back porch or front porch.

Trouble is that as soon as I do that the temperature will fall! The back porch is a bit of a problem area as well. It gets a lot of sunlight and often gets too hot, even during the day time in late winter, so if I move any plants to that room I need to keep the window open during the day to help control the room temperature.

I want to move the plants for a few reasons. We’ll likely soon start to have guests drop in that want to stay overnight and a room crowded with exercise equipment and several plants doesn’t make a great place to stay. Also, if I move the plants I can finally start using the elliptical machine again. Yeah!

I’ve been out taking the dog on longer walks now that the weather is so nice, but using the elliptical a few times a week would probably help get me back into shape a whole lot faster.

Do you have a room in your home that gets cluttered over the winter with items or plants that are normally outdoors during the summer season?

25000 emails later …

February 26, 2008 by Tricia

On Sunday I fired up my desktop computer for the first time in a month. I then had the displeasure of going through the 25,000 emails that had come in over the month! Yes, twenty five thousand! Isn’t that absolutely sickening?

These days I mainly use my laptop and most of my email accounts are collected on the laptop, however I have the email accounts set up to leave the mail on the server as I’ve always considered my desktop computer to be the main one. So most of the email that I have collected and stored or dealt with in the past month on the lap top came in again on the desktop computer.

I have my email program, Eudora, set up so that quite a few different types of email go into mailboxes that I’ve set up for them as the mail comes in. Unfortunately my Eudora email program is messing up and it tends to put about three quarters of my email in the junk mailbox folder so I pretty much have to sort my mail by hand anyway. Grrr.

Some might be reading this and wondering why I bothered to sort it out at all. Well I keep track of all the payments I get through the month/year on that computer so that’s one reason to sort all that email out and find all those payments!

I also run several mailing lists and blogrolls. The mailing lists are fine, but I’d stored up a lot of my blogroll requests over the month and while I was sorting through that gigantic pile of email I took care of pretty much all of the requests for the Green Thumb Sunday, I am Canadian, Fabulous Photoblogs and the Do Follow blogrolls.

Lots of new sites were added to the blogrolls so if you happen to be on any of those lists please keep an eye out for the new sites and go and visit them. I’m sure they’ll appreciate your visit to their blog.

If anything, after collecting so much email and having to spend hours going through all of it, I’ve learned my lesson and I’ll be turning that computer on every few days now to keep things in check. Actually I have better work habits when I’m on that computer so I should use it more often anyway.

Do you have more than one computer? Do you end up sorting out the same emails on each computer too?

Looking to buy or sell a property in South Africa?

February 14, 2008 by Tricia

I just finished watching the latest episodes of Survivor and Lost and looking at all of that lovely scenery has me dreaming of exotic locals.

Do you ever think about living in another country or perhaps having a second home in another country? I know that several of my readers work from home and make their income from their websites, as I do. All we need is a good internet connection and we could work anywhere right?

Here I am talking about how nice it would be to move to an exotic location and I’m forgetting that some of you live in places that I’d love to travel to and perhaps move to!

If any of you happen to live in South Africa or if you’ve thought of purchasing a home there you should take a look at the Property Home website where you can view South Africa Property Listings. You’ll find property listings by real estate agents, private sellers, property developers and property landlords.

Not only will you find South Africa Houses for Sale, but you’ll also find properties to rent or “to let”.

One feature of the site that I really like is that once a real estate agent or property owner has registered one of their properties on the site they can then go and search for a prospective renter or buyer.

PropertyHome has a database of close to 50,000 prospective home buyers. Their system is set up in such a way that real estate owners can quickly and easily search for suitable buyers for their properties. In fact, within seconds of listing your property for rent or for sale you’ll be automatically provided with a list of prospective tenants and buyers whom closely match your property listing.

This sounds like a great way to market a property! I really don’t think that we have anything quite like this in Canada … not on this scale anyway. I think it’s great. If I were seriously looking for a home in South Africa I think I’d be happy to register and list what type of property I was looking for and then be contacted by both private sellers and real estate agents. It would save me time going through all the listings on several sites!

I also like the fact that if I were selling a home I could put up a listing, perhaps one that said “Real Estate Home for Sale by Owner” and immediately get a list of prospective buyers for that property. It sounds win win to me.

The very best feature is their special introductory offer. Property Home is offering all advertisers the opportunity to list their properties for free for a total of three months. I know that it’s not possible to sell or rent all properties within three months, but I think a high percentage are sold within that time period and if a seller or renter were able to find a new owner or tenant in that time it wouldn’t cost them anything at all for the listing!

At this point I have no idea if Chris and I will ever move out of the country or purchase a second property elsewhere but it’s good to know what’s out there isn’t it? Hopefully this information about Property Home might come in for a few of my readers.

Our neighbors are trying to sell their house in January – Good Luck!

January 23, 2008 by Tricia

Well our neighbors home is up for sale again! They must really want to move. Who puts their house up for sale in January the coldest month of the year here in Toronto?

Once they took their for sale sign down and said they were getting some repairs done on the house (changing from oil to gas heating, new furnace and who knows what else) I didn’t really expect to see a for sale sign go up before March or April.

I think in Northern climates most people who are thinking of selling their homes try to put it up for sale in the early Spring. I’ve never sold a home, but that’s certainly the time of year that I went looking to buy a house.

In my personal experience that’s a good time to look for a new home. The snow is melting or melted so you can see the whole house – foundation and all. I mean, you want to be able to see if there are any problems right? Sure you can get an inspection done, but everything’s easier when you can actually visualize the whole house and structure. The yards also look better too which makes the houses more appealing.

Also, when I went searching for a home to buy I saw probably close to 50 homes. The majority had leaky basements. How do I know? Well it rains quite a bit in the spring and a lot of the houses literally had puddles of water in the basement. Some had several inches of water. In fact, I think this house was the only one with a dry basement. I knew right away that the foundation was probably in great shape! That’s something that you wouldn’t be able to tell very easily when buying a house in the dead of winter!

As far as I’m concerned they might as well have a sign on their lawn saying Tennessee land for sale for all the good putting their house up for sale now will do them. I wish them luck, I really do … but their house still needs a lot of work. They haven’t modernized it at all. Perhaps they are thinking a desperate home buyer will come along.

Our neighbors can’t sell their house!

January 8, 2008 by Tricia

Our neighbors who were trying to sell their home since late September finally took their house off the market. No one was interested in buying it.

We heard from one of the home owners that they had trouble selling because they have oil heating and their tank is very old and new owners won’t be able to get home insurance because of it … or something to that effect. So they’ve taken their home off the market until spring.

In the meantime they are replacing their oil heating with gas. They actually had the gas heating installed on Monday. Surprisingly it wasn’t all that noisy! Lucky for me.

We have oil heating as well and I guess we’ll either have to replace our tank in the near future or switch to gas heating. When we first bought our house I’d planned on switching to gas. I knew our oil tank was almost empty when we bought the house … unfortunately I didn’t know that the old owners were obligated to sell the home with a full oil tank and the tank was filled up the day we got the house I think! That kind of derailed my plans to switch over to gas since emptying the tank is supposed to be a pain.

Did you know that when we first bought this house the house beside us became vacant just a few months later? The former home owner had cancer and she passed away. At that time we considered buying our neighbors house as a second home that we could rent out for a few years and then eventually renovate both semi-detached homes to make them one home.

I guess now that I know what bad shape our neighbors home is in it’s a good thing we didn’t buy it five years ago!

I just hope that when they do sell their house that we get good quiet neighbors!

I really should tidy up the spare room

Looking to buy or sell a property in South Africa?

Our neighbors are trying to sell their house in January – Good Luck!

Our neighbors can’t sell their house!

Meta

Search this site

Blogs I Visit

Meta

Search this site

Tags

Blogs I Visit