House For Sale....Well, Not Yet

If you've never sold a house then you don't know how much work it really is. For the lucky few who have no children or animals and keep their houses in amazing condition (I repeat no children and no pets and more than likely a house cleaner) selling is not a daunting task.  If you have children and / or pets, you know that your house is more often than not in a condition that you would not want strangers, or even friends, to see. I have 4 dogs who live in the main part of the house, two bunnies who live in one bedroom and two teenagers who live mainly in their rooms. I know that my house is not ready for an open house this Sunday.

Overwhelmed would be a mild way of saying what I feel when I think about what needs to be done before we can put the For Sale sign out.  However, if we want the best price for our house then we need to put the effort into making it show well.  When a potential buyer comes through the house we want them to be amazed the minute they drive up to the house to the minute they walk through the last room. It doesn't usually take a lot of money to get a house ready to sell, if you are willing and able to do some of the work yourself. How I keep myself from crawling into my comfy bed and hoping that when I wake up the house will be in the right condition to sell is to look at the smaller picture. I focus on what needs to be done in one room instead of focusing on what needs to be done overall. Make a list of what needs to be done in each room and then start on the room that needs the least work. This will give you a sense of accomplishment.

So what do I need to do to get the house ready? How do I know what needs to be done? The main thing to do is to look at the house as though you are the buyer. When you live in a house you tend to look past a lot of things that will stick out to a stranger walking in for the first time. You may love your bear collection and think it looks cute but it's really just taking up space and making your living area look smaller. You may love cooking and have all the gadgets imaginable, however keeping them all out on your counter will make a buyer think there isn't enough counter space. In future blog posts I'll go into more detail about how to go about looking at your house as a buyer, not a seller.

The list of things that I need to do is lengthy. Some things are big, like having the kitchen updated with new counters, lighting and flooring. Other things are small, like getting the spilled paint off the front porch, but small details matter as much as the big ones. The first task I am taking on is painting. Putting a fresh coat of paint on the walls, and baseboards, doors and door frames if need be, makes a huge difference in how your house is viewed. When choosing colors, be aware of how the color will affect people. I saw a house online and their kitchen and eating area were the brightest yellow ever. It was so yellow the camera had a hard time viewing it. I don't remember anything else about the kitchen because the walls took all my attention and turned me off so badly I didn't want to look at the rest of the house. Neutral colors such as browns, creams and grays are always safe. Hang a stunning piece of artwork on the wall or a centerpiece on the mantle to bring some color into the room. Paint one wall a color that is complementary to the neutral color to add some pizzazz. Make use of paint colors in a smart way. Some sellers may think paint is no big deal because the buyer can easily paint over it, it's not a major repair, however it takes time to do. When you move into a house you have to be able to live with the colors that are there until you have time to repaint,. If the colors are awful then it's going to take more time to sell. Keep in mind, as well, that you may sell your house to a single man or woman so try to be gender neutral in your colors. A pink bedroom will not appeal to a man. Actually, it may not appeal to many women either.

The master bedroom is the room I painted over the weekend. In my next post I will include pictures of it before and after I repainted it. In the meantime, leave a comment about the worst and best things you have seen when looking for houses.

Landlords, your tenants are allowed to steal from you

Renting your home to strangers (or friends) can be and usually is a nightmare.  We were against renting our home out because we have heard so many stories from friends and relatives about what their tenants did to them and their property.  It's common knowledge that the law is on the side of a tenant. What you might not know is that if you leave something at the house the tenant can steal it, pawn it or do whatever he likes with it.

So if we were against renting, why did we decide to do it? We were desperate to leave the town we were in because of some situations we had encountered there. As is the case with many people right now selling our house was not an option since we owed more than we could sell it for. My husband happened to hire a man to work in his department at the factory and he needed a place for himself, his wife and 5 kids to live.  We thought it was ideal because the guy would be working with my husband and therefore would likely pay the rent since my husband was his boss.  Well we thought wrong.  Within a few months the guy had quit and took a job elsewhere.  When he quit he made accusations about my husband that caused problems for him at work then he stopped paying rent.  He had not been very reliable with the rent payment when he was working for my husband but at least we were getting a little bit of money each week from him.

We started the eviction process right away. It took 3 months but they did move out. We expected damage to the house so we weren't surprised to find upon inspecting the house that the carpets were all damaged with stains, a ceiling fan blade was cracked off, the screens in the sun room were destroyed by their dog and a door was almost completely scratched through by their dog.  We also found that they had stolen my $300 miter saw and some other tools we had left behind. We left the saw because the tenant said he was sort of handy and we told him he could build a partition wall upstairs in the loft area if he wanted to so his kids could have more privacy (he used it as a bedroom).

Remember when I said the law is on the side of the tenant?  We went to court, paid the lawyer $600 to do a terrible job representing us and walked away with a judgment for the rent owed, the lawyer and court fees but no money for damages. The saw we discovered before the court hearing had been pawned and was still at the pawn shop.  The judge would not take into evidence the pawn shop slip showing that the tenant had pawned the saw. He said it was heresay.  The police would not take possession of the saw and give it back to us because there is no law forbidding a tenant from taking (and pawning or selling) any property left in the house.  Basically, you leave it there for them to 'use' and they can 'use' it however they choose, including using it to get money.  Landlords don't know this.

Of course we have not received any money from the former tenant and as we were in the process of getting his wages garnished he got fired from his job.  So, there's no point going to court and wasting your money, unless the lawyer is willing to forgo payment until judgment is final and then they can deal with getting the money from the tenant if the judge orders that the tenant owes for lawyer fees.  We lost money on the lawyer, we lost our saw, we had to spend several thousand dollars to replace all the carpets.  Do NOT rent.

We talked to a couple at the courthouse who were suing their tenants. They owned a couple properties and were dealing with problems with the tenants at both of them. My sister rented a couple properties out and had problems getting rent payments from them and getting them evicted is a several month process. We ended up screwing up our credit because there wasn't any rent money coming in so we had no money to pay the mortgage. Although we were able to get caught up, after moving back into the house, we are still paying for it with a bad credit rating.
Renting is not worth the headache and hassle. If you have to rent then I suggest, whether renting to stranger or friend, take before pictures, have the tenants sign something verifying the condition of the house at the time they took possession of it and if you leave anything at the house for them to use write in the lease that it is there for them to use while  living there, not to sell. The lease our tenants signed was one I pulled up online but it is suggested you have a lawyer draw up the lease. We didn't take before pictures and we didn't have the tenants sign a form re: the condition of the house because we didn't want them to think we didn't trust them.  Don't worry about your tenants feelings. If they are decent tenants they will understand that you have to protect yourself.

I hope you have learned from our mistakes and if you do decide to rent I hope it's a better experience than most.

"Be Careful What you Wish For"

The saying 'be careful what you wish for' is so true.  I wanted to so badly to move away from where Mark and I grew up (and am glad that we did and would not move back to that area) however moving to the USA I see now was a big mistake.  Sorry, American friends, don't take it personally.  I think the people are great, it's just the schools that I regret that my kids had to go to. It breaks my heart that my kids didn't get the experiences at school that I had growing up and that they would have had if we had stayed in Ontario. In Ontario they would have attended kindergarten to grade 8 with the same 50-60 students (at one school not changing schools twice) so they would have known everyone in their classes every year and had close friends. They would have had time before school, mid morning, after lunch and mid afternoon to go outside and get some fresh air and socialize.  The teachers, vice principal, and principal would have known their names and faces. Sports wouldn't have been the main focus and neither would Standard Test Scores. The immense size of the school population here, the lack of down time for the kids during the day, the focus on conforming, the lack of attention to bullying are a few of the things that were hard to deal with. If I was a kid I would not want to be going to school in the USA.

Intense Pulsed Light (IPL) Treatment

In September I underwent a dermatological procedure called Intense Pulsed Light therapy.  Specific wavelengths of light are at targeted at various chromophores in the skin.  A chromophore is the part of a molecule responsible for its color. The color comes about when a molecule absorbs certain wavelengths of visible light and reflects or transmits others. The treatment is done over the entire surface of the face if there are a lot of brown spots, which was the case for me.

Here is a picture of how my face looked before the treatment.

I am 41 and have had great skin all my life.  I have not been a sun worshiper. My mother and aunt also have dark spots so a large part of the issue is genetic.  On the day of the appointment I sat for 30 minutes with numbing cream on my face and then a specialist performed the IPL therapy, which took 15 minutes.  From what i had read on the internet I expected the sensation during the therapy to feel like an elastic snapping onto my face.  It felt to me more like splatters of hot oil.  Afterwards my face was on fire.  What helped tremendously was applying aloe gel all over my face then sitting where the ceiling fan could blow on my face.  The pain lasted about 2 hours. This is a picture taken as soon as I got home from the therapy.

The next day my face was a mess of brown spots and the day after that even more. After 4 days I was thinking I would be living with dark brown spots on my face but then around day 6 my face started looking clearer.

Day after therapy this is what I looked like. There is absolutely no pain, however not looking so pretty.

Two days after there is a little bit of improvement. 

4 days afterwards I'm starting to get excited about the results.

6 days afterwards I am very pleased with how my skin looks.

12 days.  These are the results that I am left with (or so I think) and I can't be happier.

Great results, right?  My skin is smooth, bright, young looking.  However less than a month later I started seeing brown spots popping up again. Obviously it's not as bad as it was to begin with and I did expect some spots to return since the dermatologist advised me that they would, however they should not have started appearing until at least 9-12 months from the treatment.  I returned to the dermatologist and was told that the spots were actually tumors called keratoses that go deep down into many many layers of my skin.  There is a different treatment for these. It targets the spots individually with an intense light just like IPL,  however it pulses rapidly about three times on the one spot.  The results for this treatment are supposed to last much much longer with this treatment. I wondered why the dermatologist didn't just do this treatment instead of the IPL. She said that the IPL gets rid of the sunspots and then if there are brown spots left behind then they know those aren't caused by the sun and they are then targeted with this other treatment.  I think I may just wait a year and do the treatment at that time because I expected to have an IPL treatment completed again at that time.  In the meantime I am using retinol creams (skin tightener, skin brightener) Neutrogena 30 spf sunscreen aging cream, a 27% vitamin C serum plus CC cream and foundation.  If you have had skin treatments, what have your results been? What products do you swear by?  

Nothing Worked for Dark Spots

It's been over a month since I started using the moisturizer Aveeno Positively Radiant.  I use morning and night.  It has not made my face positively radiant, it has positively done nothing to improve my uneven skin tone.  Another disappointment. I guess I will have to just accept my face as it is.  I am thankful that I do not have face blemishes that cannot be at least partially covered with makeup. There are worse things in life than a few dark spots on my face.  The Estee Lauder Camouflage makeup that I purchased for $36 doesn't do what people say it does either.  Sure, it will cover the discoloration if you want to put on several layers of it and look like you have skin made of brown flour.  You won't look like you have smooth flawless skin, you'll look like you have layered on a whole container of foundation to cover something up.

I've started working out again and I've heard that's good for your skin, hair and nails so perhaps I'll see some results.  Groupon had a deal posted for Jazzercise and I like to dance (when no one is watching) and I saw the Jazzercise place just around the corner from my house so I bought the deal. Yesterday morning I got my workout gear on and had to keep telling myself that I had to go, it was going to be a hard workout but I would survive and I had to go.  So, I got my lazy self there and I was right...it WAS hard, very hard.  I pleaded in my mind, at one point, for the instructor to please start the cool down but she continued to keep our heart rates up.  Oh dear Lord help me.  Finally the agony was over and I had survived.  The instructor and the woman who worked at the front desk were super nice and a mature woman who was working out introduced herself to me.  She was so sweet. She was my inspiration. I'll go back tomorrow for another session and hopefully in a couple weeks I won't feel like crying in the middle of the workout because I'm just not strong enough to keep going.  Can we please just march in place for a few minutes while I catch my breath?

You know how unfair it is that you work out and get yourself in decent shape and then you stop working out and overnight you fall out of shape again.  Working out is not something you can do for a few months to get yourself looking and feeling good.  It's something you have to keep doing for the rest of your life if you want to be in shape.  It takes time and pain and motivation but it has to be a change you are willing to make for the long run.  How many times have you or someone you know gotten into great shape or lost some weight and then a couple years later they are back to where they started.  It's like giving birth to a child, we forget the pain we endured to get in shape and lose the weight.  Slowly the weight packs back on and the muscle we built up goes away and we have to start all over again.  I vow today that I will not let that happen to me again.  I am going to get my butt in shape (literally) and I will not let it sag again!!  Who's with me?

Frankincense and Castor Oil Didn't Help Me

I'm on this frustrating road to fix the sun spots, age spots, whatever their called spots on my face.  I wasn't a sun worshiper, I used sunscreen, I rarely burned and I've never been to a tanning salon. Since I've been married, 15 years, I think there was one vacation where I sat out and tanned.  My husband loves to sit and bake in the sun, I prefer to find some shade and read a book without having the sun glaring in my eyes. So, that is why these spots on my face are ticking me off.  I think that it's also genetic since my mom and aunt have uneven skin tone. I should have started using spot correctors earlier then I would have possibly been able to prevent the spots from appearing.

I used the castor oil and frankincense oil mixture for almost two weeks and then I switched over to just using the frankincense on my spots. Despite the awful smell of the stuff they did nothing for my spots or the pigment above my lip.  I am quite sure that the darkness above my lip is due to the Nair I used in my early 20s.  I seriously think that it destroyed some skin cells while it was burning the hair of my face! It's like burning the skin on a chicken, you can't just make it go back to golden brown once it's gone to black.  It's skin damage and the only way to fix it permanently is to go to a dermatologist. My quick fix solution is to buy makeup to cover it up.  So far none of the make up I have purchased at the drug stores have covered it up so I'm going to Belk to buy Estee Lauder Double Wear Maximum Cover Camouflage Makeup.  (with a name that long it's got to be good!).  It has excellent reviews by people who are over 40 which makes the reviews more relevant to me.  I see these reviews of products that say a product work great, it made their skin look so wonderful..ya da ya da ya da.  these reviewers are in their 20's!  Tell me how good the product works when you get past 40 please.  When you're in your 20's everything works.

So, I'll let you know how the Estee Lauder Camouflage makeup works and if it doesn't then my last resort is to go the dermatologist route.

I did purchase one more product in one last ditch effort to find something to fix the damage. Jennifer Aniston advertises this product, Aveeno positively radiant moisturizer.  I don't have high hopes for it but I just can't seem to stop buying products.  I also purchased some products from The Body Shop that I've been using for at least a week. These products had great reviews.  People said they saw a difference in their skin almost immediately!  The one product is Vitamin C Skin Boost.  It is supposed to give you a silky smooth finish and it really does.  If your goal is to have skin that feels silky then this is a product for you, however I don't stroke my face all day and no one else does either. Essentially this product is a primer with vitamin C in it.  If you purchase a primer to put on under your makeup you'll get pretty much the same thing as this.  The other product is a Vitamin C Facial Radiance Powder.  It's a powder that you mix in with a serum and that mixture is what you put on your face. You use it for 10 days and within that time the results you should see are improved skin tone and texture.  The reviews were so phenomenal that I bought a few of these.  My results?  No difference in skin!  Zip, Zero, Nada!!! Perhaps it'll take longer to see a difference.  I'll keep you posted.

Keep your chin up (but wear sunscreen).

Small Town Living

I grew up in a small town in Ontario (Canada) and enjoyed it. I could walk to the store, although it was probably a 20 minute walk but it was safe and there were sidewalks. I could ride my bike without care or concern.  I played in the woods down the road from my house and in winter skated on a small patch of ice there, running home to get hot chocolate when my feet felt like ice blocks.  The school I attended wasn't overpopulated like the schools I see here in the USA. We had 2 grade 8 classes, so a total of maybe 60 kids in our graduating class. We all knew each other.  It was a great small town life. That's one of the reasons my husband and I chose a small town to raise our kids. He grew up in a small town too.

Being kids in a small town, not adults,  meant we didn't hear about the gossip that went around town or in church.  I'm sure it was there but we were too busy being kids to notice.  Now we're adults and our eyes were rudely opened when we moved to a small town down South.  We thought the South was supposed to about hospitality and friendliness.  Apparently not everyone got the memo.

When we moved here a neighbor brought over a fern to welcome us and I thought that was so nice, even though I just have to hold a plant and it will wilt in my hands because it knows it's going to die soon so it might as well kill itself before I have a chance to kill it.  Anyways, that friendship with those neighbors lasted a few months before we saw the claws come out on the grandma, the head of that household, and we steered clear of anything to do with her and her grand kids from that day forward.  It was a bit tense in the cul-de-sac for a while.

I won't go into the gory details but suffice it to say that rumors spread fast in a small town.  If something happens at school then the kids bring home the details, not usually accurately, and then the parents talk to their friends about it and the details get even more skewed. Then there are the police who have nothing better to do than stop kids for just walking around town or riding their skateboards.  Kids can't just be kids and hang out?  As soon as the police in town knew a kid's name they were sure to let other people they were in contact with know that kid's 'reputation' and let the parents know they should stay clear of them.  Do you know that a kid will do what you expect them to do? So if they figure you don't have any confidence in them to do right then they'll think there's no use in doing right because you expect them to do wrong anyways.  They will be as good as your expectations about them are.  This plays out in schools, at home, in society.
The principal, I think, found it fun to interrogate kids.  He should have gone into police work instead.  His philosophy, as far as I can tell, was that it's better to get them out of 'his' school than to have them there contaminating the hallways and classrooms with their 'bad selves'.  Whether getting them out meant juvenile detention or alternative school, either one would work for him. And don't expect him to keep things confidential. He would call parents and tell them that the friend their kid was choosing to hang out with was bad news and they should do something to stop the friendship. There was no attempt to help the troubled kids at school. There were too many kids to do that. It's just easier to get them out of that school.

So, in the end I've come to the conclusion that small town living isn't for me (not here anyways).  Perhaps things are different in the town we moved from in Canada.  Before we moved I didn't see anything like what I saw in the small town down here.  Kids could ride their bikes and walk around without being stopped by police, parents stood outside school waiting to pick their kids up after school and we talked, principals cared and had time for students. There weren't arrests and suspensions like I've seen here.  We've since moved out of that small town of drama and gossip and are living much more peacefully. Praise God.