Road worthiness, road readiness April 29, 2008

We still do not have PCS orders, but it can’t be too far away.  Our request for a compassionate reassignment has made it to the top of the chain and we should hear something this week.  Although we are hoping for Colorado, we know it could be anywhere. 

We have finally finished the bathroom!  All of our flooring is done, the bathroom is painted and the cabinets are installed.  For the cheapest thing at Home Depot, they sure brighten up the room and look nice.  We’ll see what happens after renting it for a while.

The newest challenge is doing our own Dity Move.  There are so many families moving to and from Anchorage this summer that the moving companies are anticipating saturation.  We are opting to do our own move (called a Dity Move, mentioned above).  We toyed with the idea of doing a U-haul, then looked at PODS (there are no services up here right now) and think we may have settled on ABF.  They will leave a trailer in front of our house three days before the move, drive it to our destination and give us 3 days to unpack it.  We will only have to drive our car and pull a small trailer.  I like this much better than our previous scenario of being stuffed into a UHaul cab, PULLING the Suby. 

The challenge within the challenge is keeping a toddler happy for the 10+ days it will possibly take to drive from Anchorage to Destination X.  A good chunk of that time will be spent driving through Canada, with little around to look at.  I’ve googled and dogpiled, goodsearched and yahoo’d and have come up with a list of toys/findings that should be useful for our trip.  I also have a “treasure box” system in the works and will post pictures of it when it’s done.

I have so many projects that need to be finished before this move comes to fruition!

 

See what we will be travelling with? She’s downright nutty!

Hypermiling, anyone? March 29, 2008

http://www.hypermiling.com/

I thought it was a bit extreme at first, but have you SEEN the numbers on the gas station signs?  Will they take Monopoly money, do you think?  I already unwittingly practice some hypermiling techniques; I don’t have a heavy foot, don’t brake until necessary and let the engine do that for me, don’t step on the gas straight out of a stop etc.  But this guy takes it to the max!  He even has a video that was pretty enlightening about how often people get zero mph by getting crazy with the brakes.  They also have training for businesses with fleets!  My father owns a business but hypermiling would kill him.  He has a heavy foot.

 I’ve been out of the blogging loop due to unforeseen home improvement projects.   NOT a way to save money, that home improvement thing.  The projects multiply and have babies over night.  One thing leads to another! We just wanted to finish laying the laminate!  Then we realised we had to pull out the cabinets in the bathroom to do it properly.  They fell apart so we had to get a new set which doesn’t sit in the same place, so now we have to tear the wallpaper off and repaint.  If we are going to repaint the bathroom, we should just do the whole house since we have to in a year anyway.  Although, FYI if you do mostly one colour, you can just get the 5 gallon buckets and save at least the cost of one gallon.

We are trying to get reassigned to a base with more doctors for our daughter, the reason for the sudden burst of Home Makeover.  We are aiming for a compassionate reassignment which means we could be out of here lickety split, leaving little time to get the house sold.  We are looking at it like a rental property for at least a year, so we are trying to get things accomplished on a tight budget without looking cheap. It’s not easy!  We are saving on the paint by going with 5 gallons of the semi-gloss in a neutral off white colour.  Semi gloss is easy to clean and the neutral shades will attract more people than my usual colourful preferences!  We decided to carpet the stairs instead of doing laminate.  In our house, they are the first thing you see and since we are doing it ourselves, we don’t want to do a botched job that immediately greets the eye.  We managed to find some cheaper but durable carpet that wasn’t hideous and Home Depot was doing a free measurement incentive.  It looks like we’ll get the job done for less than $400 and it will be much nicer to see professionally installed carpet than amateur laminate with gobs of maple coloured caulking!