Back home again in Indiana

I blew into town on Thursday evening and just went by the house today (the van turned out not to have been used since August and needed a tow to the shop yesterday, and a new battery and a tire and the oil changed and then it was already time to go out to supper with various family members).  Some lovely person stole the downspout on the north side, and it's been rainy, so the basement is very wet and things smell a tad musty in the big house. The carriage house smells questionable because the toilet's trap dried out completely and it smells urine-y.  Other than that, though, one year vacancy did not affect this house at all.

I so wish I could keep it.

Still haven't heard from the potential buyer, so I think I might move back on over there and start working on things at a slow pace, see what happens.

Possible buyer

Darn it. It will be cool to have turned a profit, but ... it's like losing a child.

With luck, the full inspection will make them run screaming.

ETA at The House

I'll be returning to Indiana in the last week of June and hope to actually do some things on The House while I'm there.  Life in Budapest has been idyllic, but I'm looking forward to a little house time.

One way to tile a floor

I love this floor!  It's a penny mosaic.

Now I have a goal if I ever get back to The House...

A rather hypnotic masonry video

Well, it's been a month or so since I've left The House, but I've been so busy making money (which is nice) that it seems like a week.  My latest plans revolve around building a Big New House, and that will perforce involve masonry, now that I know how great masonry is.  So when I ran across this video of a man laying a whole lot of 12-inch block, I thought of you.  Enjoy!

For sale: one big house

You doughty followers of The Big House will doubtless have noticed that I haven't posted this year.  The spring has been hectic - lots of travel and our daughter graduated high school - and now we've left The House for better prospects.  This is the view from my desk right now, in Budapest's 16th District.

I still have so many projects photodocumented that I want to write about, and hopefully now that we live in a place where my wife is unassailed by Level 5 culture shock and my children have public transit for all their back-and-forthing needs, I'll actually have some time to write about them. I probably have so much backlog that I will have bought a fixer-upper here in Hungary before I run out.  I'm going to insert them into the post stream around the dates they were actually written, but I'll also put current-dated references to them for the home audience.

In the meantime, I've put The House on the market for $40,000.  As I tell people, either I'll get to keep it, or I'll have enough money that I won't care.  I think it won't sell this year, but we'll see.  With an office view like this, suddenly The House is less attractive to me, and I remember, you know, how much I always loved Europe to start with.  But if it doesn't sell, then in the fall or maybe next spring, I'll head over for a few intensive weeks of work - sort of a work camp of one.

My next post will be a full to-do list of everything remaining to be done in The House (at least those that have been dignified with to-do points), just for historical reasons and in preparation for any such work camp binge.  But in the meantime, my bank account is running on fumes and I really have to pay attention to invoicing and additional work.  (Without significant distractions!  It's like heaven!)

Another beauty in Hungary

Be still my beating heart.