Jace's Birthday

This past Monday we were all able to meet up with my brother and sister-in-law to celebrate my nephew Jace's birthday at Jungle Jim's Playland. We took Victoria there last year for her celebration just with us and she had fun and so she had fun again! Jace and Victoria were able to go on a lot of rides together. Mikayla and Ellie were able to have some fun too though. In fact, they had a crawl race and never finished...thanks to the many distractions, but it was still cute. And they're off...

Peekaboo! We're on the market!

We finished! Sort of. We have finished most of the exterior paint. There is about one days of work more to completely finish, but nonetheless, we decided it was presentable enough to put the P Duplex on the market. We hope that we can sell it soon and that some of our troubles will alleviate. We are asking $229,000, which may be a bit high. Truthfully, we're not sure. The housing market is not good right now, but we have made it look really nice and we think based on the rents people can charge that it is worth that. If not, then we'll either keep it with renters or accept a lower offer. It's kind of just a waiting game now. Wish us luck.

In other ados about nothing, Mikayla plays peekaboo all by herself and it's really cute. She holds the blanket up, waits a few seconds, and then drops it down awaiting my response. It's so cute! Maybe all babies can do this...I don't know, but I thought it was pretty unique since I don't recall Victoria doing this. Here it is...enjoy.

Life as it is now

It's been over a month since I've posted on our blog because we've been so busy. Thus, here's a very breif update of what's been going on with us:

We've decided as a family that we're tired of being landlords. The last straw was after an incident where our LDS neighbors gave us two days notice and then left us with an entire month of no renters. And the chaos never ends. People argue the contract, complain when things don't go there way, bail on the last month of rent, etc. Not to mention how much time it takes to maintain all the properties. We know it's not the best time to sell our houses, but the remainder of this year and next year we will continue to be really busy trying to get the properties ready to sell. We plan on keeping the Riley house for the time being while we decide where we should be and where our business ventures will lead us. Our first goal is to put the Provo Duplex on the market...so we've been giving up most of our Saturdays (and Labor Day) trying to get the exterior finished painting. Here's the before picture of the Provo Duplex.












And the progress...we're painting it brown and blue, with accent white.

A few months ago we bull dozed our backyard...attempting to level it. I don't have a before picture, but just imagine a forest. Ok, it wasn't really a big forest...but there were about 4 or 5 huge trees in the middle, plus everything was unlevel.

Also, we believe it was last night...we were robbed. We stupidly keep some of our power tools lying right in the back yard. Anyone in our neighborhood could easily see what we have and come and take stuff in the middle of the night. Frankly, I'm surprised it didn't happen until now. What was stolen was a power washer (thank goodness we were done using it), a compressor, and a gas powered chainsaw. We are most dissapointed about the chainsaw because we had just got it this year to finish cutting down more trees in our backyard and we weren't done with it. So now, it's probably sitting in a pawn shop and without a serial number we can't do anything according to the cops. My tax dollars at work...doing nothing!

So that's the brief summary. We'll continue to be busy working to get our houses presentable for the market. We really want to be out of this business. It's taking a toll on our family and so we've shifted focus. Please keep us in your prayers...we need it. If you want details feel free to ask.