Basic Information:

The new house is a 7 year old manufactured home by Fleetwood Homes (a Phoenix company).  It is about 1500 sq ft overall with a master bedroom / bath, 2 additional bedrooms and a second full bath.  The "living room" is separated from the dinning / kitchen area by a set of cabinets, giving a fairly open floor plan.  There is an area between the smaller bedrooms and dining area that could be used as a sitting room or play room.  I am using it as my workshop for carpentry etc.  A large sliding glass door leads out to the "back yard" where I may build a small deck one day.  It is on the north side of the house, so it would be shaded and cooler in the summer.  The house came with appliances that work well, which saved a lot of time and expense.  Heating / air conditioning is provided by a heat pump that needed repair, but seems fine now. 

Weather:

The nights are getting cold now and the days get colder as well.  Average temperatures are from the mid to high 60's in the day time and 40's at night.  We are in a colder period lately, as has been the rest of the country, with night time temps below 30 and day time temps struggling to get above 50.  The heat pump runs between 10% and 25% of the time when it is below 45 and 30 degrees respectively at night until late morning, when / if the sun warms things up again.  Seems like a pretty efficient system.

Projects:

Winterizing:
I have done a lot of work in terms of winterizing.  The skirt around the base of the house was all bashed in where the previous owner had bulldozed gravel around the house.  Not only did it ruin the skirt, but looked like hell.  So far I have moved about 5 ton of large size gravel from around the house.  Anyway, replacing the skirt improves the appearance and efficiency of the heating system.  The skirt keeps creatures out and heat in :-)  The remainder of the gravel will be removed in the landscaping phase. 

I insulated the water line to keep it from freezing at night (easy fix, no idea why it was not done before).  I also built folding insulation panels for all the windows.  Some of you know about my famous window insulator made of reflective barrier.  Laugh if you must, but it definitely cuts the utility bills!  Plus the new design allows them to be quickly removed and stored when not needed.

Leveling:
One of my big concerns about purchasing the house was where the house is physically located.  When the house was placed, they ignored the fact that a dry wash would run right under it in the rainy season!  That was the reason for all the gravel... to try to divert the runoff.  They were partially successful, but a bit too late.  Water running under the house had eroded soil under some of the support piers.  With the skirt off, I used a water level to check the house and found it had settled over an inch and 1/4 on one corner.  Doesn't sound like much, but it is enough to put some of the doors out of square in the frames.  I spent about half a day crawling around under the house with an inch and an 8th wrench adjusting the steel piers that support the house.   Doors work much better when they are square :-)

Landscaping & Run-off Protection
Overall the landscaping project took 5 weeks.  I hired a nice guy who has a Kubota tractor to do the bulk of the really heavy landscaping.  He is 76 years old and is one of the nicest guys you'd ever want to meet.  He and I spent 11 hours digging up the high spots in front of the house and moving the dirt to other low spots where runoff would be a problem.  The pictures of this project do not give any real sense of how much dirt was involved.  However, a rule of thumb is that one ton of dirt covers 10 sq ft to a depth of 1 inch.  I had 15 tons delivered and it is the small strip of dark dirt you might notice in some of the pictures of the front yard. 

Before the main landscaping project I used about 2 tons of the purchased dirt to build the barrier on the fence line by the road.  There is a natural path for runoff from the road to the side (and under) the house.  Another ton was used to cover and build up the area on the road side and part of the front to block the runoff path.  All this work was done by hand with buckets, hand cart, shove and garden rake.  Believe me when I say that the Kubota tractor was a back, if not a life, saver.  On the other hand, all the exercise has me in better shape physically than in a very long time :-)

Interior:
Move in was busy.  The place was advertised as a fixer upper and it needed a lot of TLC!  There was old worn out carpet that was removed before the closing.  This left hundreds of padding staples to remove and tack strips everywhere (you don't want to step on either in bare feet).  Lots of other cleaning efforts over the first week or so.  Anyway, suffice it to say that clean up took some time.  All the window blinds were pretty bad and were thrown away before the close as well.  All new mini-blinds are installed now. 

Lots of other little projects as anyone would expect in a second owner home.  I added a medicine cabinet in the master bathroom.  Fixed one of the toilets.  Built an awning for the front entrance (came out sweet).  Replaced a broken door to the master bedroom (my birthday present to me :-).  Fixed loose molding etc. 

Still debating what kind of floor covering to use (mostly bare floor now).  Carpet seems like a bad choice as there is nothing but dirt outside.  It gets tracked everywhere and would be a real pain to get out of carpet.  Same goes for laminate flooring.  I suspect it would get scratched to death in short order.  Leaning toward vinyl and will keep an eye out for a sale.

Making a house a home:

I have been gradually replacing some of the furniture I left behind.  Now I have throw rugs, a dresser, queen size bed, computer table, book cases and pictures in the bedroom.  The bedroom is as big as my old living room, so it has enough room for the bed, dresser and computer setup.  Very nice setup...  will post some inside pictures when I get completely unpacked and can clean up all the tools and clutter (yea right :-)

More to come...

The house

The realtor has some pictures of the property before the sale.  She will send them along and I will select a couple to post here.  This is one I found on-line (grainy picture, but you get a sense of the condition).

The house after the first month

These are some pictures I took before the major landscaping project.  At this point in time I have been working on the house for one month.  More pictures are now posted following the the landscaping project.

The front of the house faces the corner of the lot, basically east south east.  It cleaned up nicely after removing the gravel and replacing the skirt.  Too bad I didn't make any process pictures.

This is the east side of the house.  Note the raised area under the window in front of the shirt with rocks on top.  It is about 8 - 10 inches higher than the ground level.  This replaces the ugly gravel and will divert any heavy runoff to the back of the property.  The next picture is of the source of the runoff and the effort to divert it.

This is the view from the road leading to the property.  Basically everything in view, except the foreground fenced area, is the property.

The back part of the property looking west.  The trees in the foreground are on the property, The mansion in the background is unoccupied, but not in foreclosure.  The son of the man that homesteaded the valley owns it.

The mountains to the west are on the other side of the valley ~ 4 mi away

This mountain is an old volcanic cone to the north west

View to the east. Mt. Lemon is the tallest mountain on the left at 9,000 feet
(the mountains on the right look taller but are actually just closer)

A close up view of a few of the cacti near by.

One of many spectacular sunsets

This is a lens cloud over Mt. Lemon at sunrise.  Lenticular clouds, technically known as altocumulus standing lenticularis, are stationary lens-shaped clouds that form at high altitudes.

The landscaping project:

These are pictures taken after the landscaping project.  The entire project is intended to adjust the landscape to divert rain runoff.  Overall the length of the project is 80 paces or about 240 feet.

This is a picture of the source of the runoff.  The center of the picture is the wash on the other side of the road and gravel fill used by the neighbors to fill a deep depression.  All the dirt along the fence was moved by hand!

This pile of gravel came from the front of the house.  Took about 3 days using buckets and a shovel.  Bigger than it looks, I estimate it at about 5 tons!

This pile of gravel came from around the rest of the house.  The Kubota moved all this.  It is a bigger pile, but only took a few hours.

Kubota tractor.  Pretty small machine, but does a lot of work for it's size.

All the shaded dirt fills a depression around the natural path of the wash from the road.  The dark shadow top left is from the side of the house.  All this fill connects with fill on the roadside, diverting the flow between the two bushes, around a bend toward the back of the property.  It is about 130 feet from the bushes to the natural wash across the back of the property.  Subsequent pictures follow the path described.

This is the fill added beside the road to divert runoff to a natural wash.  It connects to the fill added in the next picture.

This is the natural wash that was built up with fill.  The intent is to turn the path of runoff toward the wash behind the house. It connects to the fill added in the next picture.

This is some of the fill added along the side of the house.  It connects to the fill added in the next picture.

This is a view of the runoff path after adding several tons of fill.  The shadow along the path is about 1 foot tall.  There is a natural wash at the end of the fill where water can flow harmlessly across the back of the property.

This view starts a review of the fill project result.  The darker shaded dirt fills depressions running up to the front steps that would have been flooded in the past.  In the near foreground you can see another project.  This effort fortifies the base of the skirt and diverts rain water from the roof to the yard.  Ironically, the gravel that was so ugly scattered all over the yard looks clean and neat here.

Continuing to turn the view, this covers a large part of the front yard where runoff flowed in the past

Continuing to turn the view, this covers the rest of the front yard.  The majority of the dirt for fill came from a rise in the middle of this area.  You can also see the rest of the fortified skirt / drainage along side the house.

So this is the result... a nice clean presentation of the house on the land with no more ugly gravel scattered all over. The ugly gravel removal is cosmetic of course, but certainly has made a huge difference.  The neighbors are all expressing appreciation :-)

Two windows in the living room (one covered one open & both open)

View of the insulation folded and put away & the dining room windows