Our First Investment: Sweat Equity, Part II

This picture shows how we started this project: by removing the awful siding. I was surprised to find that the guesthouse was very well insulated, which explains why it doesn't get terribly hot in the summer (I can work in there without dying of heat). The siding was nailed, screwed down, and otherwise made impermeable, so it took us forever just to get the siding off this one side, and I was covered with an uncomfortable amount of dirt, spider webs and termite droppings (yes, ewww!!!).

In Tucson termites are ubiquitous. We are currently ignoring the termite problem in our own house until we have enough money saved we can pay to get it treated outright. That might take a couple months, but since they've been eating my house for more than 2 years, 2 months probably won't make all that much of a difference (I may retract this when/if the roof falls in on our heads). Since the main house is made of cinderblock, and we are planning to replace the roof in the next two years, we decided to let the termites finish their lunch rather than cut their lives short with the power of American Express.

In this photo to the right, you can see that grass was growing into the insulation. In Tucson, bermuda grass is another ubiquitous pest. I gave up my back yard to bermuda grass after our first year here; an arroyo runs behind our house and I would have had to poison the very ground to stop the grass from coming in from under and over the fence. It just goes to show how invasive it is, that it is invading the guest house itself!

Now I have a confession to make. We spend $80 a month on a gardener and I have no plans to stop that anytime soon. I love our gardener. I want to marry our gardener. We lived with a "ghetto yard" for four years, and I cringed whenever anyone walked up our weedy, disorganized sidewalk, stepping over children's things, to get to our door. Finally I noticed an older gentleman who took care of several yards in our neighborhood, and asked what he charged. He actually charges $40 a month for just the front yard, but finally we asked him to do the back yard too. It's a steal. He seems to be perfectly happy charging a minuscule amount for what seems like a herculean task to me. I will give up fashion and lattes to keep my gardener. Some things are simply worth the money. This morning I found my back yard freshly raked, all the wood from the siding stacked against the fence, and several tools my sexy husband left lying in the yard (he is famous for this) stacked on a picnic table. Did I mention I want to marry my gardener? If only because now I can lovingly place those tools where they are supposed to go. Ahem! Good thing this is an anonymous blog. :)

This last photograph is sort of a before picture. It's not before before -- that picture is at the bottom, in another post. As you can see from this photo, however, we added the pathway and some trees. We also poured a real porch for the guesthouse (it was just cinderblocks, and there was no covered porch on the back of the house, when we first purchased this property). I think it is starting to look nice and our live Christmas trees we planted 4 years ago are getting big enough to look like real trees and not seedlings. I hope this makes a nice place for some starving student (and that all this work pays off).