Rain, Mud and East Texas Engineering

The heavy rain that was so uncharacteristic of Texas last year seems to be continuing.  We have had only a couple of dry days, and little sunshine, in the week that we have been here.  The rest have been rainy, drizzly, or foggy.  Seems that we have a stationary warm front in East Texas.

The result is mud.  We expected that at the home building site, but we also have mud in the driveway at the mobile home where we are staying.  The surface is solid, but there is a thin layer of mud on top that tracks into vehicles and the house.

We took the RV in for a safety inspection this morning, and we stirred up a mud hole getting in and out of the parking spot.  We looked at buying a load of gravel, but that would cost over $400, and we are told that it would simply sink into the mud anyway if we lay it down before the ground dries.  So we took the East Texas engineering approach and laid down scrap plywood from our building site to support RV wheels.  Looks bad, but its is only temporary.

Another View of the New Home

This view shows the house from the small lagoon on the lake shown in the previous post.  The house will be Texas style with a porch that runs around most of the house.  The roof will be corrugated sheet metal and the walls will be mostly covered with Texas Hill Country stone.  We have a screened sleeping porch off the left side of the house as shown in the photo and a second floor deck above the porch. The dormer in the middle of the house encloses a vaulted family room.

Home Construction

Our home is now framed and pretty much dried in.  The view of the lake is going to be wonderful.  Here is a view of the lake from the second floor deck on the west side of the house.  More views of the home construction can be found here.

Fighting the Bureaucratic Wars (Continued)

Today we successfully completed registration of our minivan and Jeep Rubicon and officially became Texans by successfully obtaining Texas drivers licenses.  There were only two additinal hitches.  The hassle we went through to obtain evidence that we had paid sales tax on the Rubicon and minivan in Michigan was for nought.  We still had to pay a $90 new resident fee.  The other was that neither agency would accept an out of state check, and we were forced to use cash and a credit card.  The credit card cost us an additional fee of 2.5%.  Oh well, we are Texas citizens now, y'all.

Now all that remains is to get a safety inspection on the motor home and register it and the Jeep TJ.

Thank You, Rick

We hired our friend, Rick, who we know from the Wolverine Four Wheelers, to help us with the move.  Rick did as masterful job of loading our belongings, filling every nook and cranny with something.  We needed every square inch and filled the truck to the door.  Rick drove the truck the entire distance from Michigan to Texas.

After a nice visit, sprinkled liberally with Rick's famous stories, and several meals of local fare, including barbecue and Mexican food, we took Rick to Houston on Sunday to fly back to Michigan. 

Thanks, Rick!  We appreciate your help and value your friendship!

Fighting the Bureaucratic Wars

Texas requires that new residents register their vehicles and get a drivers license within 30 days of arrival.  We knew we had to get a vehicle inspection before we could register, and Monday we headed down in the Town and Country minivan and 07 Wrangler Rubicon to a muffler shop in Trinity for an inspection.  They told us we needed proof of insurance before they would do the inspection.  Fortunately, Cec had her insurance certificate, and they inspected the minivan.  The Rubicon would have to wait.

Later that day we had to go to the builder's supply store to look at windows.  Since the Texas Department of Public Safety driver's license office was right on the way, we decided to stop there.  Closed.  Martin Luther King Day.   

The next day we took the Rubicon and 97 Wrangler TJ to the muffler shop and got them inspected.  We asked about the motor home, which they said they could do.  However, they cautioned that turning the rig around in their lot would be difficult and that we should come before 10 o'clock so we could exit through Church's Fried Chicken parking lot before they open.  Then they dropped the other shoe.  They probably would be out of inspection stickers on Wednesday and would not get any new ones in due to delays caused by the King holiday. 

On Tuesday we also returned to the driver's license office.  It was open, but we discovered that we needed our Social Security cards in addition to proof of insurance, and our vehicles had to be registered before we could be licensed to drive them!  

We returned to Riverside to retrieve our Social Security cards.  On the way back I remembered that we might be able to save the $90 new resident fee for auto registration if we could prove that we had paid sales tax on our vehicles in Michigan.  So we needed to find our sales receipts also. 

My social security card was in my business papers that I had kept aside for the move, but Cec had put hers in a file box that had arrived on the moving truck.  We went to our storage barn at our new home site to search through the chaos there to find her Social Security card and proof of sales tax payment.  Luckily Cec pretty quickly located her social security card and sales receipt for the minivan.  However, I could not find the file box containing all my auto papers.  They were buried under stacks and stacks of heavy boxes.  Better to pay the $90 than move all that mess.   We decided to concentrate on the minivan and Rubicon and forget about registering the motor home and TJ Jeep until we could get access to the files.  They won't be driven on the road for a while anyway.

Cec suggested that I might be able to obtain a copy of the receipt for the Rubicon from the dealer since we bought it less than a year ago.  So we called Golling Chrysler Jeep in Michigan, and amazingly my salesman had a copy.  The only problem was getting it to us.  We do not have a fax machine, and mail was unavailable for two reasons: (1) we do not have a mailbox up at our new address yet, and (2) we did not have a key to the post office box we share with Cec's mom.  She is out of town until early February, and we could not find the other key here even with her help.  So we decided to have the fax sent to Office Depot in Huntsville.  

Off to Home Depot to get the fax and then to the courthouse annex to register the vehicles.  There were only two minor problems.  We had failed to bring our file folder with vehicle titles, and we had to show proof of Texas insurance.  The still-in-effect Michigan insurance was not acceptable.

So off to the insurance agent's office to get proof of Texas insurance.  We had already made arrangements for Texas insurance, but we had not received the confirmation in the mail.  It might be there, but recall that we cannot access the post office box for lack of a key.

So we think we have everything we need now.  We'll report on that later. 

Off to Texas!

We loaded our possessions in a 26' Penske rental truck on Monday and Tuesday with the help of our friend Rick from the Wolverine Four Wheelers and headed to Texas.  Rick drove the truck with Lee navigating, and Cec followed along behind in the Town and Country minivan.  We flat-towed the Jeep Wrangler behind the truck.

We spend the first night at Hartland, MI near where Rick lives, and he joined us Wednesday morning for the trip.  We decided to take I75 south out of the Detroit area so Cec could stop at her favorite Goodwill store in Troy, OH.  Cec loves to discover treasures at second hand stores. We then continued through Cincinnati, Louisville and Nashville.  We stopped at a small town just west of Nashville for the night.

On Thursday we drove through Memphis and Little Rock.  After stopping in Texarkana, Texas for dinner, we decided to drive on and reached our trailer at Riverside where Cec's mom, Joanne, lives about 11:30 PM.   Joanne was in Nebraska for a funeral, and we had to get everything turned on before we got to bed.  We did not set the alarm clock the next morning.

We got up  on Friday and took the truck down to the new home site to unload it in our storage building.  Our builder called and offered to send his crew over to help us.  Three guys arrived in about an hour, and we got the truck unloaded in a couple of hours.  We need to unload a small freezer and sewing machine at Joanne's trailer, and we can then turn the truck in.

My old college friend Darrell will be visiting us on Saturday and Sunday.  Late Sunday we take Rick to the airport for the trip back to Michigan.

It is great to be home, even though our new house will not be completed until spring.  We will live in the trailer with Joanne and in our motor home, which is parked adjacent the mobile home.