We are finally settled enough that I felt like I could take a few minutes and focus on some gardening today!

So I got some seeds started inside for a little later in the summer.  It’s really hard to believe that it is May 21st and I am just starting my first seeds of the season.  In 2012 my first seeds went in on January 14th!  Ugh!!!  I have really missed gardening for the last 7 months as we have gone through this move.

Here’s where the seed starter will be in the new house.  The only spot we could find was in the garage. (As you can see the garage is still a mess)  The good thing about it is the seed starting rack is easy to get to and right by a nice bright window for some added natural light.  I’m a little worried about my late winter seedlings as the garage is sure to be pretty cold in January and February.  So we will have to see what we can do about that in 6 months.

Of course it’s very late to be starting any seeds indoors but there are a few things I wanted to get going:

1.  Summer Crisp Lettuce (Nevada) – 8 Cells

2.  Cabbage (Golden Acre) – 4 cells

3.  Kale (Vates) – 4 cells (I’m excited about this one as these are my first saved seeds, read more by clicking here)

4.  Kale (Luciano) – 4 cells

5.  Chives – 2 cells

6.  Parsley – 2 cells

The cabbage, chives and parsley are all experiments.  I’m worried it’s too late for the cabbage (and too early for fall starts), but figured it was worth a try.  The parsley is for the fall cold frames and I’m just hoping to get some chives established this year for next years harvest.

I dutifully recorded what I started in my garden journal.  If you don’t use a garden journal you are sure missing out.  I have been keeping one for 5 years now and it sure makes planning and record keeping easy!  (Click here to read more about my garden journal.)

We are hoping tomorrow we can get over to our borrowed garden and get all our summer crops planted!!

So now that we are finally closed on our new home I thought I would give you guys a little perspective on what it is like to buy a home that is a “short sale”.  I’m writing this article from the perspective of a buyer.  For the last 15 years I have been working in the accounting side of the real estate industry so I’m more familiar with how a short sale works than a lot of folks, but I am by no means an expert.  I’m writing this to give you guys a little taste of the process in case buying a short sale home is something you may be interested in.

There are four things I’m going to cover today: First, what is a “short sale”, second the offer process, third the bank approval process and forth other issues that can come up.

First off the word “short” in short sale has nothing to do with time.  In fact the process is not “short” at all.  A short sale refers to a home that is being sold for less than the amount owed on the home.  So the perfect example would be a home purchased in 2006 for $300,000, with a mortgage of $275,000.  Now after the “housing bubble” burst in 2008/2009 the home may only be worth $240,000.  So the owners of the home cannot sell it for what it is worth.  In many cases the mortgaging bank maybe willing to take a loss on the home.  So the bank will let the home be sold for $240,000 and they will “forgive’ the additional $35,000 in debt.

Often, but not always, a short sale home will be in distress.  The owner may be having trouble paying the mortgage and the bank is willing to do a short sale to get the distressed loan off it’s books,  instead of foreclosing on the home.

So why would you want to buy a short sale?  Well in our case we chose to buy our house because it was such a good deal.  Often there will be an additional discount built into the price of a short sale home.  In our case we got our home at about 90% of market value so that made it worth the wait.  This will not always be the case but you can often find a nice home at a really good price if you are willing and able to wait through the process.  Usually the home owner is still living in the home and caring for it so you have that advantage as well.  A foreclosure home may often be abandoned and not well cared for.

The offer process is the next topic that is very unique with many short sales.  In order to attract buyers, listing agents of short sale homes will some times list the home for a price that is much lower than what they actually expect to get.  In our case the home was listed for over $50,000 less than it was worth.  This practice brings a lot of interest quickly.  If the home is in good shape and is a good value there will be many offers.  So you need to do your homework quickly and decide what you are willing to pay.  This isn’t a traditional bidding process.  You may only get one chance for your offer to be considered so make it  your best.  But don’t allow that fact to cause you to over bid.

The real estate market in our town is currently has a lot of short sales (in fact at the time we made our offer the only homes for sale in our target area were short sales), so we looked at several and we have friends who have been as well.  I know of short sale homes in our town that have had over 25 offers within the first few days.  So don’t plan on coming in with a low ball offer and walking away with a steal.  Offer your best price and see what happens.  After all the offers are in the owner of the home chooses the best offer and that offer is submitted to the bank for approval.

The bank approval process is where most of the time and frustration comes on a short sale home.  Before the home can be sold the bank has to approve the sales price.  Many banks are not in a hurry to do this.  In our case it took 60 days for the bank to approve the deal.  From everything we have heard from our agent and many others that is actually fairly quick!  Many times you will be waiting 90 days or more (in fact I know of someone that has the primary offer on a home that has been waiting 6 months!).  I really have no idea why it takes this long.  While you are waiting expect all kinds of ups and downs.  We must have heard the words “we should hear something by next week” 15 times!!!!

Once the bank approval is in the closing should move forward fairly quickly with around a 30 day closing time frame.  So if you are really lucky you might be looking at a 3 month process.  But it could easily be 4 to 6 months from the time you made the offer till the day you close.  Remember though there is usually a price discount built in to help compensate you for the wait.

There is one question you should ask when you get an accepted offer.  Often if folks are having a hard time paying their mortgage they may be struggling with other things as well.  You would do well to find out if the sellers are in bankruptcy.  Bankruptcy adds an additional wrinkle to the process.  If the owners are in bankruptcy then there will be an additional delay once the bank approval is received.  The bankruptcy court will also need to approve the sale.  Usually that approval is just a formality but the wheels of government move slowly and this can add 30 or more days to the process.  Be sure you ask that question of the listing agent once you know your offer is the winning bid.  You don’t want to wait 3 months for bank approval, just to find out that you are going to have to wait another 30 days for court approval.  It’s better to know that up front.

So if you are going to make an offer on a short sale you need to go into the process with your eyes wide open.  It can easily take 4 months or more to close on the home.  In our case we ended up being 6 1/2 months from the day we made the offer to the day we closed on the home.  We were in the lucky position of having a great little apartment in my parents basement to live in.  That made it cheap and easy for us to wait out the time.  But you need to think really hard about an offer on a short sale if you don’t have somewhere to wait it out.

We love our new little home and the area it is in.  With a some minor work (mostly paint and flooring) we will have a beautiful home that is exact size we wanted in the area we wanted.  But would we do it again???   Well . . . probably (if you ask Mrs. Stoney you would get a big NO)!  We knew this was going to be a long frustrating process when we started.  But wow what an emotional roller coaster. The constant “we should hear something from the bank (or attorney, or trustee, or judge) next week” is pretty exhausting.  I can’t count the times we though we had a closing date set only to see it move back another week because someone didn’t get something done.  The only thing that kept us going through the whole process was how we felt when we first saw the house.  Mrs. Stoney and I left our first showing with a feeling that this was the place for our family and every time we went back that “feeling” was confirmed!  And that feeling kept us on track through the process.  Buying a short sale home is not for the faint of heart and it is not for everyone, but if you are willing to wait a bit you can come out of the process with a nice place at a nice price!!

I’d love your input as well, please feel free to leave comments if you have had an experience buying a short sale home!!

Well after 5 weeks of hard work we are finally living in the new home.  When we bought the house it was live-able, but just barely.  So we decided to use the fact that we were not in any real rush to move in to our advantage.  We have spent the last 5 weeks painting, installing new flooring, adding new trim and fixtures.  And after a lot of work and going way over budget we have a very beautiful home.  Some time soon I will take you on a tour and show you some before and after pictures.

Now that we are living in the house I felt like today was a good time to get started on the garden.

Here’s where the garden will go.  When we are all finished the garden will take up about 1200 square feet.  We plan on having 6 or 7 beds that will each be about 4 x 28 feet long with one foot paths between.  That’s the goal.  This year I would just be happy if we could get all the grass dug out and the ground tilled.

We are so late in the year that we have abandoned all hope of a summer garden here at home.  Instead we hope to have everything ready for our fall and winter garden.  A friend of ours who as a large (1.5 acre) garden has very generously offered to let us use some of his ground to plant our summer crops.  I’m going to visit with him on Wednesday and see how much space he can offer.  I’m hoping to have enough space for our tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and summer squash (and possibly some melons).

But we are under the gun to get some garden space available.  I ordered Blackberries, raspberries and strawberries from Miller Nurseries back in mid March when we thought were going to close.  I was able to delay the strawberry plants until this week.  But the raspberries have been sitting around in the garage for 2 weeks now.

So this evening I started the big task of tearing out the sod.  What you see here took me about 45 minuets of work.  I plan on renting a sod cutter to do the bulk of the work when we are ready but for now I’m just tearing it out with a shovel!

My biggest challenge is going to be what to do with all that sod.  I’m hoping to find a neighbor who has some land and needs a hole filled or something like that.  If not I guess it will be off to the land fill as I don’t have a compost system set up yet and I doubt I will get to it this year.

I’ve seen worse soil that what we have here, but I’ve also seen much better.  It’s pretty heavy clay so I’m going to need to add a lot of organic material!  I guess what I see is pretty much to be expected after the soil has been buried under grass for 15 years.  We are very excited to get started on our new garden.  I look forward to the challenge of growing more food on less land!  We hope to be topping out over 1000 pounds in a few years when the fruit trees start bearing!  And we hope to do that on 1/2 the land we had before!!

Finally after being homeless for 5 1/2 months we are happy to announce that we have closed on our new home!!  Boy what a struggle to get this house closed.  It was a short sale and it took 5 months and 10 days from the day we made the offer till the day it closed.  Wow, we are mentally and spiritually worn out!  But now we are very excited to start this next faze of our life.  So here’s the first shot of our new home!

It’s a cute 2500 square foot home on about a quarter of an acre.  It is only a mile down the road from our old house so the kids will all be able to stay in their same schools and we will still be close to all our friends.  This house offers some real advantages to our family.  First it’s all finished, our old home  had almost 1300 square feet unfinished. But even though this house is almost 1000 square feet smaller that our old house we will have more finished square feet.  Second the yard is a more manageable size.  The yard at the old Stoney Acres was beautiful, but to keep it that way was a lot of work (in the summer we would often spent 10 hours a week each working on the yard).  The new Stoney Acres will have almost as much garden space but a ton less grass and about a million fewer trees.  We will be able to focus on making our vegetable garden and small orchard very productive and we won’t have to worry any more about weeding all those flower beds!!  Third we got a great deal on this house.  It is in need of some TLC, that combined with the smaller yard and house (not to mention today’s great interest rates) mean we have a much smaller mortgage with a payment that is close to half what we were paying before!!

Now the fun part begins.  Before we can move in we have to paint and put all new flooring in.  While we are at it were are going to update all of the trim and make some other major repairs.  The garden will go in a very sunny part of the back yard that is currently grass, so we have a lot of work to do there as well.  So look forward to a bunch of post showing the progress.

DIY Friday is a feature that pops up every once and a while here on Stoney Acres.  We are BIG do it yourselfers around here so we will try to share some of our projects and trick that we have learned over the years.

Baking Soda and Vinegar are used a lot around our place.  We really are not big on chemicals so soda and vinegar are used in place of cleaning chemicals and for many other uses.  One of our favorites is using baking soda and vinegar to clean drains.

Plugged or slow drains are a way of life for us.  With 4 girls in the family all with long hair the shower drains and bathroom sink drains are always getting clogged!

Most commercial cleaners are made with lye.  Which is poisonous, rough on your pipes and really bad for the environment.   So we have found an organic method that works pretty well and doesn’t damage your pipes or put our families health at risk.

Here’s what you do:

1.  If possible take the drain screen off and try and get some of the hair out first.  This isn’t always possible so don’t kill yourself trying to figure out how to get the drain cover off.

2.  Slowly pour a big pot of boiling water down the drain and let it drain down.

3.  Pour 1/2 cup of baking soda down the drain and let it sit for 5 minutes.

4.  Add 1/2 to 1 cup of vinegar to the drain.  Quickly cover the drain with a towel and let it sit and bubble for 15 minutes.

5.  Next pour another pot of boiling water slowly down the drain.

6.  Repeat the whole process a couple of times if necessary.

7.  For really stubborn drains a plunger may help the process along.

Now I will be honest, we have never tried this on a drain that is 100% blocked.  I think you would need to get rid of any standing water and at least be able to get a little water flowing before you could really try this.  But it works wonders on slow drains.  It has never failed us on clearing out a very slow drain.  Some times it may take a treatment or two but it always gets the job done!

What other uses do you guys have for baking soda or vinegar.  I’d love to hear your suggestions in the comments section!!

Hi guys.  We are still alive here at Stoney Acres, but we are still homeless.  The home we have an offer on is a short sale (someday I will have to post a little advice column about buying a short sale home).  Anyway, every day for the last 6 weeks we have been hearing the same thing “only a few more days”.  Ugh!!!  This process keeps dragging on and on!

We made the offer on this home 5 months ago today, and still it sits vacant and mocking us!

The hold up is some legal problems with the seller.  Their attorney messed up some paperwork and that mistake keeps delaying things.  We are really hopeful that we will get closed within the next week.  We love the house so much and the price is really great and that has kept us around.  But boy are we ready to get out of this apartment and back into a house!

I feel bad knowing there is no way we will get a spring garden in now.  The home currently doesn’t have a garden so we are planning on taking out the grass on about 1/2 of the backyard.  But that will be a lot of work.  We will be lucky now to have the garden ready for tomatoes and other summer crops in May.

Keep us in your prayers and hopefully very soon we will have at least part of an acre to blog about at Stoney Acres!!

Still no final word on the house!  But we think we are getting close!!

I have to take a minute to brag about the Valentines boxes Mrs. Stoney made for the girls this year.  Before I show you the photos you need to know something about Mrs. Stoney.  When it comes to projects for the kids she is kind of an over achiever!!  She and the two little girls have spent hours together over the last week working on these boxes!!  The kids are really blessed to have a mom that wants to spend her free time working on things like this!

So here’s Valentines box number one.  This first one is a gum ball machine.  It’s made out of a glass bowl and a clay pot saucer.

And here’s Valentines box number two.  Our youngest wanted the house from the Disney movie Up.  This one took hours to build paint and decorate!

I’m so glad the kids have such an awesome mom that loves to do these kinds of projects with them.  This is the 20th Valentines day that Mrs. Stoney and I have been together, in fact this Valentines day is the 20th anniversary of our 2nd date!!  I love you sweetheart, Happy Valentines Day!!

The Salt Lake City area is famous for cold weather and crappy air quality in January.  This year is especially bad.  Because we are in a mountain valley the cold air gets trapped by high pressure and our air gets smoggy and gross!  In the past week we have seen temperatures below zero several nights and today will be the first day in a week that our day time temperatures will be over 25.

We are still stuck in our little basement apartment.   For those of you who don’t know we sold our house in November and we are waiting to get a deal to go through on a home we put an offer on just up the street from our old place.   The home we are buying is a short sale.  Every day our real estate agents tell us we should hear something tomorrow and every day it gets pushed back!!  I will have to write a whole post about our experience in buying a short sale home.  Just a hint, “short” has nothing to do with the process!!  We are now almost 90 days into this and it is looking like we may be another 30 at least.  It’s a good thing we are getting such a good deal on this home or we would bail for sure!!

I never thought I would say this but both Mrs. Stoney and I are getting a little bored.  We are use to having a big home to clean and take care of along with a yard and chickens.  Even in the winter time we are use to many projects to keep us busy.  But here in our little apartment there just isn’t much for us to do.  We have enjoyed having more time to read and more time to spend with the kids but I have to admit we are getting a little restless.  The super cold temperatures haven’t helped as we are stuck inside most days!  Ah well, I guess we should enjoy it because once we move into the new place we will have a lot of remodeling projects to keep us busy!!

So 2012 was a good year in the garden, but not our best.  We ended up with 637.25 pounds of produce, which is about average for us but far short of last years record 750 pounds.  I won’t bore you with a breakdown of our total in this post, if you are interested in seeing the detail of our 637 pounds you can go to our 2012 Garden Totals page by clicking here.

Last week I gave you a breakdown of all the new crops we grew in 2012.  In this post I thought I’d give you a run down of some of the real “winner” crops for the year along with a couple of the failures as well.  Let’s start out with the “Winners”:

Peas

The spring of 2012 was our best year for peas!!  We love home grown peas and we have been looking for a harvest like this since we move to Riverton.  The climate where we lived was just different enough that it really took me a long time to figure out when was the best time to plant peas.

This year we finally got it right.  We planted in the main garden on March 24th.  I think the combination of location and the new drip irrigation system did wonders for our pea harvest.  We ended up with just shy of 28 pounds of peas this year.  That’s twice the yield of 2011 and our biggest harvest ever.

In addition to the spring pea crop we were also able to have a successful fall crop as well.  Again timing was everything, we planted the fall peas on July 21st and we had a small crop ready before the frost and cold weather came in October.  Nothing spectacular but enough to keep us happy!

Melons

Our melon crop was a real highlight for us this year.  We love all kinds of melons and we decided several years ago that we would pretty much limit ourselves to only eating our home grown melons or melons from the local farmers market.  The supermarket melons are just not up to the same standard so it’s home grown for us.  This year we dedicated more space to melons than we have in years past and it paid off big time in our yield.  We harvested a total of  106 pounds of three types of melons.

Cantaloupes were are smallest producers this year.  We had a total of 18 pounds only about 6 melons from 3 plants.  To be honest that was about right for me.  Maybe if we would have had 2 or 3 melons we would have been happier, but I think we will shoot for that 20 to 25 pound mark from now on.

Crenshaw melons were our next largest producer we ended up with about 21 pounds of these.  We had 3 melons that didn’t quite ripen and we were in the midst of moving and I just ignored them and left them in the garden.  Had I brought them in and let them ripen on the counter we would have had over 30 pounds.  We love this melon and will be growing it every year now.  If you’d like to read more about them you can click here.

Watermelons were our biggest producer.  We had 67 pounds of water melon and we could have eaten even more.  We can only grow crimson sweet melons in Utah because of our short season.  These are a small “refrigerator”  type melon.  Most weight in at between 5 to 8 pounds with our biggest this year being 13 pounds.  I have no idea how many melons we harvested, I would say around 15, plus we lost 5 or 6 others when I goofed and left the water running over night and caused them to split.

We doubled our production of melons this year and couldn’t be happier!!!

Sweet Peppers

I’ve only been growing sweet peppers seriously for 4 or 5 seasons and I finally got it right this year.  We had almost 24 pounds of peppers, which meant we had plenty for fresh eating and we have a freezer full of them for the winter months.

Pumpkins

We are not big pumpkin eaters.  We grow our pumpkins for decoration and jack-o-lanterns and as winter feed for our chickens.  We had a good crop this year despite the struggle we had with wilt.  87 pounds is a good year for us.  Not our best but very good!  Given the fact that we most likely won’t have chickens again for a while means we won’t be growing nearly this main in the future!

Tomatoes

We had an average year for tomatoes.  102 pounds is about the same as last year, which given how hot and dry we were this year is really not to bad!  We did have tomatoes 6 weeks earlier this year than we ever have before because of the addition of Early Girl tomatoes to  our line up!

Carrots

As usual our carrot crop shined again this year.  In fact carrots are the only fresh veggies we still have right now.  We had 52 pounds of carrots total this year.  That was a good solid year!

The Looser’s!!

Not everything was roses this year in our garden.  The biggest looser for us were the potatoes.  We planted them in a new bed on the south side of the house and that bed was just to hot and dry for potatoes.  Our totals were down almost 175 pounds for the year, and that made the biggest difference in our annual total.  Had our potato crop come in even close to last years totals we would have had a record year!

Our onion crop was also a big disappointment this year.  We only had about 20 pounds this year compared to 70 in 2011.  Part of that was on purpose.  70 pounds was a lot of onions, but we were hoping for 40 or so pounds this year, but the early spring heat really effected our crop.  We ended up with a lot of small really strong onions.  Oh well there’s always next year.

Other highlights

We also had a good year with broccoli and cabbage and got spring and fall crops of each!  Our fall lettuce crop was fantastic again this year and we did really well with several of our smaller crops like cucumbers, zucchini and patty pan squash.

One of the biggest highlights of the year came from our seed starting.  Every plant in our garden was either sown from seed or was planted with starts that we grew ourselves. The only exception to that was the 1 early girl tomato start that I bought from a local nursery, I also bought 6 broccoli starts in the fall because I was afraid mine were started too late.  But it ended up that my starts produced and the nursery stock didn’t.  Anyway I was super proud of my starts this year and the fact that I didn’t have to rely on the local nursery for my starts!!

Well 2012 has come to and end and Stoney Acres is going through a ton of big changes.  Next years garden will be at a whole new house (good news coming soon on the new house).  And we will really be starting from scratch but I’m looking forward to new changes and fun new challenges for 2013!!  Happy New Year!!

So the lack of a house has kept us from some of our family traditions, like tons of outdoor Christmas Lights and a billion decorations around the house.  But it hasn’t kept us from one of our favorites.

A few days before Christmas every year Mrs. Stoney makes gingerbread houses.  Then on Christmas Eve each of the kids gets to decorate one.

We have done this every year since our oldest was was about 2 years old so this is our 15th year of making gingerbread houses.  Usually Grandma and Grandpa come over to help!

This has become a favorite of the kids, even the teenagers love it  and we have a blast decorating them.  It seems to keep everyone distracted from the pending presents.

As the kids have gotten older they have gotten better with their decorating.  This year was by far the best year yet!!!

After we finish the candy houses, the kids get to open up two presents, one is always PJ’s, the other is what we call a “pinch, rattle, and shake”.  This is a present that usually shows up under the tree a couple of days before Christmas.  This is the only present under the tree that the kids are allowed to touch, in fact like the name says the kids can pinch, rattle and shake this one and try to guess what it is.

After these two presents we sit under the Christmas tree and read “The Polar Express” and then hang our stockings and leave some cookies out for Santa.  We are also always sure to check the NORAD website to see where Santa is before we go to bed!!

In the morning before anything else we sit on Mom and Dads bed and read the Christmas story from Luke Chapter 2.  Then we have a fun day of presents and family time!  We try to keep out meals simple on Christmas so that Mom and Dad have plenty of time to be with the kids!

I hope you all enjoy your own Christmas Traditions!  Have a very Merry Christmas!!!