Finally, some good news!

Happy Saturday friends!

Whaaaaat? Good news? YES! Yippee!

Yesterday we had a third company out that said the same as the second company: a few little spots of "wood eating mold" nothing to be concerned about. He said it was a really clean crawl space and he wouldn't do anything! So, if you're looking for mold mitigation or encapsulation of your crawl space, here are my recommendations:

1. Get a few estimates.

2. Crawlspace Ninjas I'm sure would do a good job encapsulating, but upsold us to the hilt, quoting us $28,000 to put in drainage pipes, 2 sump pumps, and possibly a new dehumidifier. All bandaid fixes.

Check to see if there is water coming into your crawlspace and if there is a way to divert it. For us, there was a pretty little dry stream bed that was installed by one of the previous owners between the house and the big Japanese Maple out front. There was a downspout that diverted water into it during rain, bringing some water into the crawlspace. This is how the water ran before:

Brad just diverted the pipe to a different area and now that problem is solved. A little repointing left to do on the brick front porch and no more water in the crawlspace.

We will treat the few spots of wood eating mold as an extra precaution but as long as we keep the humidity low, the mold wouldn't grow anyway. The last two guys wouldn't even bother treating the mold because it was so little, it wasn't toxic, and it wouldn't continue to grow with our dehumidifier.

3. Our friend and realtor extraordinaire Dean Mueck (contact me if you need a realtor, she's fab and I've known her for 30 years!) told us to have Shamrock Waterproofing come out for an estimate. While we won't be using them because nothing is wrong and we've decided against encapsulation, I wanted to tell you about them because they deserve all the business! How refreshing to have a company come out and say, "It's all good, you don't need us!"

4. I was also told about another company called Natural Restoration, they were the third estimate. Also worth checking into, also honest and told us we didn't need any work!

In other good news, our insurance agent was horrified that the contents of the house were not all out yet and will be calling the contents mitigation company to get that sorted out. It seemed ridiculous that it was taking this long but they are only coming out twice a week! Happy to know it wasn't just me who thought it was taking forever!

THE RANCH:

Well these first two aren't actually from the ranch, but from the rental. I met this beautiful tree in the forest this week:

She had some words to say about not worrying so much about the state of the world right now because, "We are eternal."

On that same walk with I Love Lucy, I came across a big patch of lichen, on this stump, all over the ground in clumps, I don't usually see that!

And then at the actual farm, the squirrels are having a field day with the last two big pumpkins! At first they had made a big hole:

But by Friday:

MORE ILLUSTRATIONS:

That last one cracked me up 👆🏽. It was cute as a pencil drawing but when I went over the lines with pen I ended up looking like a little old lady! Whatever, I can still feel his little warm body in my arms when I look at that picture.

It's fun to do just ink and no color sometimes. I'm still looking for the words for this one:

One time my aunt and I were talking about past lives and she told me about one of hers, where she was a child of the trees 💜

MEMES:

"Justice is what love looks like in public." What a great quote.

And seriously, I look at my hands on my steering wheel and think, "Wow. What happened?"

OMG this made me laugh so hard, this is for my daughter Nichole who is a die hard Lions fan (they got SO CLOSE this year!!!):

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