House projects

Well in the middle of the chaos of life we were in desperate need of finding a stucco person to fix the back of our house. It was painted plywood on the second story and really starting to wear. We started the process back in March, looking for contractors. We had six come over and had prices ranging from 6500 to 14,000 :(.  We finally decided to go with someone in the middle (because the cheapest company did not have time to do our job), but then we read his reviews and checked his license and it was not good. So after six months of trying to get this figured out we were back at square one and super frustrated.  On the three day weekend we went to Laura's for a barbecue and one of her friends was showing us pictures of their bathroom remodel and I jumped all over her seeing that they had some stucco work done.  We got the name of her guy and he came the next day and gave us a bid for $5000 (not including paint) and came the next weekend and it was done!!!  It looks so nice and clean and we don't have to worry about all this rain destroying the side of our house :). He also found us a painter who was super cheap and we had them both clean up some other issues around our house. 
What a great find!  
Before....

After.....

Right around the same time our rear neighbors knocked on our door and said our fence was falling over which Ryan had been repairing to keep their dogs out so the timing was perfect because we could paint the backside of the Casita when the fence was not there. And we met our neighbors who are super nice.  
We also were exploring solar last spring but couldn't make a decision.  I joined nextdoor and they had a big discussion in September on solar and it revived my interest. So we started looking at buying options and decided to go in that direction. They are coming in the next week or two to install!