Articles by mgedwards

New photos…finally!

Are you tired of seeing photos of bananas in various stages of ripening?  Well, I am too!  I finally had a chance to put up some new photos.  I put up some photos from our recent trip to Machu Picchu in Peru.  We spent some time there in mid-March and had a wonderful time.  Machu Picchu truly is an amazing place and one of the New Seven Wonders of the World.  If you ever have a chance to visit Peru and Machu Picchu, I highly recommend it. 
 
Over the next few days I will try to post some more photo albums and catch up with photos of South America and Paraguay.

The “lease renewal” ritual

We have a couple of properties.  One is located in the Seattle area managed by a property management company; the other is in the Washington, D.C. area and managed by us remotely from Paraguay.  Each year about this time we go through an odd mating ritual known as the "lease renewal."  We would love to have long-term tenants in both places, but alas, we have to lease them from year to year.  Our Seattle property is leased by a company that provides corporate housing for a major corporation.  They take good care of the house and are dependable, although they keep us on the hook from year to year and renegotiate at the last minute.  The property management company does a decent job taking care of our Seattle place, but they charge a large fee up front each year for "finding" a tenant that renews the contract each year, and they charge a monthly service fee to boot.  It adds up.  We don’t have many headaches with the place but don’t see as much rent as we would like. 
 
Because we manage the Virginia property ourselves, we don’t have to pay a property management company to manage the property (we retain a local legal representative as required by law but manage it virtually ourselves — well, I do anyway).  The tradeoff of course is that we have to manage the property remotely.  We rent to our colleagues and have developed rapport with each of them, allowing to work together in the event of difficulties with the home.  Nevertheless, owning a rental and managing it yourself is a challenge, especially if you live thousands of miles away from the property.  Whenever the tenant needs a repair, we’re on the phone right away to get the house back in order.  Finding a new tenant is another challenge entirely.  So far we’ve been very fortunate to have lined up tenants fairly easily.  Because they’re our colleagues, we can advertise within the greater community and find someone whose timing and price match ours.  We have been very fortunate over the past three years.  We’re negotiating with prospective new tenants right now and should be able to work something out with them.  This happens every year, and each year I wonder whether I should just throw in the towel and hire a local property management company.  Then I think–why would I every want to spend so much for some company to do so little?  Doing it myself is worth the trouble.

Not quite like America

We just received one more small shipment of items from the United States.  We’ve been here over ten months and are still receiving shipments.  The reason is that my wife started working full time here and went to the states late last year for a few months of training.  Her household and personal items are still arriving via ship.  As such, we haven’t quite moved in completely even though we’re approaching the half-way point in our journey here.  I still have not finished hanging wall hangings like photos, tapestries, and pictures, leaving the house with a half-finished look and feel.  I wish I could hammer in a few nails and hang them up, but it isn’t that easy. 
 
Homes here in Paraguay are made with brick.  The walls don’t have soft materials such as insulation, wood frames, or sheetrock.  Nope, the walls are just brick with rebar reinforcements.  As such, hanging wall hangings requires drilling holes, inserting plastic anchors, and screwing in screws that serve as hangers.  I finally found a store that sells what I need and bought a few packages last night.  As is frequently the case here, finding things such as plastic anchors with screw sets is a logistical challenge (usually word of mouth and trial and error).  There are no Home Depot or Lowe’s stores around the corner.  I went to three places looking for these items and finally found some hanger sets in a grocery store.  Go figure.  Now that I have them, I need to get to work.  That will take a few hours of measuring, drilling, hammering, screwing, and hanging.  Inconvenience and spending extra time to do things that aren’t that difficult to do in the states is just one reason why I miss the United States.
 
Let me give you another example to illustrate my point.  Our bicycles arrived with the latest shipment.  I was trying to prep the tires but could not find a tire pressure guage at home that works (we have two, and they’re broken).  I’ve been to four stores here locally, including two tire shops, a bicycle shop, and a home store, and none of them sell a tire pressure guage.  I asked one store clerk what Paraguayans do to measure tire pressure, and he responded, "We go to the gas station."  OK, well, that’s fine for a car.  But what if you want to measure the tire pressure of a bicycle tire?  I guess the answer would be, "Go to Argentina!"