Monday, June 27, 2011.

We've lost out on the log cabin because the home inspection revealed too many things that really needed to be done. So now we have found a Montana looking outside house with wood siding outside of Livingston on top of a rocky hill overlooking the Yellowstone River. The house has rights along with 10 other houses to a 73 acre island in the Yellowstone River for camping, hunting and fishing. the house needs to be stained, better paint colors inside, replace the pergo flooring in the downstairs bedrooms, replace the carpet downstairs (it has very little padding and is stretched), knock out the kitchen wall and produce a new footprint for it. The kitchen is way too small and has the same cabinets my first house on Crows Nest had. We will eventually have to replace the appliances as they wear out, because they are pretty old. And I'd really like a gas stove!
It'll be harder to decorate it Montana style because it doesn't have the rough hewn circular sawn hardwood floors or the log walls. The walls are sheet rock. Maybe I can paint the bedroom walls cappuchino and the downstairs hall a sage green. We need to replace the family room carpet; it looks like indoor outdoor carpet and isn't nicely padded.
Outside are many shrubs and rose bushes that probably need to be trimmed. They have planted yellow and blue iris and have several bird feeders. Some have residents. Where the foundation meets the ground is covered with flagstone. It has a 2 car garage also and is close enough to the house that the outside area could be enclosed into a breezeway or mud room. We could buy a greenhouse to put on the only flat part of the lot. The lot overlooks a farm with horses.
The owner of the Ennis RV Park suggested we buy caragana for a hedge and pots tells as a flowering shrub. The pine trees up here are dying from a pine beetle, so it's better to plant blue spruce or fir trees.
We ate at the McCallister's Inn again, but the same bartender that we had last time was off. we ran into him in the Walmart in Bozeman on Sunday afternoon. He has 5 children, 4 girls and 1 boy. The boy is right in the middle. They live around Ennis Lake and now is not the time to fish there. The lake is too full of melted snow run off.