The 30% garden vinegar is called that because regular household vinegar has 5% acetic acid, and garden vinegar has (you guessed it) 30% acetic acid. The recipe for mixing it that calls for salt, kind of sterilizes the soil for anything new to grow there, so when we're spraying out the planter boxes at my mom's (she uses them to grow vegetables, but they are empty right now and dandelions like them a lot), we just use the straight 30% vinegar. Where there's some crabgrass in the front yard that is determined to keep appearing, we add the salt, since there's not supposed to be anything there at all besides barkdust. The 30% vinegar definitely kills broadleaf weeds without needing any assistance from soap or salt, but it's a post-emergent killer, not a soil sterilizer, so as new things grow one has to keep spraying the vinegar. My family and my mom's neighbors all pressed us not to use anything like RoundUp, so we went with the vinegar. We're over there working all the time and have the pump sprayer in the shed, so we can readily spray things that pop up. It will be the new owner's lookout once the house sells.
Yes, we did consider selling the house totally as is, but the problems were not cosmetic, and were very likely to cause holdups and low offers (if any offers came in at all). For one thing, my folks moved out and took what furniture was worth taking (their apartment is only about 25% smaller than their house), but that still left a lot of junky furniture (a sofa, two deteriorating armchairs, shelves, wobbly side tables, plus a huge, very old and heavy freezer that had duct tape holding the gasket on). We couldn't have sold the house with that in it, any offers would either have been contingent on it being gone, or would have been for thousands of dollars less than the value of the house just for the hassle of having to deal with it. And then there was the oil tank, which is an environmental issue and had to be removed, not to mention the black mold spot in the oak floor the size of a pizza, the old wall-to-wall carpeting that had what seemed like pee in it, and the raspberry-red walls in the bathroom. If this was just a matter of selling the house at any cost and splitting up whatever the proceeds were, with the heirs, that might still have been something we would have considered, but my mom and her husband need every dollar they can get from their house, since assisted living is so expensive. The real-estate agent said that if we put $10,000 into the clean-up, we could expect to get $50,000 more on the price, and not a lot of contingencies. So it's worth doing.
Son is not in school yet, it will be the 30th. In the meantime, we're trying to get a few summer things in, so he will feel like he had a vacation! :-)
Oops, forgot to weigh this morning, but yesterday, I was down .5 of a pound from last week. I'll check tomorrow but wouldn't be surprised if that's where I am today also. I just haven't been eating as much as I often ate in the bad old days, and have also stayed pretty active.
We got the messy weeds out of my mom's yard and the barkdust spread (by "we" I mean largely the hard-working landscaping crew). It was really hot, and every inch of the yard had weeds along with some pretty nice original landscaping (they had to be pretty alert to what to take out and what to leave in). My husband and I were there in between the crew's visits, spraying any weed that rashly popped up, with 30% garden vinegar. I felt for the landscapers because of the heat, but they got theirs back by charging $2,900 when done, $1,400 more than I originally budgeted. We couldn't have sold Mom's house if the yard looked like it originally did, though, and they did a good job. Last week we also had the removal of a 60-year-old fuel-oil tank from the basement, to the tune of $900. My how the money goes out when you want to sell a house! I've still got to deal with floor refinishers, cleaning crew and handyman, and to find a broken-window repair company and a locksmith. (Don't want their iffy lock to fail when a real-estate agent is trying to open the front door for a buyer!) Once those last things are done, though, that will be it. It will be a satisfying feeling. There wasn't money in the budget to paint the exterior (or much of the interior either), but what has been done is good.
Our son's new kitten has been a big hit, helping him ease the pain of the loss of his favorite cat in June. New kitty is a flame-point Siamese, (though mostly white still because he's so young). His name is "Agedashi," which is a way of preparing tofu squares by coating them in rice flour and frying them lightly. They're creamy inside and slightly golden outside, so the color is right, and my son always orders them at his favorite sushi restaurant. We just call the little guy Dashi (pronounced "doshi.") I posted a picture on my photo page. He's so little and light that he makes our two grown cats look like creatures from another species.
Hope everyone has a great week!