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price than the other contractors were and we awarded him the contract.
Our house construction began in about August 1960. Construc-
tion moved along nicely and we were hopeful to be in the house by
Christmas. Unfortunately for us, Finigan had other houses being built
and he used his crew on them for over a month while ours sat still. The
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in Sunset Village to our new home.
During the construction phase, Jean had visited the site every
day. She and I together visited every evening to see what had been done
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2½ percent of the construction cost. We did the job ourselves and we
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thousand dollars!
In order to have a broader patio outside the family room, we
hired a bulldozer to shave the hill farther back. Despite the fact that the
grade was about eight feet in height at the back, the soil was the same
all the way down without a single rock. Richard and I followed the deer
trails through the poison oak and we sprayed over our heads, in front of
us, and below us to kill the poison oak. We had a bulldozer come in and
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from the roots or the seeds was easily destroyed by spraying. We im-
mediately planted fruit trees on the hill so that we would have our own
home orchard.
After a few years, deer became more of a problem because they
were attracted to the vegetation planted by the homeowners in the area.
Since there were numerous deer in Tilden Park, they migrated into Hap-
py Valley very easily. I tried shooting them, naively thinking that could
end the problem, but they were replaced quickly. Each year the does
produced twin fawns, so the deer population tends to explode. I went
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had been used in heat exchangers. These were cemented in as fence
posts. We strung barbed wire strands a foot apart, seven feet high. The
deer would dive through them. We left the barbed wire in place and
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