April 2008

Homeownership is expensive. -New fence.-Paint fence and repaint deck.-Dirt, plants, equipment rental, blood sweat and tears for landscaping.-Termite treatment.-New alarm system components.-Tree trimming.-Air conditioner maintenance.-Refinancing. People always say that owning your own home is the best investment you can make! But with the way homes leach money out of you, it’s hard to see the advantages sometimes. I guess I have to believe it since I’m WAY too invested right now to change my mind! Honestly, I don’t know how people do it sometimes… afford everything they want or need. Oh wait, yes, I do; it’s called credit cards. In our family, thankfully, we don’t carry credit balances as a rule. Is that un-American?? Probably so. We don’t buy what we can’t pay for. I don’t count the house in that equation, because if I scrimped and saved long enough to buy a house outright, I’d be moving in by the time I reach retirement age. Speaking of houses, I want to live in an Earthship! Or, at the very least, an earth-sheltered home. These beautiful structures have now supplanted my dream of living in an underground house. And wow, how amazing are these places?! So environmentally friendly, built largely of recycled materials like tires and aluminum cans, sturdy, fireproof, bugproof, requires little to no climate control, generates solar energy, recycles used water, catches rainwater… and more. Check out the photos of The Phoenix near Taos. The bathroom leaves me speechless! You can actually stay in some of these Earthships overnight, like a B&B I guess. I’d love to do that next time I’m in New Mexico. I think you need a good bit of land to build one of these, and probably decent soil as well. In otherwords, no matter how much lottery money I win, we can’t really […]

We got a new fence yesterday! Due to the nature of our backyard layout (fences joined to neighbors’ on either side, and a deck that goes all the way to the fence on 2 sides), it was a little on the pricey side, but we needed it badly. Our old fence was falling apart, and I do mean that literally. Doc said that the construction crew didn’t need any tools to remove the old fence; they just pulled it out with their bare hands. We chose not to have latticework across the top again, as it was an added expense. I’m fine with that; I didn’t really care for it in the first place, although Doc liked it quite a bit. You can get an idea of what it looked like here. I plan to take out those stumpy shrubs, put in a gravelled path with sandstone flagstones, and plant monkey grass and caladiums here. It will be much nicer than the mud pit that it now is. The lovely shade tree above it tends to drop huge quantities of leaves here in the fall, so raking it out is an ongoing chore, and one that I have neglected for years, until now. The weird little box shed is gone! It was a real waste of space and hard to use, so I’m glad we had it taken out. I think it was originally the spot for a previous owner’s jacuzzi, and a subsesquent owner had a little covering built over the hole, to use for storage. Click here for a photo of what it used to look like. The new fence is nice and straight. Not only was the old fence wavy in a kind of seasick way as well as rotten all the way through, it had previously been […]