Good morning home repair and improvement fellow travelers. Once again we gather to discuss our homes and how to keep them functioning without being exploited by high paid professionals under emergency conditions.
Our ad hoc cadre of construction and decorating professionals and gifted amateurs wander in each Saturday to share war stories and offer direction, advice and encouragement to Kossaks working on their own place.
Sometimes it's a dripping faucet or a clogged drain; sometimes it's a room addition or a remodel of a kitchen or bath. The big secret is that ordinary humans do this stuff all the time and with a bit of information, so can you.
A huge Thank You to Code Talker for shoveling through 7 feet of snow to get over to the shop and open it up last Saturday, so I could flake out and sleep-in lateget some things done last week.
I hear most of the country has been pounded by Winter lately; down here on the High Desert of the southwest we have hardly seen winter at all. What snow has fallen on the mountains nearby is melting too soon and running off down to Texas. This means, quite starkly, a shortage of irrigation water next summer for farms, gardens and pastures, in case you thought not having a winter is a blessing.
So yesterday I took a look at some land for sale, just to see what can be had for $675 per acre. One of my pet projects (things I dream about) is affordable housing, which starts with inexpensive land.
The land in question is right in my neighborhood, less than five miles away. Ancestors of my neighbors here lived there, evidenced by the ruin of a tiny 3 room stone house overlooking the dry wash of Tecolote Creek. An utterly gorgeous setting with no utilities and maybe no water, either.
We'll talk about this some more, after I get this posted.
So it costs about 12 bucks a foot to drill down through hundreds of feet of rock and see if water can be found. My own well at 275 feet is fairly "shallow" for these parts and it is entirely possible to drill 800 feet or more and not find water. The southwest is called "arid" for good reason.