Thread: Getting to be an expensive week

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Let me start from the top. The plan for heat this winter is to put a wood furnace in the garage about 25 feet away and pipe the heat underground into the house therefore keeping the mess in the garage. In order to do this a decent section of sidewalk had to be removed in order to put the pipes in but no big deal because they poured the sidewalk over my septic tank which hasn't been serviced for 20+ years and it should be pumped out, kill two birds with one stone.
Well, i ripped the cement out and poked around the ground to find the tank, no tank. Take a foot of dirt out poke around, no tank .Start on some more dirt and all the sudden I am wondering why I can't keep the skidloader bucket straight and why do I smell sewer, yep, back tire found the tank. Two more feet down was the tank, the lid completly rotted away and I fell through. I dug around it with a spade and the old tank was crumbling away so I got a new tank installed today only in a better location.
Its not all bad though, the old tank was packed solid so hard I could jump up and down in it and not go down a bit. I think we were getting real close to a disaster this winter.
More money comes in when the propane truck came and put in $800 of LP in this week ( thats were burning wood gets nice ). The other whoops was when we actually balanced the checkbook the right way and we were off $900..... for the worse.
I can,t wait till this vacation at home is over

Hmmm...At least you won't be out there doing that stuff in January dealing with frozen earth...Things could be worse I guess..

Better get back to work, sounds like you need a break!!!!!!!

You were jumping up and down on a rotted out septic tank!!! You're NUTS !

Sean

Ain't home ownership a blast! Hank

Ah yes, the thrills of home ownership.

After putting in "low" buck items like a new septic tank, town water, a new furnace, a new driveway, a 2 car garage, a full length dormer my (ex) wife had a better idea. Let's move.

I have since traded that second house, cars and her for much better units. I have 3 garage stalls(OK), town water(good), sewer(very good) plus natural gas for heat(excellent) and a wife that doesn't bitch(well not too much)(extremely excellent)

Additionally, I no longer have a @#$% swimming pool(good) nor a 30x45 pole barn(very bad) or 7 acres of grass to mow(good) with this current house.

Sean wrote:

You were jumping up and down on a rotted out septic tank!!! You're NUTS !

Sounds to me that he was jumping up and down on what was in the tank , not on the top of the tank. Very brave, or as you said just NUTS.

If it had been less solid he could have disappeared forever, or would have had to go live with the skunks (if they would have had him)

Originally Posted by sgo70

You were jumping up and down on a rotted out septic tank!!! You're NUTS !

Sean

When I read that I thought if I had tried that I would have hit a weak spot!!!

53 Chevy5
I hated to do it but I prepaid on a credit card 2,400 gallons just under $2.00 per gallon plus 7% tax. I was afraid if I didn't propane could be over $3.00 per gallon tough call. That is for the house and garage, I just hope I can be up to getting some of the old cars fixed up enough to make a buck or two.

Richard

Sounds like my time off! I spend a third of my days off keeping the house and yard alive for one more year! Our house was built in 1858, and is 100% wood. So if I skip any maintenance like sanding and painting window sashes, the repair bill for replacement, reminds me what a little provention is worth!
IC2 I'd misss the 30x45 pole barn too!
But not the 7 acre mowing!
New septic is not glamerous, but well worth the trouble! I also like the killing two birds with one stone approach!
I hope that the economy takes a turn for the better very soon. On the news yesterday the rate of forclosures on retired people is climbing. It makes me so sad to see people work so hard their whole lives and then get devastated in retirement.

We moved to a new house in 1999 to get a single level for my wife's knee problems (and then fixed up the upstairs after her second successful double knee operation) and the ground around the house was graded by a guy on a tractor with a blade; it seemed innocent enough. Then two years ago without any known cause the lid of the septic tank collapsed, probably cracked by the grading tractor. Well our cat was attracted by the odor and FELL IN! Then the cat got out somehow and wanted to come into the house!!!! Fortunately I lassoed him with some clothesline and tied him to a fence post while I played a garden hose over him. Of course he doesn't like water so he would take two mighty steps with the small slack in the line, leap forward and fly through the air with the rope bringing him back. We had to get a complete new tank since the sides were also cracked and we drenched the cat with liquid soap several times and finally brought him in and tied him to a faucet in a bathtup and lathered him up some more. The tank had to be dug out and buried in a hole in our woods and replaced by a new tank which we now guard carefully against tree trimming trucks and the crane that came in to remove the two pine trees that fell on our roof during Huricane Isabel several years ago. Fortunately we have enough wilderness forest area on our lot for the burial of the old septic tank. Strangely our tank is in the front yard due to a better slope there and for whatever reason the grass is not greener over the tank; maybe there is only a few inches of dirt over the lid because the grass does poorly over the lid! Here is a picture at Easter last year, some 18 months ago, when we really only had that one late snowfall. Although the house is relatively new it is getting to be the time for the first repaint that I am not looking forward to. Maybe I can put it off till next Spring.

Don Shillady
Retired Scientist/teen rodder

Don what a beautiful place!

Thanks Stovens. We really wanted a one-level ranch home but I mentioned to the builder that I wanted a small office upstairs. We hired a one-at-a-time contractor and he had his own architect who whipped up what is pretty standard in this area as a "Williamsburg Style" home and even the brick is labeled Williamsburg Red. We were amazed at the room upstairs and the attic was tall enough so I could have put a basketball backboard up there but my wife said absolutely no bouncing dribbling upstairs so we recently finished it off with a combination of my amateur carpentry with help from a local jack-of-all-trades guy and we told the county it is a "Game Room" with a 1/2 size pool table but it has a small bathroom and can serve as a guest room for the grandkids when they visit. The point is that in Virginia there are a LOT of brick style buildings and I guess we have a prototype of the restored homes in Williamsburg. Where I grew up in Eastern Penna. field stone was the material of choice for "class" but in Virginia almost everything is either frame (faux frame as plastic siding) or brick as is our home. Still, very few homes in Virginia have basements as compared to where I grew up in Penna in which almost every home has a basement and usually a shop down there, so I had to get a small garage for a workshop. In my opinion the most desireable setup is where there is a driveway down to a basement garage but that depends a lot of the slope of a given plot of land and is the exception in this area. You know our house is paid for except that our county taxes are high and we leveraged our way through three homes buying and selling at appropriate times using the little blue mortgage book and ARITHMETIC. Even Einstein was amazed at the power of compound interest. I saw other folks buying houses they could barely afford including a neighbor who lost their home and had many go-around discussions with my wife regarding "moving up" against my better arithmetic judgement so regarding the housing crisis I have to wonder whether arithmetic is a lost art (due perhaps to use of optical scanners at the checkout counter and credit cards)? My mother was a book keeper for a plumbing business and they would keep her even when salesman were laid off because she could balance the books to the penny every month. Surely there must be some balance between aspirations and financial reality? Anyway our present house is roughly a medium priced home in a county which has many other bigger houses and the county taxes are annoying but our only form of "rent" at present. My wife is also a book keeper/secretary and heaven help me if I buy car parts that exceed what our previous monthly mortgage payment was so I have to space out parts purchases! Stovens, on one of my book shelves I have two of those small metal models, one is a '32 Ford 3W Coupe and the other is a '48 F100 in the original green and black paint scheme. Does your F100 have a flathead? I still have a 4" Merc crank in my shed waiting for some needy flathead and I will let it go for much less than a new crank from Speedway! I would like to see it go to someone who knows what to do with it!

Don Shillady
Retired Scientist/teen rodder

great looking home.

Love the snowfall and trees.

Don,
It amazes me how much taxes can eat up your budget. Our county - Saratoga - the horse racing season keeps the taxes 'reasonable' for NY state as well as the fact that our county is pretty well run and is the only one in NY that is waaaaay in the black. Unfortunately, school taxes are, IMO, well over what they should be, especially for those folks in the newer and maybe larger more expensive homes. Every year I canvass a couple of very new and very expensive developments for political reasons - and in several cases have to explain to folks that school and property taxes are run by different people for different reasons, My school taxes are ~$3k, with property taxes at $1.2K but less then a mile away, and through the woods, they are in the $9-12K and $3 to 5K property tax range. My property taxes just broke the $1K mark two years ago, but only because the town assumed the sewer system from a private contractor and a lot of needed updates have been made. My home - 2772 sq ft plus a 1500 sq ft walk out basement on a little less then an acre of oaks and maples (leaves in the fall to the knees). It's nice here, but we will be moving a few hundred miles further south - I wand another month or so of better weather

I retired a couple of years ago though my wife is still working - she MIGHT throw it in at the end of the year. For the most part, we live on my retirement and SS. Occasionally we go over, but not often. The rest - savings. My car hobby? Well those costs are were already budgeted and an account set up before I retired.

Dave when we did our addition 3-4 years ago, we had to pay a one time school tax fee of 3500.00 and then another 3500.00 for the permit. We posted a 5000.00 bond fee for historic review, which we got about 2k back from. We were also required to provide a historic review, another 2.5k; then we were required to pay the city to have their own interpreter of that review, as they had no one qualified to dispute it. By the time the addition was built, at least 20 k went in one form or another to the city. Our addition was 1500 sq. ft, to a 800 square ft cottage. By building the addition vs. buying another house, we kept our property taxes within our budget. But if we would have sold our home and bought a new home our property taxes would have been close to 12k a year for the rest of our lives!
The local city planning department is brutal on anyone wishing to pull a permit, so much so, people in Oregon and Washington state who worked on our design, and engineering of the addition, had heard of Petaluma's reputation as hard asses. The whole process brought us very close to a divorce from all of the stress. Both my wife and I agree now, that we would have rather sold the house and bought a new one then go through that process ever again, propertytax or not.
On a positive note we do love our place now. My goal is to retire in 20 years and at that time have the house completely paid off. So far so good!