Money Pit Sweet Money Pit

As I was walking my dogs up the mountain this morning and surveying the storm damage from the recent torrential rains and snow melt, I comforted myself with the notion that my property was probably not stolen from anyone ever. The part where the house and back yard is located was at one time filled in with rubble, probably from the mountain, and the land was formerly most likely as swampy as the water supply reservation next door. It is almost a swamp now. The rest is the side of a mountain. No self respecting Indian would have lived here.

I am not sure when my property was settled. The older section of our house was just a log hunting cabin, probably built in the 1940s or later. It has been added onto over the years, and we have had to pay for bringing the underpinnings and infrastructure up to snuff. The houses on the road all seem to have been built within the last 50 years except for the one at the Lee farm over half a mile away. This is the top of a mountain, and it is not until the Lee farm that you get enough flat land that is also not a swamp for any pioneer to want to settle down. I figure I have as just a claim to our real estate as anyone, and I don’t expect any Indian to be able to cloud our title.

Besides paying an exorbitant purchase price, we have added our labor to the land and thrown a lot of money at the place. We built our pond one rock at a time by hand. We planted flowers and perennials and shrubs a plenty. We personally painted the interior. We fenced in the back yard. We replaced the septic tank, replaced and rerouted the main drain to the septic tank (the old one was crushed, and we were flushing our toilet into the bowels of the earth apparently), replaced and rerouted all the plumbing in the basement, and replaced and rerouted the grey water and sump pump outlets. We replaced a good bit of the roof. We put on all new gutters and drainpipes. We put in a new furnace. Our contractor is, even as I write, replacing the sagging support beams in the basement. Some idiot had cut holes in them to run pipes through them, and they are sagging so much that I put in jacks just to be on the safe side. We are hoping the current repairs will result in level floors in the old part of the house, in which case we need to put in some new flooring in the downstairs bedroom.

The next thing is a generator. We lose power a lot up here on the mountain, every time a tree falls on the power lines for instance, and we need power to run the well pump, the sump pump, the Voice Over Internet phone, the aquarium heater, etc. We have a wood stove, and our range is propane, so heating and cooking are not a problem. But running water is nice to have, and not having a lake in the basement is desirable.

And the electrical is not up to snuff. If you make coffee and toast at the same time, the breaker shuts off.

I also want to do something about the flow of water from the road onto the driveway. When it freezes, the driveway becomes a glacier.

Finally, the upstairs bathroom has a hot tub in it. It doesn’t work, but I don’t want a hot tub. I want a tub with a drain and a faucet, perhaps with spa jets.

Fortunately, we have found a contractor who actually shows up and does the work. We will be keeping him busy.