Category: 2019

As of this morning, we are under contract with a buyer for the Placitas house. We are cautiously optimistic. We’ve got several hurdles yet.

First of all, the buyer has been very hesitant. It’s a huge move for her – she’s coming from the east coast – and she seems indecisive. Apparently she’s been off-and-on looking for a house in Placitas for 6 years. 6 years! So hmmm, maybe a looky-loo?

Secondly, she is an older, single woman. I don’t want to be ageist and sexist, but that’s a complicated house. It’s got a well and a pump house (dug into the ground, handy-like, right?) and septic system, and solar panels, and there’s always something to troubleshoot. The desert countryside has mice, packrats and bunnies, all of which love to eat wiring. It’s just a hard house to deal with. So maybe she’s more together than I am, but I would not want to deal with that house alone.

But she loves the house (it is a very attractive house) and maybe she will be blissfully happy there. Everything is in good shape – there’s no known issues.

It will need to pass a septic test. I’m only giving it about a 50% chance of passing. That’s just because of the age of it. It’s original to the house. It hasn’t been giving us any trouble, but to test it the inspectors will jet into it far more water than we would ever send it at once. So there’s no way to know how it’s going to perform under those conditions until they do the test.

If that the system fails, that means probably $5,000 – $8,000 to get a new one installed. Hopefully they can find a good spot for it. You can’t put a new septic in the same spot as the old one. There’s not a lot of room up there at the top of the hill, and we can’t put it downhill because it would be too close to the corner of the lot where the well is.

And some of you probably remember the septic installation nightmare at that Placitas house John and I almost bought a couple of years ago!

Anyway, it’s a beautiful house, and we’ll do what we need to, to make sure it’s got a good septic system. And hopefully she will complete the sale and be very happy there enjoying the stunning views for many years to come.

It’s been freezing cold; winter temperatures all the way into May. I’ve been very grumpy about that, by the way. I’m very much a hot weather person. And there was snow in Santa Fe in May!

Finally the temperature got suddenly hot. So a couple of days ago we turned on the cooler and phew, something stunk. Foul air was blowing into our house.

Sometimes evaporative coolers get funky while in disuse, so John checked it out and it looked ok. Although it’s not easy to get into the depth of them.

So today we spent over $430 getting all our ductwork professionally cleaned (they do that with a big suction truck, like carpet cleaners). When they left, we installed a new filter, turned on our evaporative cooler and…STENCH! So we’ve been running it all afternoon, in the hopes that the smell will “clear out” with fresh water running through the cooler.

It’s been a few hours and I can smell it all the way out on the patio. I’m not sure what it smells like. I don’t think it’s mold or mildew. More likely it’s a dead rodent.

I was also doing a little bit of indoor painting today, and I couldn’t even smell the paint over the cooler stink. It was that bad.

We’re not sure how long this house sat empty before we bought it. It wasn’t on the market very long, but the previous owners had moved out, and then they hired someone to do a fair amount of updating. There’s no telling how long that took.

Here’s Kira eyeing the cooler warily through the gate. She thinks the smelly problem is with the evaporative cooler. My nose says so too.

For a long time I thought I liked evaporative cooling. It delivers a cool moist air, which in the desert is nice. And it takes a lot less energy than a condenser, because it’s just a fan blowing over water. But it works by evaporating water, which is scarce in the desert.

And evaporative cooling is just a big nuisance. It needs set up and taken down twice a year because it shares venting with the furnace, and apparently can’t be hooked up at the same time as the furnace. Once it’s set up, you can’t go back to your furnace. Once it’s taken down, you can’t go back to cooling. Our weather is extremely variable, and it’s inevitable that during the spring and fall there are days when you have cooling when you really need heat, and vice versa.

Probably my biggest issue with evaporative cooling is that it only works with the windows cracked open. In a cool, moist, welcoming climate like coastal California, it can be heaven to open the windows to the fresh outdoor air. But that’s not the case in the desert.

I run humidifiers and vaporizers 24/7, year round, trying to keep the indoor humidity up to around 20%. The minute I open a window, all that hard-earned humidity is gone. The evaporative cooler adds humidity, but only while it’s actually running. So most of the time the windows are all cracked open, letting out all my humidified air.

The conventional wisdom with evaporative coolers is that it’s not good enough to have one window cracked open. People (like my dear hubby) crack open at least one window in every single darn room. So that can be a dozen windows to run around opening and closing – or just leave open regardless of the current actual conditions.

Also in New Mexico, we get sand storms. It’s miserable on the hot days when you need your windows cracked open for the evaporative cooler, but the wind is howling and blowing dirt inside.

Also I like to be able to have my windows closed to block out the noise of the neighborhood. The neighborhood dogs set my own dogs off, and then I’ve got a riot of barking in my own house. It’s just quieter and more secure with the windows closed. I don’t want to have to have the windows open all the time. I only want to open them when it’s particularly nice out and I feel like opening them.

I just want central air conditioning. And it’s cheaper than moving to San Diego.

I measured! It should fit!

I bought a brand new fancy refrigerator. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite slide into the spot where it’s supposed to go.

I’ve never had such a nice, fancy refrigerator. It has a new feature called “showcase”, which is a little hard to describe but basically it has a double door such that you can access the “door” items from both sides.

I’m going to make this refrigerator fit. It’s not like it’s the wrong size. The refrigerator is 35 inches wide. I measured my space to be just over 36 inches wide.

I’ve got over an inch to spare, so why won’t it fit?!?

Turns out the cabinet was installed crooked. I had assumed the narrowest point was where the counter sticks out slightly from the cabinet. But the cabinet was installed so crooked that the widest point is actually down at the base of the cabinet. Here you can see the gap between the cabinet and the stove down toward the bottom. The stove is straight. The cabinet is not.

So it’s crazy, but I’ve got a guy coming tomorrow to remove the cabinet and straighten it out by an inch. An inch!

Update (two days later)

So the guy reinstalled the cabinet and now the refrigerator mostly fits.

Sort of. Turns out that the door hinge can’t be tight against the wall because the hinge edge of the door swings out slightly when the door is opened.

If you’re like, what the heck is that a picture of? It’s a birds-eye view of the top of the refrigerator in Santa Fe, which does the same thing.

Both refrigerators, the one in Santa Fe and the one in our new house, have a wall on one side, so the refrigerator has to stick out past the wall, by the depth of the door, to give the door maneuvering room.

Silly me, I bought counter-depth refrigerator so it wouldn’t stick out into the doorway, not realizing that it needed to stick out into the doorway in order for the refrigerator door to work. This means I currently can’t push my refrigerator all the way back.

At the Santa Fe house, the wall ends in a wide opening between the kitchen and dinning room, so you don’t notice that the refrigerator sticks out slightly into that opening.

But at our new house, it’s a doorway, not a wide opening. So it’s pretty obvious the refrigerator is sticking into the doorway.

The best solution would be to remove the door jam and open that whole space up. I didn’t want a door there anyway. It’s between the kitchen and laundry room, but the pantry is in the laundry room, so the door is just in the way. So I don’t mind taking the door and part of that wall out, but it’s going to be a biggish job.

After removing the door jam and redoing any framing & support that’s necessary, the drywall and texture will need redone. I will also have to have the floor tile patched. There’s no tile under the few inches of wall that I need to remove.

All that just to get a normal sized refrigerator in there! The previous owners must have had a really small one. It was gone before they put the house on the market so we didn’t realize.

Just a quick note to explain why I haven’t posted much of anything recently. It’s not that there’s nothing going on…

After I quit my job, I went to Boston for a week, then we staged the Placitas house for sale, then we were in California for a week, then the moment we were back from California I started showing one of our rentals to prospective tenants and getting the usual between-tenants maintenance done (a broken window, sprinklers not working, etc.) which took a week, then we moved some of our stuff into our new house (the boxes that came out of the Placitas house), then I flew to San Diego, then I was barely back for one day and we turned around and drove to Utah for John’s birthday (it’s our annual tradition), and now this week is booked solid with appointments like refrigerator delivery and meeting with contractors to get quotes for various things like electrical work.

Meanwhile John’s been assembling and installing and troubleshooting and moving heavy items in and out of our pickup truck and to and from Home Depot.

What hasn’t happened yet is I still haven’t packed up my stuff in Santa Fe. Augh! I’m really looking forward to getting my stuff moved from Santa Fe to Albuquerque. The pod has been out there waiting for a couple of weeks now, sitting in the driveway empty.

I’m thinking I might have time to go up there today and start packing, but first I have several errands to run (Home Depot, Lowe’s, groceries, etc.) and then I have a coaching client at noon (which is over the phone so I can do that in either Santa Fe or Albuquerque), and then I have to be back in Albuquerque to meet another contractor at 4:00. So maybe I should just wait and go up to Santa Fe tomorrow and get all my errands done today. Because I’m tired.

Anyway I have tons of stories for you, like why the refrigerator doesn’t fit even though I carefully measured, and my hunt for the dead thing in the air vents, and the 1950’s style old-guy salesman with a briefcase of samples who tried to get me to buy a $4,000 door – haha, seriously?

Bottom line is we’re fine. We’re working really hard and spending a disconcerting amount of money. I’ve got two rentals turning over this month and next, so I’m having work done in both of them as well as lots of things done in the new house. So in addition to traveling, plus packing and unpacking, my life is primarily scheduling and meeting with contractors. And buying things at Lowe’s.

Hopefully when I have time, I can tell you all about the various projects in subsequent posts. Plus our recent trips – I’ve got some beautiful photos of Utah.