Category: Rentals, Remodels, Relocations and Real Estate

As you may remember from previous tree posts, we had been trying to save our huge mesquite in the front yard. But after a year and a half in Tucson, we are more aware of the risks.

Although Tucson doesn’t often get the frequent, sustained high winds that we’ve always disliked in Albuquerque, it does still get occasional wind storms. Tucson also gets surprisingly powerful brief dust devils. I’m not sure if “dust devil” is the right term. I always thought of dust devils as being harmless. But these brief whirlwinds can blow off chunks of roofing and take down unstable trees and branches.

The key being the word “unstable.” The previous owners had cabled together a split in the tree. We’ve been told the cable brace is just a temporary measure. Sometimes trees can be bolted together as a more permanent solution, but we’ve since been told that mesquite are brittle and not good candidates for bolting.

For me the moment of insight came when I looked up one morning and it seemed like the split was visibly larger than it had been. It felt inevitable. John wrapped a chain around it for additional luck and we started getting quotes to take the tree out.

In addition to the split, one section of the multi-trunked tree leans far over the house. I wondered how they were going to remove it. The previous company, which we had hired to trim the tree last year, dropped a limb on the roof and broke a skylight. We didn’t hire them this time.

The morning of the removal, the crew and several pieces of large equipment showed up bright and early.

The tree was in bloom and looked particularly beautiful in the early morning light. It was very sad.

This big crane with the hook holds onto the sections of tree that are being cut so they don’t fall, and moves them safely into the street.

At first a guy in a bucket removed some lower branches. An operator in the cab of that crane moved the arm that held the bucket. The guy in the bucket could also do some fine tuned adjustments using controls on the bucket.

They got the big crane in position and strapped to a large limb.

When they put tension on those cables, the whole tree shook. Once they were sure the limb was being held by the crane, they sawed off the limb. https://youtu.be/RSBPTXtGXdE

Here they are taking out the middle third of the tree. https://youtu.be/9VeDFnx5JOA

After the midsection was removed, it was very obvious how much the remaining trunk leaned over the house.

If you don’t have the fortitude to watch an entire four and a half minute boring video, start about a minute in. https://youtu.be/dRLUO53Qhko

It was so weird to watch the tree float through the air.

I felt sad to have it gone. Our front yard looked empty and our house looked naked!

John went out right away and bought some pots and bougainvillea bushes.

And the next week he planted a desert willow where the mesquite was.

The desert willow is currently struggling (two weeks later), so we hope it pulls through. They generally do well here, it’s just shocked from the transplant. The bougainvillea are doing great.

While the crew was out removing the huge mesquite, we also had them take out a much smaller trash tree in the backyard. It was brittle and a large section of it had already fallen on our fence during the July storms last year.

The guy brought the tree down right on top of the wires, which alarmed me, but after flashing me a sheepish look, he nonchalantly pulled the tree off the wires and continued working. https://youtu.be/_rWLaVheTe8

Now that the mesquite is gone, our back patio is so much cleaner! We used to have little mesquite needles everywhere – in the yard, in the house, in the pool – pervasively everywhere, like dog fur but worse. John filled two huge leaf bags with mesquite litter just from the roof. Now we are making steady progress clearing out the needles from every crook and cranny on the property.

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com

From what I can tell (and I am not the expert so take this story with a grain of salt), it all started sometime last year with a spending bill in front of Congress. Congress asked a few questions about how some of the money would be used. And somebody, somewhere way high up, some manager or director of some agency that oversees some other agencies, made a bonehead decision not to comply with the request. The information that Congress was asking for would be released soon enough in an annual report (that nobody bothers to read anyway), so this genius figured it wasn’t worth the staff time and nuisance to ensure that Congress got direct and immediate answers to their questions. Congress could wait for the annual report.

Congress doesn’t like being blown off (who does?) so they didn’t appropriate the money. Trickle down, trickle down, trickle down some more and eventually, one small tiny itty little bit of that spending bill was no longer going to make it into my husband’s inbox where it was originally intended to go. Not only was he personally going to be underfunded, but his entire 3-year project, which was about halfway completed, had to be halted. And everyone he had hired to play a role in the project had to go find something better to do with their time. Which they did.

It was painful listening to him call them all last fall and explain that the money didn’t come through, all the while knowing that it still could come through. But they couldn’t depend on it; they had to go find something else to do. John could have easily gotten onto another project himself, but instead, he decided to drop to half time this spring in order to remodel our house.

Several months passed. John signed up for his part-time schedule to start and a couple of weeks later…you can guess what happened next. Congress released the money, approximately 6 months late. The entire fiscal year’s worth of money. The fiscal year started back last fall, so John doesn’t have an entire year left to use it. He does not get to push out his original deadlines. John now has 6 months to complete a year’s worth of work. And all the other scientists and engineers that he had previously lined up to help have already found other projects and are no longer available. This is no way to fund science.

It’s also no way to complete a remodel. I’m going to have to go back to interviewing general contractors. We’ve never had a general contractor that we liked, but maybe we could get lucky this time? We would have to get really lucky though, because in this market it’s going to be nearly impossible. Not only is real estate booming (putting a lot of demand on contractors), there’s also a labor shortage. I have no idea how we’re going to get this house remodeled now.

Some things I can probably handle without a general contractor. I can probably find a crew to take our enormous tree out before it falls on the house. Hopefully before the monsoons start.

We had originally hoped to keep the tree, but after witnessing multiple neighborhood trees come crashing down during last year’s monsoon winds and earth-liquifying flooding, we no longer have any confidence in this tree’s root system or the cables wrapped around it holding it together.

I can probably also find a crew to clean and seal the adobe, also hopefully before the monsoons start. But I haven’t tried, only having discovered the need recently, so I don’t know how hard it will be. Obviously it’s a specialty item, which can make finding tradesmen more difficult.

And I really have to get the master bedroom sliding glass door replaced because water flows in during a strong rain and the wall and floor are already water damaged. I really want this done before the monsoons.

This appears to be some sort of metal lath under plaster, which is apparently how they used to do things. Being from the Pacific NW, I tend to find rust alarming. It probably doesn’t matter too much that the lath is rusting, except of course the plaster is falling off. If you look closely, you can see the orangish adobe brick behind it.

Look at that, I have the Italian villa, crumbling plaster vibe going on already, whoo-hoo! No need to fake it, I’ve got a genuine bit of authentic history right in my own bedroom. We don’t even have to make that bucket-list trip to Italy now! I can enjoy the ambiance of crumbling plaster from the comfort of home, anytime I want. (Urg.)

John is in Albuquerque and hasn’t seen this. When he reads this post and sees these pictures he’s going to be like, WTF? What did you do? But all I did was remove a small section of trim and lift the damaged carpet slightly to expose what was going on. That’s one of my lesser-loved superpowers: exposing issues that no one wants to deal with. I put it all back, ok? You can’t hardly tell. It’s hidden under the rug. But now we know.

This other rotted trim is on the exterior, thank goodness, but is still not what you want to see anywhere, inside or out:

“Eww” is right. Yuck. Yes, I assume that’s termites. How did this house pass a pest inspection?

For that matter, how did we pass a roof inspection without anyone mentioning there basically isn’t one? And how did we get a full home inspection without even figuring out it’s an adobe house? We did at least manage to figure out that there was no place in the kitchen for a refrigerator (“Very unusual” the inspector noted.)

Hopefully we can still get some critical items done. But there’s no way I’m going to get the kitchen remodeled anytime soon at this rate.

Oh and one final comment – remember when I made fun of that tacky, “peeling plaster” wallpaper in yesterday’s post? I’m now getting peeling plaster wallpaper advertisements in my junk email.

The internet is scary. It’s almost embarrassing to imagine that the algorithms think I want to buy that. As if I care what algorithms think! Except…it does matter what the algorithms think. But probably not about wallpaper.

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com

We recently hired a company to install solatubes in our ceiling. Solatubes are a specific brand of solar tubes, and are like skylights except they concentrate the sunlight. Solar tubes are smaller than skylights but brighter. We had them installed in Albuquerque a few years ago, and like them a lot.

The Tucson house has a low ceiling, with only a few small windows, so it’s not as light and bright as we’d like.

It would be prohibitively difficult to add windows. At first I imagined the challenge was just the difficulty in finding the right kind of brick to trim the windows to match the original ones. But then we discovered that our exterior walls were solid burnt-adobe brick. The brick wasn’t just a decorative facing, the brick was the wall. Even if we put a header in, it would not be a minor project to start knocking holes into a structural adobe brick wall.

There’s only one place I can envision putting in a window – along the front of the house, looking into the living room where we currently have an outdoor statue niche (shown here when the house was staged for sale; we don’t have a statue in there ourselves.)

The statue niche includes an electric outlet in order to light the statue at night. It definitely adds a southwest element of character, but I’m really not a statue person and would rather have a window. I’m hoping we can replace the tile with a custom piece of window glass.

Currently we’re just using it as an electrical outlet to power a little fountain (cue major eye roll) it’s super dorky looking right now.

With that being our only likely option for additional windows, we decided we were going to have to add light from above. We were slightly hesitant to cut into our nice wood ceilings. But we decided light is more important than wood.

Here’s the installer cutting into our ceiling:

Voila! Sunshine! Don’t worry, it doesn’t glare on the wall like that once the filters are in place.

In this next picture you can see he has the flashing in.

Wait a minute. No, that’s not an optical illusion. There’s the ceiling – all 5 inches of it – and there’s the sky. Where’s the roof? There’s no roof!

We knew there wasn’t much gap between our ceiling and our flat roof, but we didn’t realize there wasn’t any gap at all. All we have is about half an inch of roofing material tarred directly onto the top side of our wood ceiling.

That’s it. Our ceiling IS our roof. John says it’s like living under a wood deck.

Talk about poor R-value! No wonder it costs so much to heat in the winter. Our heat is all going out the non-existent roof! At least the ceiling is made from thick hunks of wood.

One time years ago I had a house that had two roofs. I wanted a venting bathroom fan installed and discovered a second roof was built on top of the first one. And I don’t mean just some additional roofing material. I mean an entire second roof was framed about a foot above the still-intact first roof. So I guess it’s my karma. I had two roofs, and now I have none.

With our ceiling being our roof, that means there’s no place to add insulation. We will probably add a foam roof, which is expensive but will provide some insulation.

After getting over the surprise around the construction of our non-roof, we were very appreciative of our beautiful new portholes to the sky.

You may be wondering, like we were, if there’s no gap between the ceiling and the roof, because they are one and the same, where do the electrical lines go? They appear to have been laid down on top of the wood and under the tar layer, just sandwiched in there.

Holes have been drilled through the thick wood ceiling to bring the electrical in from on top of the house. So we might have to pull up that top layer of roofing material and drill through our ceiling to do any rewiring.

On the inside there’s wood trim in places that suggest it may have been installed to hide wires.

You also may be wondering where everything else goes, like venting and pipes? There’s a dropped ceiling running down the hallway for the heating/AC ductwork. Otherwise almost everything is exposed on top of the roof…or, err…top of the ceiling I should say. We have ducting and gas lines running all over up there, completely exposed.

I actually don’t know yet how the water and sewer lines run. The hallway walls are stick frame, and so are most of the interior walls radiating from the hallway to the exterior walls, so presumably that helps. It’s mostly just the exterior walls that are solid adobe brick. In the kitchen we have both a sink and a dishwasher along an exterior adobe wall. I assume the pipes are just hidden behind the cabinets, but we will find out. Clearly there will be more interesting discoveries ahead as we work on this house.

They always say to expect the unexpected when you’re remodeling, but I didn’t expect to discover we unknowingly bought a genuine adobe house or…our ceiling is our roof.

Well, that sure was an enlightening lighting project!

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com

Over the last few months we’ve occasionally had contractors to the house in Tucson as we look for someone to help us with our upcoming remodel. Once or twice I thought I might have heard a contractor referring to our house as “adobe.” It struck me as slightly odd, but I didn’t think too much about it. People who are new to the southwest will occasionally refer to anything with a stucco exterior as “adobe”, but we don’t even have a stucco exterior. And this was a knowledgable contractor calling our house adobe? Did I hear him right?

Recently we were looking at the brick wall in our kitchen/dining area. We believe it was once an exterior wall before the house was expanded. When examining it, John realized it was a solid, 8″ thick brick wall. We had assumed it was an exterior layer of brick with wood framing behind it. But that’s not the case. The brick is the wall – the wall is simply one layer of very thick brick.

The vast majority of US homes are stick (wood) framed, and then stucco or brick or other kinds of siding are used for the exterior finishing. On the inside is drywall (taped, spackled and painted). Layers: drywall, stick frame, siding. So in a typical house, when you hang a picture you’re nailing into drywall, unless you hunt around and find a stud – one of the two-by-fours or two-by-sixes used as framing inside the walls.

An adobe house doesn’t have wood framing inside. Adobe walls are solid adobe and thick, often 8″ thick. Turns out our exterior walls – and our interior walls that used to be exterior walls – are built from a single layer of 8″ thick slabs of brick. That’s it. Just brick. Just solid walls – no layers. That sounds like adobe construction – having no wood framing on the inside.

But wait. Are our bricks adobe? What are these soft bricks anyway? They are enormous; 8 inches wide and 16 inches long.

I got onto the internet to figure it out. What are our large, relatively soft bricks called? Adobe means mud in Spanish. Are they mud bricks? No. Mud bricks aren’t fired, they’re just dried. These bricks are definitely fired, they’re just not as hard as the smaller bricks found in the majority of the US.

Or are they slump block, like a friend of mine once called them? No…our brick is softer, lighter in weight and larger than slump block. But I discovered why she guessed that. The internet says, “Slump Block is a concrete block unit that is removed from the mold before it has a chance to completely set. This causes the concrete block to keep a slumped appearance like adobe brick…” Like adobe brick? Could that be what we have? And, “…slump block is a concrete block made to look like adobe or burnt adobe…”

Burnt adobe! That’s it! That’s the word I was looking for. “Burnt”, meaning that the adobe bricks were fired. Now that I knew the name for what we have, I was able to find out lot more information.

Guess what? According to the internet, “Tucson, in Pima County Arizona, has about 15% of all the burnt adobe homes built in the US from the 1960s through the 80s.
Basically, burnt adobe homes are bricks made out of mud that are much thicker and larger than typical bricks. The concept behind building with adobe is that adobe walls have enough thermal mass to absorb heat during the day and release it at night thus keeping the home at a fairly stable temperature year round.”

Elsewhere it says, “Older adobe homes are typically reddish in color while the ones made in the 80s are more of a yellow/tan-ish color. Some people confuse slump block and/or red brick homes for adobe but neither material is nearly as thick as adobe.”

Yep, apparently burnt-adobe brick homes are real adobe homes. In fact, I learned that adobe homes are made with adobe bricks, not heaps of mud like I had ignorantly imagined, lol. That explains the exposed mud-brick interiors common in New Mexico. I just thought I was looking at a decorative element on the interior. I didn’t realize it’s the same one wall! Duh!

The adobe homes in New Mexico are made with adobe brick like mine – but then a surface layer of adobe mud is added on top of the adobe brick, hiding the bricks. These adobe homes in Tucson just don’t have the outer layer of adobe coating. Instead, the adobe bricks are left exposed.

Another website, based in California which specializes in repairing a different type of brick says, “If your home was built with “Burnt Adobe” an orange-pinkish brick common in Tucson, AZ, Sonora, and Baja Mexico, your best resources for repairs would be in the Tucson area.”

Yep, that’s us! Definitely pinkish-orange and common in Tucson. These are apparently 100% clay mud, with no concrete.

Not only is my house a genuine adobe home, the type of adobe is specific to Tucson and the Sonora region. I love regional character and am very pleased to have a house that is distinctly Tucsonian.

Well, there you go. I never thought I’d have a real adobe house. I can’t believe I didn’t realize I was buying an adobe house! I thought it was a brick exterior over stick frame construction, just like a million other houses in the US. It took me a year and a half to figure it out! But sure enough, I see now, it’s right there in the real estate listing, “Construction materials: Burnt Adobe”

So if our walls are solid adobe brick, how are the electric lines run? With a typical wood frame construction, they’re run in the hollow spaces between the two-by-four wooden planks. Luckily most of our interior walls are wood frame construction with drywall, which makes it easier. It’s just the exterior walls (and the interior walls that were once exterior walls) that are completely solid brick. But we do have some electrical outlets on our brick walls. How? It turns out these bricks are soft enough that you can dig little tunnels through them for electric lines! But it’s not easy. Also you can hide them under wood trim.

And where does the insulation go? Haha, there isn’t any. And there’s no way to add it, because there’s no hollow space to put it. We can’t even blow it in. The walls are solid. That interior brick is the exterior brick. No layers.

Now that I know we have 8″ thick, burnt adobe walls rather than stick frame construction with drywall, I’m realizing that we could remove the interior plaster that’s in most of the rooms and expose more brick if we wanted to. But even an accent wall or two sounds like it would be a ton of work. Youtube shows how to remove plaster from regular brick, but our burnt-adobe bricks are softer than standard brick and I’m not sure we could get the plaster off without damaging them.

It also occurs to me that we could do the faux Italian-villa look, removing patches of plaster to reveal the brick in random places, as if the plaster was slowly denigrating with age. LOL! We could create a faux historic Italy interior with our adobe brick in the living room, on two walls of the master bedroom, two walls of the office, one wall of the guest bedroom, one wall of all three bathrooms…OMG we could do faux Italian villa everywhere! The interior side of all of our exterior walls is plaster on brick. But don’t worry, we’re not going to do that. Creating a crumbling-plaster look always seemed so fake to me.

Oh – even worse – they make wallpaper to mimic the look!! OMG, LOL, this is wallpaper for sale:

We could do that, but for reals! Uh no thanks.

Meanwhile we have more immediate issues to worry about. I noticed during my research phrases like, “if cared for properly”, and, “if well-maintained” and “except for the maintenance involved”…uh-oh.

Yep. Apparently we’re supposed to be resealing the brick regularly because otherwise it absorbs water. We’re not supposed to plant anything up against it. And we’re not supposed to irrigate anywhere near it. Because it can sop up the water and develop black mold! Once I’d heard of it, I realized I’ve seen the black mold on houses in my neighborhood.

I had assumed it was staining from dirt running down off the roof, but that is mold growing in porous, damp adobe.

Especially where there are plants up against the brick.

In fact, now that I’m looking closely, we do have some black mold on our adobe! It’s hard to notice, but it’s developing along the parapet at top.

In particular it’s developing where we have a large tree overhanging the roof.

And here on the north side of the house:

Not good! And here it is on a small ledge under a window.

Yikes! Ours isn’t bad yet – I hadn’t even noticed it before I knew what to look for. But it’s going to need to be cleaned off before we reseal it.

Here’s a couple of videos about how to seal adobe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSdcxMmlSaI and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTt716ch0tU

I guess you will be hearing more about the joys – and travails – of remodeling a real adobe home.

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com