Gary’s post: Another morning post (5:45am). Another New Mexico sunrise.
Today will be full of fun. Our belongs finally arrive from Washington. They’ll show up in a 70′ semi-trailer, so getting it into the property on the access road will be fun – but doable. Looking forward to finally having tools, clothes and access to some kitchen stuff. The fun part will be organizing the workshop so that we can get access to things and keeping the New Mexico dust off of things. Of course, the timing sucks. Wendy will be working so I get to deal with this (again). It’s fine, Wendy had to deal with our move from Texas to Seattle, shoving all our belongings into a 2-bedroom apartment. I’m sure this weekend will be spent organizing the workshop, moving Jaret’s (our youngest) stuff into storage and trying to make sense of the mess.
More work to do on the property. I got bids from contractors for an electric gate. It’ll be about 10k to get one installed, but worth every penny. And I have another company coming to put a garage door opener on the workshop – which will be about $800 because it needs a 3/4 hp opener that runs about $600. And then there’s the EV that’s coming at the end of the month. I need to get our Chargepoint EV charger installed, so time for another visit from our friendly electrician at $90/hr. Thank goodness it’s only money. Amazing how expensive it is to get everything installed and set up. Still waiting for a call from our septic provider on installing a RV holding tank so I’m not dumping our RV waste tanks every week. Nasty and smelly. And waiting on a quote to get a water line installed from the pump house so we can use well water in the RV instead of filling the freshwater tank every week. Nothing every goes quickly in New Mexico…. which is a good thing as it forces you to slow down from the frantic pace of civilization.
I picked up our building permit yesterday, so that was progress. Our contractor took it over to the state inspection agency for their approval and permit. It’s a crazy system in the county here. The county issues the building permit, then the state issues the inspection permit. The state also inspects the concrete foundation. The state permits are 3x more expensive than the county. Probably because they have real people who do work, or sorta do work. We’ll meet with our general contractor on Thursday to discuss budgets and work out cash flow and payments.
From a construction perspective, the foundation corners get “pinned” on Thursday or Friday. I’ll fly the drone and map the layout against the site plan to make sure we’re in conformance. I want the house to be aligned too “true” north and south. That’s about 33 degrees off from magnetic north and south. Once that’s done, then the excavation starts, and we break ground. I’m also going to pay our architect for the down payment on the panels – want to get them ordered and built before the price goes up because of tariffs. Gotta love government stupidity.
Well, time to get ready for the day’s festivities. More to come. Someday Wendy will actually post something – but don’t hold your breath. She tends to get focused on work…
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