On 2 occasions my wife and I have had 5 year plans to be out of this old house and into a different house. Economics always interfered with these plans as they required INCOME. So given those two plans I have put a lot of thought into what I want in a home.
The first requirement will be an all brick ranch style structure with a full undeveloped basement. An attached garage and a detached garage/barn all sitting on 2-15 acres of land with room to plant some large gardens and raise some small stock.
The unfinished basement will get a concrete gun vault poured into one corner and one end will be walled off for storage purposes. A concrete stairwell will be constructed with steel doors at top and bottom. The basement will get a small kitchen and bathroom installed and will be set up to accommodate several people if need be. I want all the bedrooms located at one end of the home with a central hallway leading to them and the restrooms and stairwell to the basement. All windows will have a security film applied to them and functional shutters will be hung.
A standby generator will be installed and solar panels will supplement everyday power needs.
All of these things are not readily available on the local real estate market but I can come close. Everything that is missing I can add myself.
Each end of the house will have small walled "gardens" and a spanish style courtyard would be constructed at the rear of the home.
Of course, after this last job loss I found my ideal home. Located on 15 acres on a hilltop surrounded on 4 sides by timber and bordered on two side by a creek. The house had an all brick lower level and a wooden second story all sitting on a full basement. This whole package was less than 145,000 dollars. A beautiful place a few miles out of town. And me with no job. I'll keep looking, keep drawing homes and have hope that one day thing will turn around.
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A few days ago our neighbor told me his dog was loaded with fleas. Great. A couple days later our dogs started itching and biting. Today I washed them with Miracle II soap and the little dog was LOADED. The soap killed the fleas, then I applied some Front Line to both dogs. I also applied a permethrin based insecticide to the yard and sprayed their kennel with a permethrin kennel spray. As a precaution, I salted the carpets too. Tip...fleas in your carpet will eat the salt and die, just vacuum a couple day later and reapply the salt and vac again a couple days later. All their blankets and towels are in the wash with more Miracle II soap. What a pain in the ass this has been. Hey, I discovered last night that Dollar General has salt 3 for a dollar. Great for storage and it never goes bad. Check out Miracle II soap. I use it for soap, shampoo, dog soap. and occasional laundry use.
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For this weeks preparedness updates I want to buy 2 blue 5 gallon kerosene cans and fill them and store them for use in the lanterns and lamps as well as the kerosene heater. That'll give us a little over 15 gallons of kerosene. The heater will run all day on about 2 gallons. If you just use it in the evenings it will give 3-4 evenings of heat on 2 gallons. I also want to get some replacement chimneys for our lamps. We have 3 lamps and one Dietz lantern for emergency light as well as a case of long burning candles and a couple of L.E.D. lanterns.
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