When digging out some of the plumbing pipes on the side of the house leftover from removing the laundry room, I came across the rusty edge of some kind of metal plate. The plate was about 3/4″ thick, 5″ wide, and of unknown length. It was buried about 2 feet deep, and ran towards the fence between my neighbor’s house and…
After removing the laundry/utility room and sealing the wall, I had to move and reinstall the water heater. My original plan was to leave the water heater outside for the winter and build an insulated “shed” around it, but finally decided it would be easier to just flip the water heater to the other side of the wall into the kitchen….
After removing the cinder block laundry room, the now-outside wall had some plumbing and electrical that needed to be removed before winter. The plumbing included hot and cold water supplies for the small sink and washer, and the drains for the same. The electrical was for the clothes dryer and the 3 or 4 other outlets that used to supply the…
One of our favorite things about this town and this area is the wildlife: there are lots of animals around, sometimes closer than expected. At night the sound of coyotes is common, deer are often seen walking down the side streets, and cows frequently hang out on the side of the road just thinking their cow thoughts. Here are a…
This fence project was one that had very little visual impact, but just made me feel better. Because of the large amount of work involved and the end result looking almost identical to how it originally looked, my neighbor jokingly called it “general mischief”. The short (about 30″ tall) chainlink fence surrounds the front yard of the house, with an…
In the back yard of our house there was an old open-top cistern that was used to hold water pumped from the well by the original windmill and an adobe shed attached to it. The cistern measured about 9 feet long by 4 feet wide by 4 feet tall, and was made out of concrete. The shed was made out…
Our house was built in 1894. Several people in town are amateur but very talented historians, and send us historical pictures of our house whenever they come across them. Here are a few: This picture was apparently taken in 1949 from across the street: These two pictures are undated, but are thought to be from the mid- to late-1950’s. I…
One of the first odd things we noticed about this house was the laundry/utility room. This room measured about 9 feet by 12 feet, was constructed of cinderblock and was obviously added on to the house long after the main house was built (we are guessing sometime in the 1970’s.) The room was beyond ugly (I consider cinderblock to be…
My wife and I were sitting out on the front porch a few nights ago at sunset, just enjoying the quiet and watching the wildlife. Bats are common around here, and we noticed that we had been seeing more bats flying lately, specifically coming from the east side of our house. The following night, with a sneaking suspicion in my…
Today I was digging around in our rather unkept back yard moving some old bricks and I found something that was a bit exciting: the object was small (about an inch in diameter), round, and flat. Both sides were obscured by dirt and tarnish, but I immediately knew it was a coin. I could just barely make out the outline…