It can be harder to practice Bach when the wildfire smoke hits, because the fireplace room is less airtight, and if we have to pick between 2 of 3 air conditioners, we'll sacrifice that one if I don't need it for work. There's electrical work coming, because it'd be good to have a better A/C solution, and also our gas furnace and ducts are installed stupid. The new shiny thing is "ductless mini-splits," which are indeed shiny, and I wonder if a technology evolved to make them be more practical and popular, or if I'm just accustomed to dilapidated heating systems and no air conditioning. If I understand it correctly, some genius figured out how to use the same liquid for both heating and cooling, so you can stick the big compressor thing outside the house, and the inside-outside connection is limited to electricity and a fluid hose, both more energy-efficient than air and its ductwork.
Splits take 240V circuits, though, and our house also has an adorable 100A service that will need a lot of help, and there are other uses waiting for 240V circuits, etc. etc. and it will just be a whole thing, although hopefully less of a thing than the foundation work. That went really well, I think, and it is bizarre and pleasing that the floorboards in our 1938 house didn't creak at all for a couple months. It's not natural. There are wall and ceiling cracks all over the place, but the important part is that the house is no longer collapsing inward.
Our electric bills this summer were, for lack of a better word, absolutely adorable. I think we're paying about $20 for a month with a lot of A/C use. As far as the Sun is concerned, we live in a desert, so usually the solar panels spend the day generating enough power to run the house, and enough to charge the PowerWall house battery, and to sell surplus power to the grid precisely during the hours it's most expensive. Sunrun, who owns and maintains the equipment, handles all the accounting and makes the money. The safest bet in the country, that PG&E will only get more expensive and less reliable, is paying off, rates already having gone up over the year of the solar installation process.
Anna made a scale diagram of the property on graph paper, so we can take the various possibilities and see how to arrange them. The next step is a good shed, to put tools and stuff in, and get rid of the U-Haul container currently holding an improbable quantity of stuff in the yard. Then a shade structure, which then gives us a year-round workshop space, which we'll then use to somehow roll bench tools in and out of the shed. (The only things less fun to move around than the bench grinder are the drill press, and then the winner for Most Awkward is the chopsaw, an absolute monster of a thing that I got for five or ten bucks when I passed a contractor's retirement yard sale, and has lots of cast iron in it.)
Then there's an inflatable hot tub waiting for installation, and the dusty backyard crying out to be covered with something that's not dust.
To some extent all this home improvement stuff feels weird, when we'd like to move somewhere with more water; but we don't really know if we'll move, or when, or even if we'll sell the house if we do. We own the place outright, now, so just walking away into foreclosure isn't an option. It's more like car repairs: if your car breaks down, and you need the car, and you're not willing or able to replace the car, then your remaining option is to fix the car. High school graduation is on the horizon, but we don't know what the kid will need after that. At this point, I can't really imagine a post-pandemic era, but we can't shelter in place for decades. Whether or not we go out to concerts again, there will be colleges or job opportunities, or a simple desire for change, and we'll want to migrate.
To somewhere with clouds, and rain.
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