Update on the House

I sat around thinking to myself, “What should I write today?” I’ve been placing articles for sale on Constant Content and dealing with the house being torn apart, so taking a break to write for read.cash sounded great… until the writer’s block kicked in.

Do I want to do a deep dive into the history of relations between Ukraine, Russia, and America and why you should reject all the propaganda coming from all three of these nations? Do I want to tackle the question of whether Billy the Kid was really killed or not? Should I review more language stuff?

In the end, I figured I’d just do an update on the house. Fast, simple, and for anyone who really cares to know. As I wrote before, we had a house fire about seven months ago. For the animals’ sake, we decided to actually attempt to live in what remains of it while the damaged bits are rebuilt.

This means that we’ve been living in a home with massive heat loss problems. No insulation left, because it was apparently laced with trace amounts of asbestos, in the middle of a northern Minnesota winter. Yay.

We’ve gone through five tanks of propane, about five hundred gallons each time. That’s a lot of money down the drain, and on top it we’ve been running space heaters, so that’s about $600 in electricity every month, although it’s starting to go down now with the warmer weather.

It’s been about seven months and the upstairs is still sitting as a gutted mess. After gutting it, our contractor had a hard time getting people to come out and work on it, so it sat for a couple of months. He finally got going on it, but couldn’t figure out what was holding the roof up. It managed to stump him, an architect, and an entire engineering firm for several weeks, somehow.

The house is more than 100 years old and no power tools went into its construction. It’s been interesting to see all the crude posts and poles, many of which were cut from local trees and still have the bark on them.

In a way, I’m a bit thankful for the delays, though, just because I have more time to get the inventory sorted. I hate making inventory lists, especially since I have so few pictures of anyone or anything inside the house! I’ll have to start photographing more from now on.