Tuesday, February 06, 2007

House Quest Takes a Hit

As some of you know, I've been bent on building a house for some time. I've been consulting with architecture, fraternizing with contractors, and consorting with the worst of the lot, real estate agents. We were making progress, even finding lots and working on closing the deals. I've been to the planning and building departments in the area we're going to build. I have a list of quotes and prices an arm's length long with sloppage added. It's been a longer process than we thought, but well worth it.

I've been doing the architectual drawings and was planning to hand them over to the engineer and architect for their stamps of approval...or spankings for mistakes. I had been doing that in Autocad: even after it being a serious fscking pain in the rumpus maximus to get installed because autodesk didn't believe that I'd bought the damned thing. Anyways, I posted a sample drawing of what I've been doing. I'd gotten the site plan by and large done. I've done the exterior elevations and floors plans. I was mostly done with the foundation plan. The next step would have been to do the plumbing, septic[1], and electrical plans. It was going slower than planned, but I have a nearly two year old and a wife that's ESL and crash coursing her way through academic english by taking the classes.

Except I can't continue for the moment at least. My computer is dying. It's one damned thing afetr another. The fscking machine is announcing EOL and calling me a frakker for making it work for so long and hard[2].

Fortunately, I moved off the drawings to the 300 GB USB drive I have set up there (which is rather newer than most of the rest of the machine). However, I'm going to have replace my tower now which sucks. it's an expense that I'd hoped wouldn't come until after the house was done. I could use Lyuda's laptop, but she's actively using it for her classes and I often work on the drawings when she's doing her homework (and Avrora's asleep), so that's out. It just means I need to replace the heeper. I've been pricing, but damnit...


Well, no plan survives contact with life.


1. Yes, in California, mere miles from San Francisco\, one of the "Great Cities of the United States", Marin County has large swathes of it that doesn't have a proper sewer system. It's quite possibly one of the reasons why the east Marin watersheds now lack salmon runs like they used to a mere 15 years ago. All the old septic systems are leaking and the home owners are scared of getting them officially inspected and fixed lest they be fined. While Marin has special rules about how close you can build to a creek now they didn't when most of the houses went into place. Their septic systems are just too damned close. It's not the only reason, I'm sure, but definitely a contributor. The Greenies are doing environmental damage. *gasp*shock*horror*


2. Also the reason I've not been putting up pictures lately.

1 comment:

Suz said...

Yeah. Tell me about the computer thing. We learned the hard way not to ignore the occasional weird noise from the server when you've got a raid 0 configuration.