I figure after the previous post I should tell y'all about some good stuff, too.
The roofers of last week installed a rooftop thermostat-controlled fan, and it's great! It got up to at least 84 outside today, which would ordinarily push the house into the 90s, and tax my poor groundwater heat pump air conditioning (read high electric bill) to the max to pull it down. But it got to only 81 inside, for a short period, without the air conditioning on or any windows open. Very nice.
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You may remember that last fall I gave the young man building a house below mine permission to run his electric line through my property, in exchange for his clearing my strip of woods of all undergrowth, downed trees, and all trees smaller than my thigh. (It's mostly wild roses and raspberries in there, which smell nice when they bloom, but make it impossible to walk in the woods, and try to take over the lawn and driveway.)
He started working on that on Friday, and he's half done already. He's even going further than we had agreed, in that he's also leveling the ground. It looks great! I had imagined that it would take him weeks, but he's got some major equipment out there, a narrow beast with tires up to my chin with a bucket on the front and a brush hog on the back. He's not leaving stumps, either. I don't know exactly how he's doing it, but even without grass, it already looks like lawn in there. The kid's a worker!
(My only concern is that the monster he's using is bumping trees, and tearing holes in the bark. I hope it doesn't kill them. I'll have to check, and any that are torn more than a total of 1/4 of the circumference will have to come out now.)
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You may have heard of Zillow.com. It's supposed to give you all kinds of details about houses you're considering buying, in particular the market value. I looked up my house a week ago, and they didn't have any data on this area yet. A few days ago, Hercules suggested that I look again. They have my house now. Zillow gave me one more bedroom, one less bathroom, an additional few hundred square feet, and claimed my tax assessment was about half the actual. It didn't even sound like my house. The market value they came up with wouldn't buy you a hovel around here. About the only thing they had right was the acreage. They have a button to "tell us if we got any details wrong", so I clicked it and sent them a note. I got back an immediate screen that said that they are unable to act on or respond to any comments, but thanked me for letting them know what I thought. Sheesh! Why bother offering the opportunity to correct the entry if they're not interested in correcting the entry?
Where's the happy dance here? I wonder if I can use this info to fight the tax assessment. (Giggle) "It's on the internet. It's Zillow. It's gotta be right, right?"
1 comment:
I tried Zillow when I was out looking at houses, and also noticed a huge discrepancy between house values and actual asking price. It's a neat idea, but needs a lot more work.
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