Why is this property for sale, you ask.
I am getting set to move to a shared property to live out my dotage among friends.
It will be hard to leave this place I built from scratch.
I bought the land in 2008 and moved here in 2009. Thanksgiving Day, to be exact.
I spent the first winter in the travel trailer I had towed down from Arizona, busy putting in internal fences and outbuildings for the chickens and goats.
Meanwile I had Linda Vista Home Builders build my house.
In April of 2010, the house arrived. And there it sat in all its glory in the middle of a lot of nothing.
The next year I spent planting. And like all people who move here, I overplanted. I had no idea how quickly everything would grow.
Since then, I have spent my time cutting things back.
The outcome of all the planting is a lot of shady places. Solid growth areas that do not need constant tending or grass cutting.
Speaking of grass, the green stuff is a hardy ground weed rather than grass in most places.
I grow the nicest grass along the road out front rather than in my yard. And it’s not from lack of trying to bring it in.
A quarter acre of one of the lots is Chicken-Land. It’s the steep part of the lot. And I mean steep!
The bush growing there is not original jungle, more like 3rd generation re-growth. It keeps the dirt from sliding downhill. But over the years that has been an issue.
I’m not talking landslides here. Steady erosion of water, wind, time, and scratching chickens has sent a fair amount of soil downhill.
As the division of the lots.
The lot with the house on it is bigger. On the plot plan the lots are about the same size. But since I have no plans to ever sell the lots separately, I didn’t follow the plan with my middle fence. It’s cuts a fair bit off the empty lot.
The now-empty lot used to house a little rental house that I have sold. Water and sewer are still there and so are some concrete remnants.
As you see from the pictures, my house is not the conventional type.
It’s a dog house.
I used to be part of the local humane society; actually, I am one of the founders.
My job in life was rescuing puppies.
Roughly 150 of them have gone through here, and some of them stayed. The ones with the 3 legs, mental or physical problems. The non-adoptables.
Currently I am down to 10.
So the house is “dog-centric.”
I just get to live here too.
The number of dogs that have been in and out of this house, and still the floors are solid, speaks to the quality of the build of this house.
There are two solid kennels in the yard. A 3rd one that I use as a plant house could also be a kennel or house small livestock.
Some smaller kennels are also under the house.
Also under the house is a solid block basement.
The house sits on enough of a slope that while the entrance is almost level the back is 7 feet up.
The room was born after sitting through Hurricane Richard in my house.
But then came Hurricane Earl, and the dogs and I still stayed up here because I had a puppy that needed warm bottle feeding.
Neither hurricane did any damage to the house, but some trees did go down. Especially Richard, who came in on an unusual path
Also under the house are the water heater, the butane tanks, and the water pump, and the Rotoplas tank sits beside the basement on a concrete pad.
We never used to have much water up here on the hill until a few years ago when the city got better pumps.
Now we always have water at night and early morning. So the tank always refills.
We also have water when it rains.
But on most days the downhill population does laundry and whatnot, and we end up having to pump from the tank for some hours of the day unless we have the patience to live with a trickle.
