"Dog poisoning isn't just about the dogs"
This line struck me. I live across from a dog park and while sometimes I like to see the dogs frolicking, often the owners themselves make me fantasize about poisoning the dogs. I should really be fantasizing about poisoning the owners.
Also that article is disturbing.
That's why I never read the links.
Retirement, if you're lucky like me, is very similar to the question we've all pondered: Would you quit work if you won the lottery?
I'm lucky because there probably will come a time when I really will be able to walk away without taking any undue life risks, and without having to worry too much about money. Unfortunately, that time probably won't come before 67 for me, and maybe not before 70.
But yeah, I'd quit tomorrow. I definitely have days where dog-poisoning would be a more productive use of my time.
I have a lot of retired friends my age, and they're doing great.
Anyway, I don't fantasize about poisoning dogs. But I never fantasized about getting really good at Excel, but somehow I'm there.
3.3 now I'm curious. I guess I should assume hyperbole.
The non-physical problem with not retiring until 65 is that you got so used to working being the biggest part of your life that despite theoretically being free to do what you want, you languish in inactivity.
My goal for a while has been to work 4 days a week, so I have more regular time for other pursuits. I think I may be just a few years away from where that's possible.
That is a disturbing article. Maybe they should open an investigation into the death of her husband.
She brought him to the hospital in an onion sack. Above suspicion.
I have a friend my age (upper mid fifties) who recently quit with no definite plans to do something else-- DINK couple, moderately prominent job, idiot boss that she had enough of. She describes it as a month of Sundays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dog%27s_Ransom
I think I would do fine in retirement. At least I feel confident that I wouldn't poison any pets.
My problem is that I will never be able to afford to retire. Even worse, it's likely that my employer will insist on it at some point.
languish in inactivity
Unfogged is a lifestyle magazine.
Crumbling is not an instant's Act
A fundamental pause
Dilapidation's processes
Are organized Decays --
'Tis first a Cobweb on the Soul
A Cuticle of Dust
A Borer in the Axis
An Elemental Rust --
Ruin is formal -- Devil's work
Consecutive and slow --
Fail in an instant, no man did
Slipping -- is Crashe's law --
Did the other half of the couple in 9 also quit? If not, then she didn't so much retire as decide to become a kept woman.
My father (72) has a very flexible patient-treating job he likes, but he is finally retiring next spring. I had the disconcerting experience this Thanksgiving of him calling up a hospital to speak with his patient, but blowing up and going full asshole almost immediately on someone he thought was stymieing him. He then acknowledged how bad it had been and called somewhere else to fully apologize (the original recipient had blocked his number). I'm hoping this is a rare thing, but in any case it seems like a good time to retire.
I renewed the lease on my office for 3 years beginning on Jan 1, 2022. I've been saying I won't renew. My malpractice insurance rules from July 1 to July 1, so if I have cases pending at the end of '24, I'll work from home.
I've have some unexpected expenses, and so retirement isn't going to be lavish. I guess I'm not so troubled by that.
12. ? Asking is conventional when one wants more information, I guess not for everyone.
No, he's been sidelined into a position without real responsibility, half-work. Both have independent pensions and savings. He's got a kid, maybe helps with support there.
14: There's probably not a big stray animal population where you are though.
My brother-in-law's year or so as a kept man is about to end, as my sister is retiring as of the end of this year.
Maybe you have to be not just retired but rich to go off the rails into animal poisoning or similar? She had chauffeurs. I don't know anyone with a chauffeur and I don't think Uber would work for this.
I'd very much like to retire from my job (possibly in 2027?) but all that means is that I could do some other half-time career or activism for a few years while not worrying about money. I still want to run for a local office, so that'll likely be my first retirement.
If I weren't doing my job or external activism, I could occupy quite a bit of my time gardening, but that would eventually run out of tasks.
Like, growing up there was a woman of independent means who made sure our school did a very high quality production of a Broadway musical every year. This was basically a full-time job for three months of the year plus she had all the expenses of traveling to New York every year to see all the shows so she could be an effective volunteer.
I have a friend in my field whose husband is a decade older than her and keeps saying she'll retire in her mid-50s when he hits his retirement.
Good question, I don't remember.
In retrospect, that should have been my main worry too.
I think I'll be able to keep myself busy, but haven't figured out much beyond that. Theoretical soonest possible retirement is age 62 (pension eligible, 5 years and change from now), soonest sensible is probably 65, and financially strongest is 67. That seems doable most days, but some days I'm ready to build a Unabomber shack and drop out.
I will not be as bad at retirement as Mauna Loa, I'm pretty sure.
A colleague retired when he could, and surprised me by saying he'd decided to make withdrawals on his retirement fund at a rate that would exhaust it when he was, I forgot but let's say 80 or less, because looking around at his family they didn't tend to live super long anyway. I'm so used to being surrounded by forward thinking types for whom the only acceptable option is "as long as possible." I think maybe he was making the 67 vs 65 tradeoff at the same time in his head, and getting out early despite the lower social security payout.
I liked the dog poisoner article though it felt a little short on motive in the wrap-up. I was telling a bird-watcher friend about it as we walked over for coffee and when I mentioned the cats-in-onion-bags-with-chloroform he said "well, I might be able to get behind that."
It's a different type of volcano that poisons animals.
I liked the dog poisoner article though it felt a little short on motive in the wrap-up.
It was an interesting example of journalism working primarily from archival sources but also shows the limitations of that approach in this format.
26.2: Right. You just need a reason if you've got too much free time.
If you can last long enough, collecting SS while you're still collecting a paycheck is awesome. For the first time in like 40 years (i.e., before having kids) I reached a low 5 figure checking account balance by just banking the SS checks.
Back story is I waited to collect SS until 70 and planned 2 years of it, but COVID-online teaching plus a new asshole department head who just had to micro-manage every aspect of that made me decide to cut it back to just one year. We had a department meeting on like May 20 to discuss next year's classes and I emailed him on something like May 29 to say I had put in my papers.
Speaking of health insurance, my youngest kid will turn 26 around the time I turn 64, so that seems like as good a time to retire as any.
That's plenty of time to enjoy life and poisoning.
28: I was amused that she couldn't even find an academic willing to pretend to be an expert on animal poisoning
I've never mapped out how old I'll be when my youngest is 26. Looks like I'll be 62. We've really been blogging here a long time, haven't we?
Which was the kid who was at UnfoggeDecaCon?
34: If you can see the mountain lion, it's not stalking you. So, you only need to be careful if you can't see a mountain lion.
The best way to prevent mountain lion attacks is to ban duplexes.
36: Ace, who is currently 9 1/2 years old.
You really need to delay retirement until your kids are old enough that they can leave town if you can't stop yourself from poisoning animals.
35: Yes, I remember a very long time ago when you posted about how you and Jammies were fighting all the time, and so you decided to have a kid to fix things. And to think, some of us here thought that was a bad idea!
38: The best way to prevent mountain lion attacks is close monitoring of retired mountain lions.
Only you can prevent dog poisonings. By leaving your dogs out for the mountain lions.
41: quite possibly my high water mark as a blogger. God I still love that post.
I have no idea how to estimate my retirement possibilities at this point because I spent a lot of time as a student or underemployed in ways that slowed or prevented savings, and then in the past few years have tried to save at a rate that will help me catch up but which probably isn't sustainable because it's been so much of my income. Various retirement calculators I've seen give a projection based on current income* but I haven't had my current income for long enough to know what I'd consider good as a relatively fixed income during a non-pandemic. I'm sure I need to talk to an advisor but I have to get over my feeling that everyone in financial advising is out to scam you.
* They all phrase things as "You should have saved X times your income at age Y" but my previous income was lower and I could probably live fixed on something close to that earlier income if I were careful/lucky with housing costs. Basically, what I've been doing the past couple years is trying to live on the previous income and shovel the difference into savings, except it's also nice to be able to afford better things and also feel like I could quite my job and not immediately be in a financial crisis.
It's of course in the interest of retirement fund management companies to tell you that you need to save more. The X times income (which assumes you'll need 70-80% of current income to "maintain your lifestyle") is so stupid because right now I'm paying for four kids expenses and saving for their college and saving for our retirement. There's no way I'd need 70% of current income without those expenses. Unless by "maintain your lifestyle" they mean support your grandchildren?
They mean pay the chauffeur to drive you while you poison dogs.
Maybe four or five years ago, I began thinking occasionally about retirement. I had, because of a family health issue, left a relatively new job that was in some important ways very good for me to return to an old job that was in some important ways less good for me, and retirement served as a very useful escapist fantasy. Then, when COVID hit, I found myself in a role that carried some pretty significant responsibilities, and I started spending a LOT of time looking at real estate located in places where we'd like to retire. That hasn't let up much, I guess, and my time on Redfin has left me thinking that I either need to make some changes in my work life or retire a bunch of years earlier than I once would have imagined would be possible. Either way, I expect that retirement will be very similar for me to working, though with fewer meetings and no teaching. But that could be overly optimistic. Maybe it'll just be non-stop pet poisonings.
To be clear, I don't want to lock myself into killing only dogs. Cats, birds, and assorted rodents have it coming, too.
I could retire and start drawing a pension in a little over ten years, when I'm 62, and I've thought about switching jobs at that point -- using the pension to support my lifestyle while I do something highminded but low-paying, like being a public defender or something. (Do I know anything about being a public defender? No, but people do it right out of law school, so I'm pretty sure I could manage.)
Getting a whole different job just to avoid the temptation of poisoning cats and dogs seems like a great deal of trouble.
Plus, you'd start at the bottom of the PTO scale so you'd have trouble just getting vacations, let alone committing various indignities on the domesticated animals.
My retirement plan has always been to go from teaching 5 classes a semester to teaching 1 class a semester, so I can finally do the job right.
Retirement is over 20 years away for me so I haven't even thought seriously about it. I hope I wouldn't waste so much of my time playing computer games, once my main source of recreation is no longer on the same device as my job, but knowing me I'd resolve to write a novel but I don't have a typewriter so, whoops, I guess I'll have to use my computer for that too.
Anyways, right now I have more important things to put money into. In addition to the kid's college fund, we hope to add a third story to the house, and hope to do so without putting more money into the house than it's worth but that's hard to be sure of.
Climbing stairs gets old. Make space by extending the second floor over the street.
Remember that the motto of building inspectors is "It's better to ask forgiveness than permission. "
I go back and forth between thinking the state will cut my line in the next five years, thinking that I'll quit in five, or thinking I'll work til 80 just so they *can't* attrition us out of existence.
Where I work, almost no one seems to ever retire. I have a 75-year-old colleague who has been gradually tapering off his workload over the last couple of decades to the point where now he pretty much only shows up a few hours a week to teach, but he seems to have no intention of retiring. In a neighboring department I have a 93-year-old colleague who, as far as I can tell, only officially retired within the last year or so.
Having just taken on an enormous mortgage to buy a home, it's hard to imagine retiring early. But unlike my colleagues, I find the thought kind of appealing? I could keep working on what I like to work on but without all these damned students.
You could do the thing with the cat in the box, but with enough replications for a confidence interval.
I guess Schrödinger had tons of money or he would have suggested using rodents.
I'm much less worried about what I'd do when retired if I retired young* now that I take photos when I hike because I'd likely go out to take pictures even if I was doing the same few hikes all the time, instead of sitting around in between trips to places I don't visit that often. Maybe if I were retired I'd actually learn to take good pictures.
*I figure if I just did the normal thing and retired old I'd sit around thinking, "I should have poisoned those damn pets when I had the chance."
If you can see the mountain lion, it's not stalking you. So, you only need to be careful if you can't see a mountain lion.
If you can see a mountain lion, all that proves is that you aren't being stalked by that mountain lion. It says nothing about the activities of other mountain lions in your area.
I have a 75-year-old colleague who has been gradually tapering off his workload over the last couple of decades to the point where now he pretty much only shows up a few hours a week to teach, but he seems to have no intention of retiring. In a neighboring department I have a 93-year-old colleague who, as far as I can tell, only officially retired within the last year or so.
I HEAR YOU, MAN
63: They are very spread out and territorial.
meet hot mountain lions for activities in your area
Sure, that sounds like fun, I'm at --- wait, are you a mountain lion?
I definitely wouldn't eat your face!
I wonder if the mountain lions that attack people aren't retired.
67 hot cougars let's goooooooo!!!!! Ahhhhhhhh!!!!
55
Climbing stairs gets old. Make space by extending the second floor over the street.
I'm seriously considering getting out a shovel in my downtime and digging out the basement just to get a little more storage space. Cassandane is adamantly opposed to spending money to finish it, though. If we can't afford the third story, I think she'd rather move than put money into any work below ground. We might have to have an uncomfortable discussion about this at some point.
My parents had some friends near DC that did that. Is that like an East Coast thing to just bust through your own floor boards and dig yourself a basement? I've almost never lived anywhere where basements are standard.
I hadn't thought of it as an "East Coast thing" so much as a "small house in a city" thing, but I guess basements aren't standard everywhere... busting floorboards isn't up for consideration. The basement is unfinished. Concrete under less than half of it, a dirt crawl space under the rest. I'm just contemplating shoveling out the dirt so that it's more level with the concrete and we can actually use it, if only for storage, because right now we can't use it even for that.
So, if there's a crawl space there now, that means the dirt is probably needed to hold up the part of the foundation under the crawl space.
On the internet, nobody knows you're a mountain lion.
75: A tricksy deduction, but likely correct. In crawl spaces, it's common to wind up with 18-24" square pier footings about 6' apart in both directions, and continuous footings under the walls. If that's your system, you can probably get away with digging down to the new floor level (leaving a pillar of dirt supporting the existing footing), then bracing the supports for the existing post, replacing the short post with a longer post (to the new floor level) and new footing (under the new slab height that will be your new floor)... so it's steady work for each 6' square section you reclaim for storage, but can likely be done steadily. Of course, how easy that is depends on how easy the soil is to shovel...
Don't break your house, Cyrus!
This post is timely because I've been trying to figure out what to do about the feral cats that have overtaken my yard. My next door neighbor puts out food for the strays, so now dozens of cats (and raccoons, and possums) congregate in our area. M is allergic to cats, and I've been getting flea bites when I sit in the yard, and we have a desert garden, which the cats have taken to using as a litterbox.
I wasn't planning on poisoning them, but apparently you can buy wolf urine to spray around your property to keep the cats off? But my research tells me it is so malodorous as to repel not only cats but people, so I'm not sure it would be worth it.
On the OP, I'm still a likely 20 years off from retirement, so it's idle musing rather than something I'm concretely thinking about. My Dad was a teacher, so got to retire in his late 50s. He particularly loved it for a few years, but the idle time did encourage haunting ebay to expand his collections, and his house started slipping from "messy" to "hoarder".
I was in the same city, so lunches and gaming together worked well for some structure for another decade, but his loneliness intensified and he started spending time on dating sites as well... making the last few years much more dramatic.
He got to enjoy about 20 years of retirement, but only because of his early start; if he'd worked until his mid-60s and still died in his mid-70s, much of his retirement would have been fighting increasing health challenges and not really getting to enjoy the travel he'd so looked forward to.
75: Maybe! The architect is getting a structural engineer in here at some point, so it'll depend on what they say.
Poisoning animals is the new choosing between baby animals?
81: That's good. I thought you were just going into their yourself with a shovel.
I just passed a covid test again. Apparently, I just have a cold.
No kind of engineer is going to hold up a foundation for long.
Maybe a month or two if they're really wedged in.
What if they drag their feet on the permitting process?
No kind of engineer is going to hold up a foundation for long.
Not even a structural engineer?
83: That may be what happens. Even if we get a plan we like and can afford for the 3rd story, it might be nice to have even more space than that. If we don't get a plan we like and afford for the 3rd story, but can't face the prospect of either living with our current space or moving, a little more bare-bones storage space would be better than nothing. Realistically I probably would never do too much of this all by myself, but I've had dumber ideas.
On the topic of work: For the past few weeks, I've been getting a headache at work. I assumed I was sick and run down before Thanksgiving, and then I was startled when it happened on Monday, because I'd felt fine all break. (This week it's been very mild.)
It made me think about environmental toxins and how would I know if something noxious had been released nearby? No one seems to strike up a conversation about their illnesses. I don't report my headaches to HR. There is a meat packing plant next door. If they just now and then released toxic fumes, no one would ever be the wiser except maybe I'll get alzheimer's a few years early.
I have a fan in my office for when that happens.
84: That sounds painful, even with an effective laxative. Surely there's an easier way?
How's your office ventilation, can you open a window? At the risk of asking obvious questions, if it was me, I'd consider New carpeting or other building changes with sealants, adhesives, coatings in the last year in your building?
I don't know how to know (or prove) that your headaches are caused by an environmental condition, but at the least, I would talk to my coworkers to find out of they've been experiencing similar symptoms. If the problem persists, maybe talk to your doctor and get a note that would support a medical accommodation. Possible accommodations to seek could include: checking/resealing the doors and windows of your office and classroom, having your carpet cleaned, getting a good air purifier.
Poisoning animals is the new choosing between baby animals?
Dear Mineshaft. Years ago, when I first got my new puppy, he was so adorable. I thought I would love him forever. But it's been years, and I've gotten older, and I'm starting to realize -- having a dog actually kind of sucks. He's so needy! The constant walks and feedings and baths are exhausting and boring. I've started thinking about all the fun things I could do if I didn't have to take care of him all the time. Don't get me wrong, I love my dog and I know I'm lucky to have had a dog at all, but I'm starting to wonder -- Mineshaft, should I poison my dog?
Outsource the task to a gifted amateur.
I was very fond of DogBreath and I never want to be responsible for another dog. I would like dogs I can visit.
58: I know someone who would have done that. After his wife died in an accident (my godmother) he started drinking way too much and became unreliable. He's spending most of his time in Oregon where one of his kids and sister live.
Though a physicist by training, he was at the school of public health.
58: I know someone who would have done that. After his wife died in an accident (my godmother) he started drinking way too much and became unreliable. He's spending most of his time in Oregon where one of his kids and sister live.
Though a physicist by training, he was at the school of public health.
58: I know someone who would have done that. After his wife died in an accident (my godmother) he started drinking way too much and became unreliable. He's spending most of his time in Oregon where one of his kids and sister live.
Though a physicist by training, he was at the school of public health.
58: I know someone who would have done that. After his wife died in an accident (my godmother) he started drinking way too much and became unreliable. He's spending most of his time in Oregon where one of his kids and sister live.
Though a physicist by training, he was at the school of public health.
Though a physicist by training, he was at the school of public health
It's me, hi, I'm the problem it's me
Someone in this house won't tell me how much they paid for tickets to see that.
I wonder if that means I can buy a $500 tent with no blow-back?
My household is currently taking care of nine dogs. (Six permanent, three temporary and in theory leaving tomorrow.) It's... a lot.
I never want to be responsible for another dog. I would like dogs I can visit.
Japan has a solution.
Yes, but only one is a husky and she's very old.
Obviously you won't win any races, but I would find a sled pulled by a team of dachshunds to be more impressive than one pulled by huskies.
Three of them are in fact dachshunds.
Otherwise it's two golden retrievers, two Shetland sheepdogs, and a bichon frisé.
It's going to take more than three dachshunds though. Back of the envelope, I said 36.
Twitter has dropped its covid-fraud screening so if you want to retire early, you can try to sell ivermectin to the free.
115: We had some last-minute Thanksgiving visitors--friends who were in town to visit family but ended up staying us when the relative they were to stay with tested positive for Covid. On Friday the (unvaxxed) relative told them she was feeling better after having taken Ivermectin. Bu they were (somewhat guiltily) pleased to report that on Saturday she tested positive and felt like shit.
My household is currently taking care of nine dogs. (Six permanent, three temporary and in theory leaving tomorrow.) It's... a lot.
Yeah, I would have said six was a lot, never mind the temporary dogs. When I was growing up, my family's peak of pet ownership was two dogs and seven cats, and that only lasted a few weeks before the oldest cat, mother or grandmother to most of the rest, vanished. She wasn't too old, realistically she was probably caught by an owl or coyote, but we like to think she got overwhelmed by the crowding and constant demands for mothering.
If people are already going to the veterinarian, pick me up some ketamine please.
Retired at 63 in 2017. A quite generous buy-out from my employer aided the decision*. If I ever have thoughts about having done it differently they tend towards getting out earlier, but not strongly so. More opportunity for travel being the most compelling one particularly with Covid knocking travel back for a number of years. And I really did blunder into a financial sweet spot with my timing. I did go back and consult part-time with my old company for a few months and it reinforced how fucking through I was with that particular gig. I was somewhat surprisingly systematic with planning what I wanted to do in retirement, and have actually done much of it, with notable exceptions being anything that required disciplined mental effort (getting back into programming for instance). Main thrust has been some increased sports (rowing team, pickleball with my wife) and recreational activities (hiking, kayaking, biking, bird watching), involvement in voter education and registration, and volunteer naturalist activities such as leading school group hikes at a local preserve and invasive species management (aka weeding the woods).
Other benefits have included freedom of association (mostly not having to deal with Trumpist fuckoid co-workers) and losing a good chunk of weight (seems I am a stress eater). Main negatives have been my annoyance at lacking the discipline to do the mental effort things like programming and various writing thingies, and an occasional feeling of being "left out" of the real work of the world in these parlous times. Oh, and of course, ongoing physical and mental deterioration and living in an incipient autocratic kleptocracy, but those are of course independent of my working status.
My wife has continued working very part-time at a relatively entry-level job at the local library but it is flexible enough to not impede us other than occasionally with regards to extended travel. (Travel being the area the two of us are not completely aligned on, her natural frugality leads her to aggressively reject my calculations showing how much we can afford to spend on travel in a year).
Anyway, I think it is hard to generalize about retirement. However, stepping back and assessing what you (and involved others) really value in life is valuable. Also memento mori.
*In my situation, working IT at a large non-IT company that was not growing, they were very aggressive at throwing us bums out, but often with very generous financial carrots. When I left at 63, there was only one employee in my department of several hundred whom I was sure was older than me (there were probably several others). This seems to be in stark contrast to academics I know, who are all planning to go into their 70s and are generally quite self-righteous about it despite (the ones I know anyway) being very financially secure. I have generated hard feelings by mildly suggesting that academia is an area which could really benefit with an infusion of younger talent (and more opportunities for that talent). Although I guess they might well just backfill with adjuncts. The institutions seems to value the old farts for their hooks into the grants/funding labyrinth.
Be careful. Birdwatching is the first step on the road to cat poisoning.
I in fact was an entertained spectator to a federal litigation known in my office as Birds v. Cats: organizations representing endangered birds sued the state for maintaining (that is, allowing weirdos to maintain) a feral cat colony in a state park. The ultimate settlement, in which the cats were transported to a sanctuary, was almost disrupted when the first sanctuary that agreed to take the cats started getting death threats (presumably from some of the weirdos).
At the risk of asking obvious questions, if it was me, I'd consider New carpeting or other building changes with sealants, adhesives, coatings in the last year in your building?
It actually isn't primarily happening in my building - it's happening when I'm teaching. When I'm teaching, I'm generally concentrating hard enough that I really couldn't tell you if I had a headache or not, and then the moment class is over, it hits me like a ton of bricks. So the pattern has been on my days when I have several consecutive classes (in different buildings) it seems to build up, and then at the end of the last class (when I'm tired and cranky to boot) it's really a lot, and then gradually recedes over the rest of the day, when I'm back in my office and at home. This is why I was idly wondering if it's something blowing in from the nearby factory, that I'm breathing in between classes. (Of course, the likeliest explanation is just that I had a bug, and was just run down enough that the concentration of teaching triggers a headache.)
I hate my MWF schedule so much. I have four of these left in the semester. I cannot wait.
The cat people are nuts here too. But I don't think that there's any way they can further their goals by poisoning animals.
There is in fact a cat colony at the end of a trail along the river where I occasionally bird (also a kayak launch point). The Pittsburgh Prison Cats, and they have their own website. The prison is the old Western State Penitentiary, an imposing place and one which I suspect most people have seen glimpses of in movies or TV shows (earlier this year I was waved off as they were filming a TV show The Mayor of Kingstown there).
Next week going on my first group birding tour in New Mexico. Curious to see how we like that. A small group at least.
It turns out the carpet in my condo building is so neglected a long list of carpet cleaners has all refused to come at all - some stuff won't come out, some parts aren't attached to the wall, etc.
Off topic:
I'm having an ADU built in my backyard. The framers are here today. They are just amazing. This is their third day of a full crew; it looks like they'll get the remainder of the second floor up today. I still haven't seen them actually tilt a floor up but probably will today. I'm bummed it won't be roofed ahead of the rain tomorrow, but I figure the climate is so dry here that it doesn't matter if the lumber gets wet for a while.
They are so casual about their ladders. Unopened, uneven, one leg on a loose pile of lumber, leaning against the house? No problem, will just stand two legged on the very top.
129: Oh man, I would love to check back later and see if you'd recommend them for my property in your area, plus cost levels etc.
Is there a GC managing them, or are you DIYing?
Definitely working through a general contractor. Dear god, I would not try to do this myself.
I do like the general contractor but oh holy fuck is this expensive. I think his overall niche is expensive and high quality, which I suppose I believe in when building something permanent. Like, every sub contractor has been (so far as I can tell) very conscientious and tremendously capable and pleasant and all the work looks good to my eye. He either bid with a cushion or costs are going down because I keep getting small refunds from a breathtaking initial bid.
I went with him because 15 years ago he did my weatherization at my other house and I found him to be very square and a tiny bit humorless and thorough. So we agreed to work together in 2019. If I hadn't been in the queue with him from then, I don't think I could have gotten any contractor to start with me two years ago. Even so, I would have had to forego the project altogether if my mom hadn't offered me one-third the cost. I am still going to end up with a loan for a couple hundred thousand dollars, which was more palatable four interest rate hikes ago.
You could buy a really big house in central PA for that. You just paint and take down the sign calling for Fauci to be imprisoned.
How would a really big house in central PA fit into my back yard?
I don't know, but the Fauci sign would.
133: Good to know. I'm on the lookout for something as off-the-shelf and standardized as humanly possible, as I will probably be on the knife edge of affording it at all.
It's been interesting watching ADU activity balloon with the new laws (entitlements, 4,391 in 2018 to 11,676 in 2021; building permits, 8,905 to 23,663), but while capacity is increasing so is price. And there are so many contractors trying to newly specialize in ADUs it can be hard to figure out who actually knows what they're doing.
It is so expensive. I pretty much sunk-cost-fallacied myself into it and I do, in fact, want what it will provide me. (Gathering space downstairs, room for a tenant upstairs.) I'm going to be happy I have it, and I'll do everything I can to extract fun from it while I live here. But I cannot imagine that it is adding as much value to the property as I'm paying for it.
135: Annex the Donbas intervening areas.
You know who ELSE wanted to expand his living room?