Patio

The heat generated from burning 2 million years worth of compressed and liquefied bacteria known as oil has led the southwest to become an inferno. The answer is obviously to stop burning oil but that can't be accomplished without some wisdom and forethought so the second best answer is an outdoor patio with misting hoses from a hardware store. This required running water from the other side of the house though the attic and a hole in the porch roof but I was cutting holes in the porch anyway.

Lots of sloppy pavers, a couple chairs and a misting hose zip tied overhead. every castle needs this. 10 bags of sand to level one area. The rest will be wobbly and uneven because I'm not going to spend a fortune to level a lawn.

A tropical paradise

A view of the ancient roof that is above the porch, but below the newer roof that covers everything. This fortunately allowed me to cut holes to ventilate the roof surface of the porch.

Cut some soffit vents....

Cut a hole in the porch roof into the attic area that is vented with gable vents

Buy some ridiculous rafter baffles made from egg cartons that prevent the insulation from blocking the air space. The baffles connect the soffit vents to the ridge vents and gable vents and allegedly keep the roof deck the same temperature on both sides. Allegedly. In practice this scratched my throat with fiberglass, poisoned my hands with what I believe was rat shit, and opened the wall up for insects to freely enter the porch and attack me as I sleep.

This is all in the life of a homeowner. Making improvements that may or may not improve the quality of living. But the problem is that any single improvement starts a chain reaction. I want air conditioning so that means the room should be insulated...and vented...which requires cutting holes and repairing split rafters...and this is done before installing a metal roof...at the same time as insulating the walls, which need new siding and windows and awnings and sheathing and that exposes the 55 year old wiring, that needs to be replaced. See? I want to insulate a wall but I end up running new electrical and fixing rafters? It's the chain reaction effect. One change effects all the other components unless you simply ignore all common sense and insulate a wall and leave the ungrounded electrical wires in place forever although you had exposed them for the first time in 55 years. Of course I'll replace the wire, but that leads down a totally different construction phase and I can't replace it all at once without tearing all the siding off at once, which is too large a scope for a single person to do.

This may sound like complaining but it's more about defining the decision making process for owning a house. Many decisions are basically made for you because of cost efficiency. Now, I could've replaced all the wood siding with new wood but I decided to reuse the old fake truwood and save money. That decision can be revisited in the future without much problem. But the decision to replace the electrical wires can not easily be revisited since I'll be tearing off new truwood and that makes no sense. Either finish everything now, or don't bother.

I have more time than money so it's easy to move forward with my one man show.