Tale of Two Houses #3

The top one, on our right hand side is beginning to take shape on its massive foundations. The orange machine in the driveway is the timber lifter, essential for lifting lumber from the ground up to the building, but very noisy as it creaks and groans and complains constantly as it is being driven up the steep hill. And of course there is the inevitable beeping as it backs down again....all of which illustrates the extreme difficulty of this building site and explains the slow pace at which it is proceeding.

The house on our left is now finished on the outside. It is much more interesting from the front, and they have added some nice architectural features, but for purposes of comparison I took the picture from our driveway as this is the view of the house we see. I hope they are going to paint the outside as it looks a bit stripey. There has been work going on inside the house, which I assume must be putting up wallboard and closing up the walls, although we're barely aware of the presence of workers.

There are a couple of other houses near us which appear to have been completed but are unoccupied. One across Los Alamos from us has some kind of changing colored light display in it's window every night and is painted a very unlikely sort of pea green color, but there is no sign of actual ocupation. The bunker house above us is completed but there has been no landscaping  or even clean-up outside. It has been under construction ever since we moved here 10 years ago and has a for sale sign in front of it but remains a complete mystery....

John has been without a working app to tell him what is being done with the energy from our solar panels. A call to the manufacturer said they were no longer supporting the app and to call the installer. We can't really do that since we didn't end our relationship with the installer on very good terms so we called Jim. Released from self-imposed quarantine, he came over today and determined that the modem in the inverter is only 3G, which the government no longer supports. 

A quick review of the options revealed that a new modem would cost anywhere from $300 to $900 plus the cost of installation.... At any rate, Jim figured out a work-around that cost $20 and the app is working again. The man is a gem. We are so fortunate to have fetched up so close to Dana and Jim. I don't know what we would do without them.