jeppine's comments

Would encourage anybody who has a historic home pre-1940s to keep their original windows and just restore them. Unless you get 4 and 6 pane windows, the energy savings are minimal.

Brent Hull is a good resource on historic windows and outlines the reasons to keep them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6mAmIrN5qY

Plus, the original windows look significantly better and will last longer.

It's more of a breeding facility. The locals call it the "Monkey Farm". They probably want them to be as disease free as possible for the labs that buy them.

There is also a controversial "Monkey Island" on Morgan Island in St. Helena Sound.

I think one of the main issues with pricing is the deferral of taxation for the sale of rental or investment properties. A lot of people are seeing housing as a potential retirement savings account that can be reinvested and also produce income at the same time.

If I had $100k to put as a down payment on a $500k house, and was able to rent at a rate that would pay, mortgage, taxes and upkeep. In 30 years, even assuming the price of housing stayed the same, it would have been a pretty good investment.

What is better though is if anytime within the 30 years the house doubles in price. I can sell it tax free and have enough money to buy an even more expensive house and potentially have a better retirement.

As long as I keep shifting the money from one house to another, I never pay taxes. I am also able to continue to rent the property and bring in a nice continuous income.

The fun little trick to this is you have to find a new property within 45 days of selling the previous property to keep the tax deferral benefits.

I think this 45 day window combined with low interest rates and limited inventory caused most of this crazy increase in housing prices.

Unfortunately, the landlords have increased their rents to correspond with local housing prices, and normal hardworking people are getting squeezed more than they ever have been.

I don't think this is sustainable, and as soon as there is a drop in renters in an area, and the rental properties start losing money. The housing prices will start to fall. The question is how long this will take.

Unfortunately, I feel that this is quite common in small businesses. I put in the same 10 years that you did, and would constantly propose large improvements to the owners. They were almost always shot down, and just result in me having to deal with the same problems.

Most of the time, I feel that it is just the owner’s fear of losing control of some part of their business. Sometimes it’s just fear of change.

I decided to go into a different career path entirely and am working for myself now. It has helped my mental state incredibly.

I know it is scary, but sometimes you just have to take the leap.

Best of luck with your plans.

He also has a website that has some good guides on tools and exercises to teach you the basics.

https://commonwoodworking.com/

Lost Art Press also has some good books mainly focusing on hand tools.

https://lostartpress.com/