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Comment by ramraj07 | Hacker News Reader

What would realistically be a ballpark expense for basic living (I assume you mean food water and power)

Washington is already extremely expensive and our area was even more so. Water was free (well) but electric was very expensive and often went out. I put in a 48kw generac with a thousand gallon propane tank for backup which was a big project but very nice to have. Food, plowing, driveway maintenance, property stuff were all also high. (wife wouldn't let me get a beater 80's f-250 plow truck) Getting trades to even return a call was hard and could be months out for any jobs so I learned to do a lot on my own. I lived in WA for 25 years so just got used to the costs but moving to Boise last year made me realize it was insane.

Haha, I thought a well meant free water, until a pinhole developed on the pipe right above the pump, about 250’ below ground.

And like you said, hard to get anyone out to even fix it. We had to wait 6 months for the snowpack to thaw and scheduling to line up. So that meant an extra thousand or so bucks just to build a workaround system in the meantime.

Yes, that was one thing we luckily avoided. The previous owners of our place had the older 25 year old well crap out. It also didn't have good GPM in that location so in addition to fixing the old well they added a new well and cistern about 200 meters away in a location with better flow. The old well was enough to run irrigation (we only irrigated a few acres of lawn around the house) so they set it up so the old well ran irrigation and outside frost frees and the new well ran the house, with cutoff so that I could swap as needed. I sometimes thought about retiring from software and starting a handyman business that would shoot for a 24 hour response time and fast turnaround for small things like outlet repairs, light fixtures, small plumbing fixes, etc. The main trades in the valley were backlogged with 6 figure new builds so I don't really blame them for ignoring calls for a 2-4 hour job that would take 2 hours of driving to access.

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