Matter of Facts: Location, Location, Location

Welcome back to the Matter Facts Podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping guns and politics every week on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at mofpodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Ravele. Andrew and Nick are on the other side of the mic, and here's your show. Welcome back to Matterfacts Podcast, least professional podcast on the internet, and if not, certainly least professional on the entire Prepper Broadcasting Network, and no one is going to take that away from us. They can try really hard, but I will find a way to derail it better than them. I mean, we do suffer from a severe lack of professionalism, but, you know, we are only professional podcasters in the barest possible sense of the word. So we get a pass. I give us a pass. Yeah, definitely. I mean, until one and or all of us start collecting a paycheck, we are definitely only moderately professional. Yeah, I had somebody try to tell me I was famous once and I was like, being a micro niche celebrity that is only recognizable at one distinct event in the United States every year by like eight people does not qualify as famous. The fishing guide on my local halfway decent bass lake is more. Famous than either of us. I kind of prefer it that way, though. It means that I get to do hood rat stuff under the radar and not wind up in club fed. Also, all the people that follow us are pretty cool. So we don't have we don't have any of the like not cool people following us. This is true. This is true. All right. I got a raggle. I got a Mrs. Emberson and a Mrs. Rabelais in the chat. And it looks like it's just going to be a quiet evening tonight, which is fine. We have a little bit of admin work. We have a mini topic and then we have a bigger topic. So without further ado, if you'd like to promote Bad Decisions by becoming a patron, that link is in the show description. And if you'd like to buy merch for the vibes from the Southern Gals, that link is also in the show description below. And if you'd like to prevent war crimes with Disaster Coffee, use code MOF to order your coffee. I cannot promise you it's going to be expedient after the experience we had last week, but I can promise you that if you get a hold of me, your coffee will show up eventually. You know, I. Have a thought on why. We got the new bag art. I wonder if they were waiting on the new bags to arrive. Because I have to say the new bag art is pretty good. It's pretty good. Andrew just took it upon himself to redesign the website again, redesign all the art for the merch and everything. It looks really nice. I mean, that's possible. I'm not sure exactly what the holdup was, but a couple of emails and some antagonizing and pestering, and things went out the door eventually. Look, man, no matter what you do, every company is going to hit shipping delays at some point. Just this shit happens. Yes. It's one of those things where you reach out. It's fixed. Got coffee. My wife is caffeinated. I'm highly caffeinated today. It's all good. The one thing I will say is that even before I was a part owner, when I was just, you know, kind of brand partner and regular buyer, I did have once or twice where I had an order get hung up somewhere in the annals of the roasting of the roaster. And, um, couple of emails, got it moving. So. Well, that's, that is the bane and benefit of small businesses though, right? Because you can, you can get in touch with the guy who can pull the levers very, very easily. The other part of that is, is there. May not be always the volume to handle the order. So you might just get stuck in a queue at some point. Hey, what are you going to do? Yeah. Dr. Scary guy. We, we are briefly talking about how, um, My illustrious co-host had a bit of a kerfuffle with a coffee order, and we got it sorted. It just took. A couple days longer than I would have preferred, but, you know. The important part is the coffee is delicious. It will be that. It will be that. Oh, it is. I had it this morning. So this was going to be a question for, like, you, me, and Andrew, but he stood us up this evening. What's your favorite coffee roast from Disaster? Oh, it's absolutely Randy's front porch. 100%, huh? Uncle Randy's front porch. Oh, yeah. My wife really likes the s'mores, but as you know, I am a horrible person to my coffee. You're an awful person. I am an awful person, but I must say the Uncle Randy's front porch, that thing knocks it out of the park even after you've tortured it for 24 to 48 hours. I will say, and You've only bought it pre-ground. Have you tried K-Cups yet? No, we don't do the K-Cups. We don't have a K-Cup machine. I wouldn't either, but that's my only option for coffee at work. So I've actually brought a couple of boxes of Randy's Front Porch to work and shared them with some friends. And I will say that the Randy's Front Porch is everyone at work's favorite who's pilfered coffee from me. That's good. Personally, I mean, if I'm not roasting my own, I tend to gravitate towards Bear's Blend, which that was named in honor of Bear Independent, Refuge Medical. Yeah. But the same roast was originally Rapid Response, if you remember that from like years and years ago when disaster first stood up. I don't think I had it. I don't think I ever tried it. It's a medium. It's kind of a full-bodied medium, but I really like it. It is, to this day, like, it is the coffee I buy when I want to have, like, good ground coffee at the house. But I will say the s'mores almost unseated it. The s'mores is really, really, really good. It's really good. The flavor of the s'mores comes out best, I would say, within, like, the first hour and a half of brewing it. You get more of the, like, almost the marshmallow vanilla flavor. It reminds me the most of, like, a French vanilla. Coffee, almost. Yeah, Raggle said dark humor, pandemics. I can already tell he leans more towards dark roast. Dark roast is, I mean, dark humor. There's a reason why Andrew and I put the podcast name on that. I mean, dark humor is a really good dark roast. I've just found that over the years, my taste in coffee has migrated away from dark roast and more towards medium and even almost more towards light roast sometimes. Interesting. Kyle's saying he's a month off energy drinks. That's a rough transition, man. It is. Good luck. But I'll be honest. I only have an energy drink every once in a blue moon, and I will happily stick to my coffee. Yeah. I used to be a real big of the Monster Green Cans. guy oof yeah like the bfc's the full the full sugar ones i used to drink a lot of those i'd get cases of them at sam's club man it get going away from those was wildly addictive like trying to fight an addiction you don't say oh yeah oh yeah i you know i I realize nothing that's in them other than the caffeine is chemically addictive, but the flavor, the sweetness, the caffeine, and the habit, my gosh, that's hard to kick a little bit. Never discount psychological dependency and how fast that builds. Oh my gosh, yes. Especially when I was having like two of those BFCs a day. That was a lot. All right. That wasn't the mini topic. The mini topic is... Second Amendment Foundation presses SCOTUS. They want carry permits to be valid anywhere. So, give me a second. I'm going to bring this up. All right. So, in short, the Second Amendment Foundation has filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in the Johnson v. Jacobson case. They're urging the court to grant review... And this case kind of hinges around the idea that if, let's say, I have a concealed carry permit from Louisiana, I should be able to go to Illinois with it, and Illinois should not be allowed to discount my concealed carry permit that was issued by another state of these United States. That is, in broad terms, what the case is around. But I thought this would be an interesting conversation to have. Hmm. Hold on a second. I just got a warning in my pane. Neato. No data detected while recording locally for at least one of your feeds. Huh. I don't know which one of us that is, but it doesn't matter because we have cloud recordings and I am not willing to disconnect a feed in the middle of it. So we're just going to see what happens. Yeah, let's see what happens. I mean... This is why we have cloud recordings and hardware recordings, because one way or the other, I'm going to screw an episode out of this conversation. But anyway. no more derailing myself. So this is kind of the long and the short of the discussion, and I thought it bore having a bit of a talk about it because... I think so. I have mixed feelings, and I imagine you might also have mixed feelings. And before we start with the mixed feelings... Raggle, no. Andrew is working in the homestead. He said he had to run to town to handle some things. He did say he may be late, but he might not make it at all because, you know, such is the life and adulting and all those things. Such is the life up in the UP where everything is two and a half hours away and he had to. Run for parts. Yes. Amen. That happens with adults. So let me chuck a couple things in here. That QR code, or actually, no, no, that QR code over there is if you would like to read the article, and if you would like to be a goofball, you can vote in this poll. Should carry permits be valid in all states? And the options are, one, shall not be infringed. Two, absolutely not. I'm a dork. three, we'll regret this, and four, am I being detained? And if you all vote for am I being detained, I'll be very, very, very disappointed in you all. Look, you may vote by placing a one, two, three, or four in the comments, except possibly for Raggle, because the last time he tried to vote in this thing, it got mad. That's true. It did get oddly mad at him. I'm not sure why. Did we ever figure out why? No, we chalked it up to, like, Ghosts in the Machine type things. YouTube hates Raggle. Very valid. YouTube hates all of us. Well, there's that. Did it just take his vote? Yes, it did. It took Doc's. There are two votes. Raggle, you have voted. Hallelujah. We have fixed the ghost by doing nothing. We did not fix the ghost. We just ignored it until it stopped being a problem. That's how you troubleshoot problems. Well, that is one way to troubleshoot the paranormal, that's for darn sure. Also IT, which is also paranormal. Well, I mean, it really is. Look, if turning it off and turning it back on again doesn't solve it, there are very few things we can actually fix. I mean, to be fair, that's how you fix most problems with human beings, too. You turn them off and turn them on again, and they magically start working better. It's called going to sleep. Yeah, that's actually really accurate. Or getting put to sleep. Ah, well. Kyle, there is no 1.5. There is no 1.5. Nice try. All integers only, sir. Oh, so that's weird. That warning just went away because I minimized the other window that I had the SAF link in. So it wasn't recording the SAF link. That would make sense. All right. But that could also be because I intentionally didn't share the audio in case something crazy decides to start playing. Oh, well, yeah, there's that. That and all the copyright strike random crap. Serious discussion. No more derailing. Good. So what are your thoughts on this, bud? Because I am heavily conflicted about this. If, and I'm going to caveat this with an if. Are you going to caveat the caveat? If we are going to. Have concealed carry permits. If concealed carry permits are going to exist at all, they need to be like driver's licenses. Drive one, drive all. I mean, that's fair. It's not as if your Illinois driver's license doesn't give you permission to drive on the interstate down here in Louisiana. We kind of assume if the other state, you know, did any kind of due diligence of allowing you to have a driver's license, you probably know how to drive, at least as well as all the couillons that run around here that run in stuff all the time. I mean, if we are going to have concealed carry permits. Now, I would argue concealed carry permits should not exist because we have the Second Amendment. I'll go down that road with you. That is my permit. That is the only permit I should be required to have. Now, I understand that we're not going to go from where we are now to. Carped quad. 50 cal turrets on a trailer behind my truck in a Walmart parking lot. But we could. We could. If we were a proper country. If we were a proper country. You used to be able to mail order that shit, goddammit. In my grandfather's lifetime, we have really fallen as a country that I can't have a quad. 50 caliber anti-aircraft turret. Actually, wait a second. When were destructive devices? That was the Gun Control Act, wasn't it? It was, yeah. Okay, so that was 68, 64. He was born in 62? Well, no, what I'm thinking is that. No, wait, he was born before that. What I'm thinking is that my dad is 73 this year. Mm-hmm. When he was a young man, he could have mail-ordered a Solothurn 20mm anti-tank weapon to his house. Father, why did you not order this? Probably because he was... Probably because he was, you know, about two steps above dirt poor in a little town in East Texas. And a soul thorn costs as much as a car. And he was a teenager. All I'm saying is, if you have an anti-tank rifle, it opens up a lot of opportunities in life. I don't think it would have impressed my mother near as much as him upgrading from the motorcycle to a car. Well... My mom would not be impressed by a 20mm anti-tank rifle. Well, that's disappointing. Neither of our wives would be either, bud. I don't know. She'd probably be impressed if I managed to get it in the house without her noticing. My wife, 10 out of 10, would take one look at that and be like, it's awful big, and then go on to reading one of her books. That's probably the same response I would get. Actually, my wife would probably look at it and be like, do you know how many books I could have bought for that? Yeah, quite a few. But how many books can this shoot through? That's the real question we need to be asking. Yeah. Rachel, 100% notice Rachel saying I would notice Rachel, the rifle we are talking about when disassembled fits into a like three and a half foot long crate when it's assembled. It's like an eight foot long. It was a tripod. Oh yeah. It's not so much a rifle as it is an intent to do malice in mechanical form. Yeah, that's pretty much what it is. I mean, it's, It is largely a cannon. It's not. It is a cannon. It's not largely. It is. It is a cannon. It's a rifled cannon. Bruh. We are really stretching that definition. It's shoulder fireable if you really want to. Your ass. I would. I would shoulder fire it and happily deal with the broken collarbone just for the video. Your wife would never, ever let you live it down. Oh no, she wouldn't, and that'd be great. That'd be the best part, is she would then tell all of her co-workers how her. Husband broke his collarbone with a tank rifle. See, this comment by Dr. Scary Guy is exactly how I know that our fans are my people and that he immediately connected the soul of Thern to unintended consequences. Which, by the way, before we get back to the topic we keep derailing ourselves from, I was this close to getting the author of Unintended Consequences on the show years ago. That'd be great. Well, he and I talked a little bit here and there. I told him I was an enormous, you know, like total, I am an enormous fan. I've read your book cover to cover like 10 times. I do a podcast in this space. I would like, I told him, I'm like, this would be a bucket list thing for me to interview you on the podcast. He did not see, he was, I mean, he was flattered. Did not seem interesting coming on the show. We talked a little here and there. Yeah. I mean, totally get it. But I mean, I was, I was, it is, Of the few disappointments I have after 10 years podcasting, missing out on interviewing him, that's the top. I mean, that's pretty fair. I think it's a very important piece of literature work in this space. I do. 110%. What is your wife saying? Here's the thing. Nick doesn't put things away. He would be looking at the gun and think, oh, shoot, I have to go make dinner. Leave the gun out. I have had my wife come home to dinner on the table and a rifle sitting above dinner on a bipod because I just got too busy and I couldn't be asked to put it away before I made dinner. I hide things very poorly. I am not a subtle man. See, honey, it's not just me. No, no, no. It's like, oh, dear God, I have four minutes before she's getting home. I better whip up dinner. Whoops. It happens, man. But, you know, I think this is an important argument to be made before SCOTUS. Whether or not we think concealed carry permits should exist. They do. All right. And if they do, it is a license to carry a gun concealed in public. We have a license to drive a vehicle in public. 50 state legal. And our license is accepted by other countries. I would argue that our concealed carry license needs to be honored by all 50 states and territories, and territories, that includes D.C., and any of. Our allied nations. My wife is disagreeing with me. She said that is not me at all. I can't stand if she puts a screwdriver in the wrong drawer. That's because the screwdriver drawer is sacred. I literally, there is a screwdriver drawer. I have two screwdriver drawers in my toolboxes. I have a screwdriver drawer and there's a little spot for Allen wrenches in there too. It's important. That way you know where the tool is when you need it. No, but Gillian is speaking to the fact that I have like the worst case of OCD on earth and like there are parts of my, there are parts of the physical manifestation of my life that are like 14 things thrown into a junk drawer and then there are things that are like perfectly organized and dressed right desk with millimeter precision like an operating theater. Don't ask me what the difference is, but it's different. And I say don't ask because I don't freaking know. I haven't taken the time to think about it. Hey man, that's... So, I don't disagree with anything you said, but Kyle has a point and this is why I said going into this I have complicated emotions. Kyle said what? should be the standard across all 50 states. And here's, here's my worry. There is no standard across all 50 states for a driver's license. Each state is kind of allowed to kind of manage that how they see fit. And again, if we're going to have concealed carry permits, I kind of think that it should be as simple as if you get a permit in one state, every state has to honor. If you don't like that, then piss off, get out of the United States of America, like go be the Go be the United State of New York or the United State of California all by yourself and piss off. The Second Amendment is the law. If you don't like the law of the land, then go the hell off by yourself and stop bothering the rest of us. Which, by the way, very few states can support themselves without some kind of assistance from the rest. They like to say Texas could. Their energy grid is technically self-sustainable. Their energy grid, but is there a single state in this entire country that is 100% independent from outside exports, period, end discussion? There's no country on the planet that is. Exactly. There are countries that could be. And most of those states, if they were not allowed to transport through their neighboring states, would be economically crippled in an afternoon. Oh, absolutely. So all that to say... If you don't like being part of the United States, the alternative is much worse. You can go try it and tell me how. It works out. But I feel as though if we're going to have concealed carry permits valid from one state to another, the danger is someone is going to get it in their head that, well, if these states have to– if these permits have to apply across all 50 states, that means– We get to raise the bar up so that the minimum requirement is the highest bar for all 50 states. And that means we all get the same concealed carry permit process as California or New York. Well, that's possible. But here's the thing. Could somebody offer that as the poison pill to torpedo this whole thing? 110%. Oh, they could. I guess what I'm saying is my worry is always, whenever we have these conversations, it's, Are they going to attempt to federalize it, which I trust the federal government to monkey around with my gun rights like I do a fart after eating Mexican food in a bad part of town. Are we going to wind up with a worse situation than what we have now, whereas like right now I have constitutional carry in my state. I'm a big fan of that. I think that's awesome. I still get a concealed carry permit because there's 32 other states I'd like to be able to carry a gun in. Yep. But how do you account for that? Like, if I'm from Louisiana and I have constitutional carry and I come to Illinois, I just show my Louisiana driver's license and be like, fuck off. I can carry my homestay. I can carry yours, too. Correct. How does this like how does that work mechanically, legally in such a way that the intent of this law is respected? And I don't know that there is a way to do it that we do it now with trailers, but we don't do it with firearms. It doesn't matter. We do it now with trailers. It's very simple. Your trailer has to meet the laws in the state that it is plated. You, as the firearm carrier, have to meet whatever standard it is your personal state sets. It's very simple mechanically. I was just about to say something, but then I realized that the audio listeners would not be able to see the face I was about to make, which would indicate this was sarcastic. Trailers don't kill people, Nick. Sarcasm tone has been engaged. Yes. Cars don't kill people, Nick. Yes, you can argue that. But you know what? You can't argue that because statistically, people die on the freaking roads every freaking day. They get run over by cars. They get run off the road by trailers. Cars and trailers are dangerous things in the hands of the ill intent or of the ill trained, just like firearms. Yeah. But as a population, the people who carry guns every day in this country, who go through the trouble of getting a concealed carry permit, who submit themselves to all the additional background checks and regulations of their home state, of which very few just let everybody willy-nilly carry whatever the hell they want. At a bare minimum, constitutional carry states state that you cannot be a prohibited person, and that by itself eliminates a good chunk of the population of most metro areas. All of this to say that population of people who carry a gun on their hip every day with a piece of plastic in their pocket or not, historically and statistically do not commit crimes at a high rate. Period. Sure. They do not ND very often. They do not escalate confrontations very often because they have too much to lose. They lose guns less than federal agents. Oh, my dear God in heaven, yes. So I guess all that to say that my point always comes back to the idea that If the intent of requiring a permit is to ensure there's a minimum level of training, and you and I have talked about how I feel about concealed carry permits. I don't think they should exist. Yeah, I agree. But to insist that they are there to enforce training on people is hilarious because the training required is, you know, flippant at best. So I took me, my father-in-law, my brother-in-law, and my wife's sister's boyfriend. All went out to the range. That's a list. Yeah, well, there's four of us. We had a private booth. It was nice. It was very nice range. Fox Valley range in Elgin, I think. Very excellent range. Like them. Nice people. If you're in my area, I'm sorry you're in Illinois. Patronize their business. They're fantastic. But so the boyfriend never shot a pistol in his life before. He's only ever shot rifles and shotguns. I had him, within two magazines of instructed fire, shoot the Illinois concealed carry permit qualification successfully with no misses. What is the longest range you shoot after that? 10 yards. 10 yards. At a full-size torso, you can make 70% hits. 32 feet? 10 yards is 30 feet. 30 feet. Exactly 30 feet. I'm trying to do math on my head to meters, and that did not work well at all. No, no, no, no. But yeah, yeah, 30 feet. I mean, it's not a difficult qualification, and the reason why that qualification is what it is is because the Illinois State Police standard qualification for a pistol is 5, 7, and 10 yards, 10, 10, and 10 rounds, 70% hits. Our state.... One good thing it's done with firearms is said was saying, well, if it's good enough for the state police, it's good enough for everyone else. Seems reasonable. I would argue, God damn it. That's not good enough for the state police. Oh, it's not. But, you know, not even close. But at least they're holding everybody to the same standard, which is a wild anomaly for the state of Illinois. I mean, that's a wild anomaly for most states, to be perfectly honest, because they they'd like to let the agents of the state run around and do backflips and dance clubs with guns. And yet insist that the citizenry be trained like a special forces operator in order to carry a gun to Walmart. I have a problem with the fact that a concealed carry permit and the training requirements therein are not considered a poll tax. For the sake of constitutionality. It is a tax to exercise your right as enumerated in the Constitution directly. What the fuck? I have an issue with the fact that with many, many firearm laws, but my gripe with concealed carry permits has always come back to the argument that I've had with many people who I thought were well-intentioned but wronged. Who continued to say we don't want the wrong people carrying guns in public, to which I would reply you only have to look at the 6 o'clock news to realize that the wrong people are already carrying guns in public every freaking day. And you've heard me use this line. before. If a law does not appreciably modify the citizenry's behavior, the problem is the law. Either the penalty is nowhere near stringent enough. Or it's not enforced at all. Or it's not enforced at all, which is a problem with law enforcement. Or it's not enforceable because the thing that you're trying to mandate, the citizenry so awfully disagrees with, they will not comply with it. And if you do not have the consent of the governed, you cannot govern. No, you really can't. Look, I have been telling people for a large number of years, look, I am a little bit of an anomaly in that if I want to manufacture a firearm or explosive, I'll. Figure it out. No, seriously, it's not that difficult. I have all of the training necessary in most manufacturing techniques that if I feel like it, I can build a saw. If I feel like it, I can. It would not be that difficult. It would be tedious and time-consuming because I don't have the production equipment to do it. I could do it. It wouldn't take that terrible long. Heck, right now I'm working through building fixturing to build a rotary crank Gatling gun and. 22 long rifle because. I feel like it. Most of the bomb makers in Iraq and Afghanistan that were making IDs and blowing the legs off soldiers had about a fifth grade education. And I have better tools. I have far better tools than your average Afghani. Look, the only thing that stops a person like me or a person like you, Phil, from doing whatever the hell we want is goodwill. That's really all it is. Well, that and our dogs getting shot. Well, that too. But, you know, at a certain point, it's worth risking your dog because of the amount, because of how little goodwill you have towards whatever body is trying to enforce the law. I won't tell Stella you said that. Hey, look, man, everybody has their line in the sand, right? I mean, at a certain point, you're going to risk not just your dog's life, but your entire family's lives, because. On principle, you think it's worth risking. Yeah, I mean, at a certain point, you're not wrong. Founding fathers of our country did it. I mean, look, if they lost, they were looking at a noose. Best case. Best case. Best case of noose. And their families being destitute, every bit of property stripped away from them, their last name being basically run out of the pages of history. It would have been a thing. Benedict Arnold is a slur for traitorism to this day, 250 years later. You know, funny story. We're never going to live it down. You know, funny story. If you look at the down here on the Gulf Coast, I know this is definitely true in Louisiana. It's probably true across most of the Gulf Coast. But if you look at this area, every time you have a major hurricane that does like more than a certain amount of damage, whatever the name for that hurricane was, no one will name their daughters that for like 10 or 15 or 20 years afterwards. Like the name Katrina disappeared on the Gulf Coast after 2005. Some emotional trauma there that they don't want to bring back. Yeah. And then everyone. Knows that kid is just going to be mocked. Yeah. I feel for the poor little girls that were like five and six years old when it hit, though, because they had a rough time after that. Oh, I'm sure they did. Fortunately, Hurricane Dolly didn't come around and cause any hell, because on the same year that we lost Dolly Parton, that would have been very traumatic for all of us. Could have been for sure. All right, let's quit derailing ourselves. We have a discussion to have about location, location, location, and area study for home buying. So I feel like we've kind of talked about this or around this before. We have talked around it. But probably not in necessarily all the details we're going to this time. So the idea here is like, you know, we've talked before in the, we've talked in the past about how one of the things that I was taught to do was when you're looking to buy a house, especially around here, one of the things you need to be really hyper aware of is the elevation. Because everything around here is gravity drainage. Most of it's very low-lying. If your house is in a low-lying area, you definitely want to know about that in advance before you plunk down a down payment and be stuck with a house that floods every time someone spits on the sidewalk. Especially in your area. Yeah, well, it is one of the more severe problems we have around here is drainage and flooding. So it's worth being aware of the elevation. But it's not the only thing you should be concerned about. True. So one of the things that I did when we were looking for the current house we're in, we gave our realtor some extremely specific must-haves for the house. And more importantly, thou shalt nots. Do not show me a house with this. Do not show me a house with this. Do not show me a house with this. Was an HOA on the list? An HOA was the number one item on the list. You will not. Show me a house with an HOA. I will not be interested. I don't care how cheap it is. I don't care how lax their rules are. You will not show me a house with an HOA. Buying a house in an HOA is like buying a condo in the middle of Soviet Russia. Unless your plan is to take over the HOA and manipulate it to your own ends, there is no point to being part of an HOA. I don't even know if I want to go through the aggravation of doing all that. An elderly gentleman that I work with went through the hassle of bought a house in an HOA where his dad lived, took over the HOA to get them to stop harassing his dad and and to start harassing the Karens that were giving his dad a hard time and then basically dismantled any authority that the HOA had. It was glorious. It was glorious. That, that, that is some severe commitment. Oh yeah. He was beyond pissed and he had money to burn and time to burn. Um, comments, comments, comments, Kyle saying goodnight. It's time for time for, uh, Meds at night time. Yeah. Kyle's had a rough go of things lately. He had a pretty bad. Injury, but it sounds like he's getting on the mend. Hopefully. Last I talked to him, it sounded like he was improving. So, that's good. A couple things we absolutely wanted to have was a. Single story house. Because I am Injury prone? I mean, heck, I've got a brace on right now. No, not you, Nick. Yes, yes. Well, all of my hobbies, my work, and the things I enjoy, they have a tendency to eventually injure you, sometimes catastrophically. And my family does not have. A great history with joint health long term, largely because of our hobbies. So I wanted to ensure that we had a house that if we were stuck here long term, say, if this was the last house we ever bought, me and my wife would be able to live here until we cannot live on our own. We would not have to relocate again if we did not want to. It would have to be a want to. So with an eye towards like, as you get older, mobility starts to wane. At least the potential for that. Yeah. You were planning down the road for if this ends up being your forever home or if you want to make this your forever home, you're cool where you're at. Exactly. We wanted to make sure that regardless of how long we lived here, it would not become an issue because of the structure. Of the home. That's that's fair. That is a very reasonable concern. I feel like a lot of people fall into the trap of like wanting a bigger house, wanting a two story house. Sure. And then they get to like it worked out well for my parents because my parents downsized from a 2000 square foot house into their current house, which is a fair bit smaller. once I'd left and when my brother was getting ready to make his exit. So if you can downsize. Well, here's the thing. They were also in a very different housing market where downsizing to a smaller house wasn't as big of a speed bump as it is now. Right. I mean, look, I lucked into a phenomenally cheap mortgage rate. It will never be economically advantageous of us to sell this house and buy a different one. It just won't. We're never going to see sub-3% mortgages probably in my lifetime again. No, the only way it would make sense at this point is if you had enough equity in the house that you could put your house on the market, go get a mortgage for whatever rate, it wouldn't matter. And then as soon as you close on your current house, take the equity, pay the other mortgage off. Yeah, if you can do an even up trade or a cash positive trade and you pay a little bit of taxes, fantastic, sure, great. But, man, that's going to be hard to do and especially get another one-story ranch house. There's not a whole lot of them in our area. There were not a lot to choose from when we were shopping for these. So.... I think that if you're going out and buying, say, your first house, you're probably not going to have the luxury of being that particular. No, you're probably not. But after your first house, if you're going to move again, after you buy your starter house, you should probably at the very least consider, is this a house we could at least modify if one or more of us were to become mobility challenge? Because what happens if you have, like, like Kyle said, Right now, he can't do stairs because of an injury. Yep. So what happens if you get in a car accident? And my wife and I went at this from a slightly different direction. And the fact that we bought this house really with the intention of it being a starter house. This could, and we have talked numerous times about if this became our forever home, we could definitely make it that. We would put money into modifying the house to be more what we wanted within the confines of the property, but it. Could be that if it had to be. But we did buy this house with an eye towards eventually picking up, moving to a different area to be someplace we'd rather be than right here. And we bought this house very specifically because it's not an HOA. It's right outside city limits, which means you don't have to deal with. mandeville and all the the city nonsense there you just have to deal with the parish which is our version of counties yep and it's within striking distance of the causeway it's within striking distance of the interstate like it's in prime commuter territory so and there's like multiple really good private schools in the area like i wish the public school system something right home about but it's not so it's just one of those things where it's like we bought this with the intention of it being a starter home with the intention of being able to pick up and move within a property that would always be marketable because of where it was. Yeah. And you know, that's, that's a good thing to look for too, is like the marketability of the area is important, but there were some things that you, that you looked to avoid when you were buying your starter house, as far as the surrounding area. Um, traffic has always been a big one and traffic is something that is just continuing to escalate in this area. But, It is mostly on the western side of town that traffic is getting really, really, really unhinged. Over here on the east side of town, it's only a little bad around school hours, but anywhere you have a decent-sized school, traffic is going to suck around, drop off, and pick up time. There's no way around that. Raggle brings up an excellent point. You look to avoid the ghetto areas. Now, sometimes those can be hard to figure out, But what you can do, like your realtor is going to drive you directly to the house, probably, or meet you directly at the house. After you're done looking at the house, drive a few laps around the neighborhood. Go four to five blocks in any direction. Take a few laps. What are the vehicles outside the houses look like? Are the vehicles all garage kept? Can you see any vehicles sitting out in the neighborhood? Yeah, there's always going to be the teenager's beater and the in, you know, parked out front or parked out front of the house in the road, but are the yards well cared for? Are the houses well cared for? If there are. Dogs out in the yard, what's the conditions of the animals look like around you? Do the people in the homes around this area have generators? The first thing that I noticed when we pulled into my neighborhood is first off, every one of the yards was damn near immaculate. Even the, even, The houses that were obviously not as well cared for, that the owners were probably older. Flower beds weren't as well maintained. But the yards were all mowed. The houses were all clean. There wasn't garbage everywhere. And I think it was at the time when I moved in, every second or third house, depending on which area of my road, had a generator. Had a natural gas fixed placement generator. I got to step out for just one second. You're going to keep talking. Yeah, no problem. So one of the big reasons why I was paying attention to that kind of stuff is because the house we bought for our starter home, it was in a older area. Of my hometown. I believe it's considered the post-war build period. Most of the houses were built from 41 to 47, sort of, with most of them built in like 45 to 47. The houses were. Fairly well kept. The yards weren't as well maintained as the ones out in my neighborhood now. But the big thing that I didn't know to look for before was where the rental units were in my neighborhood. The neighborhood I'm in now, when we moved in, had a single house that was rented. One house that was rented. Now you can find this stuff sometimes by talking to your realtor and find out if there are rental units around us. As me and my wife. Lived in our first house, the neighborhood started to flip from single family owner occupancy to, I believe some of them were section eight. Some of them were other rentals. The issue with that is not that people that rent are a problem, but you have higher turnover of your neighbors. You have less investment in the area typically. And with section eight, you have lower income individuals and with lower income individuals, sometimes crime follows, especially if it's, um, say state subsidized like section eight, you know, it's, it's an unfortunate reality of what's going, what went on with the 2008 housing crash. that a lot of these subprime mortgages, they were sold out and bought by companies or people that wanted to rent the houses out. And you can guarantee to fill that rental unit by going to Section 8. Well, that, and I also think it's worth pointing out that, like, I'm about to make a generalized statement. Someone out there is going to say that doesn't apply to everybody, and that's all born of being a generalized statement, is that it generally applies, but not specifically. Mm-hmm. But there does tend to be a very dramatic difference in the level of care towards one's community and neighborhood between a home buyer and a home renter. Because the renter is, by their very nature, not quite as connected to the community. Because at any point in time, they can tell whoever they're leasing from, buzz off, I'm leaving, and they're gone. They're not committed to being there in the long term. They're not as invested and that that's not a, that's not a bad thing or besmirch. That's just like, that's economic reality. Like I have a vested interest to make sure. Their incentives are different. The incentive structure is different. Perfect way to put it. But like, I have a vested interest to make sure that my community, the community around me is going to be habitable and, you know, like nice to me and my family in the longterm, because I'm going to be here for a while. Like, bare minimum, I'm going nowhere until Piper's out of high school. Yep. Unless something really weird happens. But you know, it's just, it's a very different incentive structure. And I mean, probably the perfect way to put it is, Gillian and I intentionally put off buying a home later than I would have preferred to in optimal situations, but we put off home buying until I was fairly sure we were going to be in this area long term. Yeah. Like we were intentionally staying in an apartment, staying in a place where the rent was cheap, putting money away, just in case we wound up getting an opportunity that involved relocating. And once we decided, okay, let's quit throwing like, you know, $ 1, 000 a month, $ 900 a month. I know it's hilarious now, but, you know, let's quit burning money in the front yard in thin air, renting an apartment, and let's buy a house or build some equity, put down some roots. but the incentive structure is totally different. So when you have a bunch of people that swoop in, buy up a lot of these houses and then turn around and rent them, it does change the incentive structure of the people living in that community. Our neighborhood flipped from 95% owner occupied houses to 40% owner occupied houses within the six years. We lived there. That's rough. And now to be fair, to be fair, A large portion of that was people that got foreclosed on, but the biggest portion of that was retirees. Retirees wanting to sell their homes quickly. Now the neighborhood I'm in now is. Largely older people as well, but there's not as much incentive for a rental company or a large property owner to buy up houses kind of where I am. The more the density is really low. So you're, Your return for your dollar is pretty low. It's harder to manage the properties because there's not that many properties in this area. They're not going to be able to buy up a half a dozen units, have the landscaping crew come in one day and do all half dozen units and get a deal. It's just not going to happen. The management costs are far too high for the benefit that they would get. But it is always a possibility no matter where you go. But the larger the properties, the more spread out the properties, the less likely it is to turn into that. And the more you get, I've found, long-term owners. And they tend to be more invested in their community. And they tend to they tend to be less antagonistic towards their neighbors. At least that's what I've noticed. Let's throw another wrinkle in here because this is something that like my wife and I witnessed next to growing up next door, some family. So you live in a more rural area, right? Yep. And would you agree that that comes with a mixed bag occasionally? Because sometimes you wind up on, you wind up next to a property that's fairly well maintained and some nice people that keep to themselves and are kind to their neighbors. And sometimes you wind up on the property next to, you know, the burnout school bus with someone living in it and the junk pile in the front yard. And you wind up living next to like the Beverly hillbillies, but not the fun cheeky kind, the kind that seemed like they came off the set from the hills have eyes. And, It's possible. And even if it doesn't directly affect. The family that's lived there for four generations, yeah. And even if it doesn't directly affect your property values, it can present a bit of a situation because now you have people who, let's say, may not respect property rights and their neighbors quite as much living directly next door to you. Oh, I had a property dispute with one of my neighbors very shortly after moving here. Almost immediately. Immediately. So one thing that you can run into, especially if you buy a property from an elderly person or an elderly person's estate, especially if they're larger properties like ours, is. Those property boundaries can get a little hazy. Especially when the properties haven't changed hands in 20, 30, 40 years. You know, lot line creeps this way or that way due to who's mowing what or who can't take care of what anymore. Well, the lady... Living. Next to me, you guys have heard me talk about her before, she thought she owned another 15 or 18 feet of our property. Well, I mean, hell, I had that in a subdivision just because my neighbor didn't apparently understand that the boundary between two properties is usually right where the utility right-of-ways are. And you can very plainly see where the big old box where all the telephone lines are in her front yard And yet when she decided to put a garden in the front, you know, in, I want to say in the front yard, like we, the two of us have the two houses at the end of a cul-de-sac. So our yards kind of wrap around the cul-de-sac and meet. Oh yeah. Well, when she decided she wanted to put a garden kind of in the front side yard, guess what? Six feet of it was on my side of the property line. Not, not like on the edge, but like fully over the line. Yeah. I didn't need to enforce your property. I didn't immediately make a big deal out of it, but then my wife and I started talking about, like, when Piper gets to driving age, we were talking about putting, like, some pavers or whatever, like, on that side of the, kind of at the edge of the yard, so we had a third driveway, basically. And I called her one day and was like, hey, ma'am, I think your garden might be a little bit on my side of the property line. And at first she was very... Why do you think that I've always thought, you know, this, of course, this has always been my property because her and the gentleman that had the house before me had lived there for apparently since the house. I mean, almost since the houses were built in the mid nineties and the previous owner and her were about the same age. And apparently we were the best of friends and like neither one of them ever cared. Right. But I was like, unfortunately, man, like the, I'm almost convinced our property line is right here where this telephone box is, and your garden is not a little bit past that. So I was very conciliatory. I told her, Mike, look, I'm not making an issue out of it. We are not going to court over this silly crap. Like, you want to go look for your paperwork and everything for when you bought the house, see if you have a survey. That's fine. If you want me to go get a survey, that's fine, too. We'll figure this out together. But. I am going to need this address because I believe you're on my side of the property line and I want you on your side of the property line. Because if you don't enforce these things, adversarial property claims come into the picture after a certain number of years. That number of years varies state by state. Check your local laws. I think in Illinois it's seven years. Basically, it's some long lines of if you maintain the property for long enough, you kind of have a claim to it. De facto ownership, yeah. But it has to be. Obvious and notorious use and care for the property. Hmm. Which is the same argument I am currently engaging with with the county as to why there. Is not a road under my garage. Under your garage. Yeah. Well. Plainly you just need to pave a road under your garage nick. I obviously and notoriously have had a garage on this property the entire time i've owned it in fact. Since 1979 so i don't know. Where we're going from here but um so. Aside from the care put into the yards the care put into the houses the care people put into their vehicles children's toys Children's toys are a great indicator of the quality of the neighborhood. If there is a bunch of yards that have a large amount of, say, play sets, swimming pools, trampoline, bikes laying out in the front yard, you know a couple of things. One, there's enough money in the area to pay for those things. And the insurance premiums that come. With those things because your insurance premiums do go up. And two, crime is reasonably low because people are comfortable leaving things at least of value outside, especially if it's bikes. I was just about to say that the thing you know is the negative, which is there's enough expectation that people can leave that stuff in the front yard and it'll still be there when they go looking for it. Although the inverse is also true of look at the neighbor's yards who pick all their things up and it's not necessarily like, They secure it so it doesn't get stolen, but just the yards are neat, the houses are well-maintained, everything's kind of put away. Maybe if you're looking to purchase a property, you drive by on a Saturday or a Sunday late morning and you see who's getting their yard mowed, who's sweeping leaves, who's raking stuff, who's maintaining their property. Are the properties being maintained? Do the roofs look like they've been recently redone? Does the siding look like it's falling off? Does. All those things kind of matter, and it's not even so much the property you're looking at buying, but it's the neighborhood you're buying into. The quality of the surroundings. Yeah. I will say, though, that that is a bit of a double-edged sword because the shitty part about buying into a place with really good neighbors is those neighbors can leave. They can, unfortunately. And you can't control for that, but what you can try to control for is if the neighborhood's already on a downtrend. I will say that, you know, Gil and I have been here, we bought this place in 2012. So we've been here 14 years. 14 years coming up soon. It was Thanksgiving when we bought this house. Nice. I wouldn't say the neighborhood's To me, the neighborhood is kind of on a decline. When we bought here, there was a couple of older families. There was families with some younger kids. The kids used to just run around, play together. We live on a cul-de-sac for a good reason. It's a dead-end street, so there aren't people blasting through all the time. We bought this house very specifically to be the place we could raise our child. And she could play in the front yard, and it was fairly safe. And what's happened over the last 14 years is that a lot of the families that had small children moved away. A bunch of the families that stayed here now have, like, teenage and 20-something-year-old kids living at home with them because none of these little bastards can figure out how to launch and, like, go get a friggin' job and start saving money and have an apartment or do anything except sit around and drink beer on the friggin' weekends. But that's a completely different discussion. Oh, and procreate. They seem to love to stay in Mama's house and procreate. Something I would think you would do. Something I would think you would save until you had like your own house and not be having babies in your mama's house. But I am here to judge. I'm a very judgmental person. I am here explicitly to judge people like that. If you're having babies in the house where your mama called you a baby, you're wrong. You should fix your life. But anyway. Look. I view random procreation the same way I do AI. We shouldn't go trying to make sentient beings all willy-nilly. We shouldn't be creating intelligent beings we are not prepared to manage properly. Truth. Anyway. So the neighborhood, like the mix of the neighborhood has changed dramatically in the last 14 years. Like that is one of the reasons. And it will. I mean, that's almost a full generation. You know, you're only six years shy of a generational turn. Well, and I mean, at this point, you know, I was, Gillian and I were like 29 and, I was 29. She was 28. when we bought it when we bought this place we were the kids that bought our first house and now we are like the middle-aged people with a teenager at home so like life comes at you real fast apparently that it do But that is like the one big reason why I've told Gillian over and over, like, could this be our forever home? Sure. Do I want it to be? Absolutely not. I don't want to be, I don't, I don't want to have neighbors. I don't want to have neighbors next door to me and across the street from me. I want, I want to be sitting on a little chunk of property in the middle of nowhere where I can pee off my front porch and not have to wave at my neighbor. Like, you know, it's little, it's the little things that give me a thrill. I have long said that my ideal living situation is a property where I don't have a neighbor within rifle range and I'm a pretty good shot. So it's going to have to be a pretty big property with, with a, with some very high magnification, I might add. So some things that you want to look for, regardless of if it's a starter home or a forever home, is there a place where there is say a generator hookup already built into the house? That's a major upgrade if you have it. They're not that expensive to put on, believe it or not. They're really not. If it's not there, budget, say, $ 500 to $ 1, 000 to have a generator professionally installed. I would argue, if you're on a budget, you can do it a hell of a lot cheaper than that. You can. And still engage a licensed electrician. Mm-hmm. Because I got an interlock kit put on this panel, and I did pay an electrician, only because I have a ton of experience with 12-volt DC wiring. Car audio, lots of modifying cars, I have a lot of experience with DC 12-volt. I don't have a whole lot of experience with 220-volt AC in a panel. It's fine. It's fine. I know it's fine. And if you live close enough to me to be within driving range, you and I would have done it. You and I would have done it in the afternoon. Hell, Stuart offered to frigging FaceTime with me and walk me through it. I mean, it's really, they are really that simple. Now, the reason I paid an electrician to do mine is I also had a, I had a, when we bought this house, I had a 100 amp panel that was well overloaded. That subpar. It was well overfilled. I now have pay. I paid an electrician to come in and put a 200 amp 48 breaker, massive fucking panel in as well as the generator hookup only cost me like an extra 300 bucks on top of having the main swapped out. And that gave me enough room in the panel to run 75 amp service out to my garage. Yep. Which is excellent. But I was just going to say like an interlock kit is not expensive. Even if you want to do something like the 80 bucks. A manual transfer switch is not a serious expense. No. And I'm not talking about having your meth head cousin come in and do it. I'm talking about having a licensed professional come in and take care of it. But generator hookups are definitely a plus. Massive plus. A well on the property is kind of a mixed bag because now you have an additional thing to maintain, but you also have an independent water source. So that's kind of one in the win column, one in the lose column. It is. I would call it neutral unless you have your own generator because then you have your own. Water and power. Unless the aquifer starts to dry up from a severe drought. Sure. I mean, this can happen. It can happen, especially if you buy into an older home and the well was not dug appropriately for the size home and the water usage you have now. Yeah. One of my neighbors recently had to re-put in his well and it was like $ 25, 000. Well, he had to go from a 24-foot deep point well to a 124-foot deep well because of the pesticides and fertilizer runoffs from the farms was contaminating his 24-foot deep well. And it was dry. I mean, 24 feet is pretty darn shallow. We're on a glacial.... Gravel and sand deposits. So it's a water bearing hill. I can drive a pipe into the ground and have water rolling out of it. I only got to go about three, four feet down below the bottom of my yard. And I guarantee I have water all year round. Problem is that water is heavily contaminated. Yeah. So the next good aquifer below us is like at a hundred feet, which it's an expensive well to drill because you pay by the foot, you pay by the foot. And well companies are very proud of how many feet down they go. There is a bare minimum charge to get the well driller out there. And I want to say it was $ 5, 000 to get them on site to drill. And then it was pay by the foot plus materials. Sounds fair. Yeah. I mean, I can't drill 124 feet deep. I'm going to have to hire somebody. Ooh. But I wouldn't call this like on the level of a well or generator hookup, but. How about making sure that your foundation is solid? Yeah, having your foundation inspected if you don't know what to look for. Around here in southeast Louisiana, that is a, I don't want to say a major problem, that is a major concern when you buy a home. Is A, is the foundation solid? B, is it level? Because around here, there's so many houses that were built on like basically old swamp land that have been packed down fairly hard. And it's just kind of accepted that when the house settles, it's not going to settle really straight. Now, I was told by the gentleman that inspected this house before we bought it that there was a quarter inch of difference from one extreme side of the house to the other. That's pretty darn good. That's pretty freaking amazing for this area. It probably wasn't that level when they poured it. It could have been a quarter inch the other direction. It could have been four inches the other direction. All I care about is. After I bought the house, like, you know, 20-plus years after the foundation had been poured, it probably wasn't going to move much more. Yeah. That's very valid. But, yeah, raggle-fraggle, septic tanks, the roof, the plumbing, the age of all the systems in the house, that all feeds into this calculation about, is this a place I want to go? And if, I mean, like, an air conditioning tear-out is 50%. $ 12, 000 to $ 15, 000. Really? Mine was $ 7, 000. Are you including your furnace? I have a boiler. Okay. We don't do boilers around here. No. You don't need that much warm. If I want to rip out that gas furnace plus that air handler plus the outside unit... That'd probably be $. 12, 000. $ 12, 000. So yes, I agree with you. Air conditioning only? Yeah, that's about $ 7, 000. It's about $ 7, 000. We don't have boilers around here. When me and my wife were looking at this house, we sat down. Before we made the offer and I told her, I said, just so you know, to get this house to where I would want it to be is going to cost $ 75, 000. It's going to cost $ 75, 000. Now, she trusted my estimate because I've been doing. Home repair stuff, since I was probably too young to be holding a hammer, let alone swinging it constructively. Debatable. Yeah, you can't see it on the camera. I got a scar on my forehead right here. Did you learn? No, I was two, and. They gave me a 24-ounce claw hammer. Of course I didn't learn anything. But you remember the experience, obviously. No, I don't. I had to be told about it. But you have the scar to remind you. I do. I do have the scar to remind me not to put forehead into claw hammer. And how old are you now? 36. And have you claw hammered yourself in the forehead since? Yes, one other time. And how old were you then? 12. Okay, so we are talking about 22 years of consecutive not hammering your forehead. It's pretty hard to hit yourself in the head with a claw hammer most of the time. So apparently after two repetitions, the lesson sunk in. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, no, I mean, it's one of those things where if you do not have the experience that I was lucky enough to. Grow up with. That's great. Why, A.R. Drew, why is it when life gives you a hammer, everything looks like a sack full of kittens? You sick, twisted man. Heaven forbid a man have hobbies. But if you do not have the, I guess, fortune to grow up learning these things like. I did, there are very quality home inspectors. I will tell you this. Do not hire the home inspector that your realtor recommends unless you really trust that realtor because that realtor's financial incentive is to sell you a house as fast as possible. Which means their financial incentive is to make sure that nothing comes back on the home inspection to scare you off. Yep. Now, Maybe they're good. Maybe they're not. As I mentioned earlier, there's a road on my property underneath my garage. I think my realtor probably should have caught that. I think that the title company probably should have caught that. I think the survey company probably should have flown. a red flag about that. I think my lawyer should have figured this shit out. Multiple people dropped the ball on that deal. I hired quality people and here we are. You have a road under your garage. I have a road under my garage. Now that is a very odd thing to have happened. Every lawyer I've talked to has so far said, oh, that's weird. I've never heard of that before. So who knows? You live and learn. Sometimes no matter what you do, no matter how high a quality people you hire, stuff just gets missed. Yeah. What you should know is hire a really, really good Amish construction crew and just put that bitch up over a weekend. Well, yeah, that is an option. We don't have any Amish around me, though. Illinois doesn't have much of that. Do you have methods? Or Mennonites. We do have meth heads, yes. They work really quick if you catch them right after a good hit. That's a fair point. They don't work good, but they work quick. Quick is kind of what you need in this instance. You can fix not good, but you gotta be quick. Yeah, you can't deal with getting fined every day the construction goes on for too long. Yeah, that's why you kind of have to. Yeah. But you know what? If you give them like. Methods and meth heads. Yeah, that's true. My wife is correct. We could visit Wisconsin and get some Amish people. I don't think you can just go get folks anymore. They kind of frown upon you getting folks. Hiring them, perhaps. See, Rachel and I are on the same wavelength, which should scare the crap out of you. Nonsense. That's perfect. But, you know, other than generators, other than wells, other than septic, which is very nice to have, I would argue septic and wells are nice to have. I think a. Dedicated generator hookup, if you're in this community at all, some kind of alternative power source is a need to have. You know what else I would argue is a need to have, although how much of it you need is kind of relative? What's that? The second thing on this little bullet, storage. Storage. That's where I was going. Take a look at it. You and I talked about the fact that one of the things that drug you towards this show a long, long time ago, many moons ago, was the fact that we were talking about how do you prep in an apartment? How do you prep in a small house? How do you do this with limited storage? How do you do this when you don't have, like, 20 acres and a homestead on a mountain in the Carolinas? My first house was, like, 920 square feet. That's not a lot. Holy hell, dude. Our first apartment was 900 square feet, dude. I increased the volume of my house 15% when I finished the breezeway. I mean, but my big thing is, like, you need some volume of storage. What volume of storage is kind of down to, like, how space efficient you can get your preps, how much preps you're putting away for, how long, and lots of other variables. And also, what kind of things are you prepping? Like. If you have, for instance, like a whole shop building that's disconnected from your house, you can store things like large tanks of diesel, large tanks of propane, things that I don't know that I'd be comfortable doing like in my garage that attaches to my house. There's definitely a risk when it comes to that because it would only take a small car fire or shop fire or whatever. And one of the reasons why I never got into welding at our previous house was because our garage was attached and Welders throw sparks everywhere. If I had a garage fire while that garage is attached to my house, it could burn the whole house down. One of the reasons why for years when I ran a home business out of the house that involved a lot of woodworking in the garage is at the same time, I also occasionally reloaded back then. And at the time, I did not have near the volume of powder and primers and things that I do now, but I built my own cabinet... And I have it specifically constructed to where the top portion of it, where all the primer and the powder and everything lives, has a door, like a whole door and a hatch that locks up. Mostly it was to keep my small child out of it at the time. Fair enough. But also it was to ensure that if I was doing anything, there would never be an opportunity for a spark to get cast into that cabinet. And pro tip, the backside of it that faced the wall was open. Because the worst thing to do with a whole bunch of flammable stuff is to put it in a metal cabinet with no venting. That's how you make a bomb. Yep. That's bad. Yep, bombs is bad. So the point is, is like, storage isn't just having a lot of storage, but it's having storage of the appropriate configuration for the things you want to store to be able to store things in an organized fashion so you can find them and get to them to store them in such a way that they're useful when you go looking for them. Not damaged. Gillian and I recently had to throw away a couple of cans of vegetables because, quite frankly, we're usually pretty good about rotating through things. But these were somehow we bought like a bunch of cans of carrots years ago. We just don't eat carrots hardly ever. Well, guess what happened the one time we pop one of the cans open and realize that they were many years past their best by date. Whoopsies. Hey, man, it happens to everybody. It does. And we always preach to people that you need to prep the things you eat because you will actually eat them and go through them. And every now and then we fail at that. But the point is that your storage method, your storage configuration, your storage size has to be of a level that it makes sense for you. And raggle, fraggle, pre-built sheds, yay or nay? Neither. Neither. It depends. It depends. It does. One nice thing about pre-built sheds, you can assemble them before the county tells you to stop. Also, very affordable. They are extremely affordable. They're not the most durable. Not the most durable, and I would argue that depending on the thing you're trying to store in them, durability is not a huge concern, especially if budget is a constraint. Or if you just live out in the middle of nowhere where getting a larger... getting something where you have to have a professional construction crew come out and build it on site starts to become prohibitively expensive in the middle of nowhere. Whereas a little flat pack thing you put in the back of the truck and set up in an afternoon, if that's all you need, it gets the job done. I will tell you this. If, if you can get the job done, sub 140 square feet, it will be cheaper to buy a pre-made storage shed of some kind, whether it's metal, plastic uh one of the prefab wood sheds you knock out real quick in the weekend those are phenomenally cheap they can be had for under 1500 bucks once you get bigger than like 10 by 12 you need to either build it yourself or hire a company to build it and the cost goes up very considerably you go from like i think to go from a 10 by 12 which was like You can find a prefab kit for like $ 1, 200, $ 1, 400 for a good quality one. Or if you go to that same size, but you want a sidewall tall enough that a six-foot guy can walk through the door without banging his head, now you're $ 5, 000 or $ 6, 000. I did tell Gillian that that was one of the things on my to-do list for this place. If it winds up being a forever home, we already have a shutout bag. Mm-hmm. At some point between now and my retirement age, that shed is going to have to be retired. Oh yeah. Like, or at least redone. Yeah. Like just within the last couple of years, I've had a couple of rows of shingles pull, like pull through the nails. I've had to go out there with roofing nails and kind of like, you know, put everything back where it belongs, hammer everything back down. Um, It's just, it's one of those things, like, you have to do maintenance on it every now and then, and I've been having to do that, and I have some more that has to be done on at some point. But I did tell Gillian, like, if this winds up being our forever home, I want another building, either behind that one or maybe in the other corner of the yard, the lawn equipment goes in there. Mm-hmm. The generator goes in there, the lawnmower, the weed eater, all that junk, the chainsaws, that all goes in there. And then that... ends up becoming the reloading shed, the toolbox goes in there, or the toolbox gets moved someplace. I've told my wife, I want to be able to park a small SUV in the garage. Yeah. I can't do that right now because half the garage is a reloading bench slash workbench, plus multiple toolboxes, plus multiple shelves full of stuff, plus just stuff. The garage is like half work area, half storage space. It's not something I can park a vehicle in. The last time I parked a vehicle in it was when I had a compact car, and even that was a squeeze. So single car garage? Single car garage. Okay. Single car garage, I could put my wife's SUV in it if there was nothing in. There at all. Sure. Sounds like my sister's garage. My truck probably wouldn't fit in my wildest dreams. You know, that's another thing to look at, too. You know, I know down by you, winter is not that much of a concern, but up by me for four months of the year, if you don't have a garage, you're going to be scraping ice off your car and shoveling snow off your car. Yep. It's not a huge deal. I did it for years. A lot of people do up here, but your vehicles last longer. Your tires last longer if you can store your vehicle inside. Your paint lasts longer. I have a bit of Toyota cancer growing on my vehicle with the clear coat starting to come off. That's going to be a project for the first couple of weekends I get around here that aren't boiling hot outside where the sheet metal is 200 degrees. I got a spot that I started last year and then I ran out of time before winter. And, um, that I got as far as bond, got all the Bondo work done, primed it. And I've got to like go back and sand it back down a little bit. Cause it's been sitting there in primer for several months. Yeah. But I got to sand it down and then put some paint and some clear on it. And on the opposite side of the truck, the clear coat just came off of a spot. So I've got to just, you know, Sand that down, depending on what the paint looks like, maybe a couple coats of paint, and then clear it. I mean, you and I have talked about that. That's going to be like a five-foot job. Oh, yeah. Get it done so it don't rust. It's a 2015 truck. It's paid off. It has 188,000 miles on it. It is not a show queen, and I don't give a shit. Yep. Uh, AR drew, I have an electric heater hanging in my garage to keep it around 55, 60 this winter, much easier on the cars, much easier on you too. And that's something that we talked earlier about make planning for when you get older in top, in terms of like lack of mobility. But Nick, have you reached the age where your bones start to hurt when it gets cold outside? Uh, my, my reoccurring injuries hurt when the weather changes. So yeah, Yeah, that's more of like self-inflicted damage than age, though. It'll get worse in about 10 years, but just strap in for it. I am watching. I have I have watched in real time both of my grandfathers, which have fairly similar traits to myself. I know what I'm in for, and it's a lot of Advil. Yeah, it's a lot of Advil. But I just bring that up like AR Drew's exactly right. Having a... Having a warm workspace to work on your vehicle is having a not just keeping the vehicles warm. So you don't have to sit inside of an ice cold car while it warms up. You know, the little things are going to make aging a little bit more graceful if you plan ahead for them. That's part of the reason why I needed to run new power out to my garage is I'm setting up a little miniature machine shop for my hobbies in my garage. And that shit sucks when it's. 32 degrees outside. I've worked in an unheated machine shop before when I was like 16, and that was miserable when I was 16. I don't want to deal with that now that I'm 36. I work way too hard to work that hard. I reload in an unheated garage in southeast Louisiana, and it's not the same experience, I'm sure. So. Considering it's an attached garage, so even in the dead of winter, it's still like 45, 50 degrees out there just from the heat transfer from the rest of the house. Phil, this was an uninsulated tin building in northern Illinois. That just sounds miserable. There was a heater in there, and it didn't work that well. We had to break open the ice on the coolant trays before we could start running the machines some days. That sounds kind of like me at my reloading bench in the summer down here. Because peak summer temperatures, I got a little 5,000 BTU window unit in there. Yeah, it cools it down enough that you're not getting heat stroke. In the peak of the summer when it's like 94, 95 degrees outside, it will drag the temperature in the garage down to about 80. Still, 80 beats 95. Yes, but the crappy part, and you'll appreciate this, is that when you're reloading and you're really focused on accurate powder levels, what do you think happens when you have an air current running through the garage? Oh, that would disturb your scale, wouldn't it? Yeah, so what I have to do is I have to turn the air conditioning off and roast while I drop as much powder as I can and do all my trickling and get all that done. And then when I can't take it anymore, I flip the AC back on. I stopped throwing powder. I, I, you know, seed a bunch of bullets. And then when I get through seeding all the bullets, turn the air conditioning back off, roast some more, throw some more powder. Have you, have you ever considered making a, um, a draft cover for your scale? I have, I have considered that. Because, so one of the. Things we have to do at work occasionally is count very small number, very few, Large numbers of very small parts. And we have a draft cover for that so that we can keep the AC on and keep it 74 in the shop where I work all year round. It's amazing. Yeah, the thing is, is that normally I plan my load development for when it's not the middle of the of a freaking heat wave. First of all, it's not really a great idea to do your load development in the hottest time of the year because it throws your velocities off when you get into more temperate times. It can, yeah. It can be an issue. So usually I try to do this in the fall when it's more temperate outside anyway, and unfortunately that didn't happen because we had a very inordinately hot and long summer, and it happened to coincide with a time when I really need to get my load development done. Yeah, that stuff will happen. I mean. You know, I would say if the property you're looking at fits all of your criteria and the storage isn't perfect, one thing you can really easily do is get yourself some of those modular shelving, build some shelving, or like Gregor suggested, put up a wee shed. Those shelves back there came off Amazon. They're rated for, I believe it was 275 pounds per unit per shelf, probably. Yeah. I mean, they're all metal. They're all frigging metal and steel. They're all sheet metal frame. And then the grates are all steel. But my point is like, you can get for not for pretty inconsequential money. If we're talking about home buying home modification, you can get some very, very, very heavy duty shelving. And I have much less heavy duty shelving in the garage that doesn't have like, you know, equipment and gear all over it. But that's more like, you know, oil and filters and towels and stuff to clean the car off with. And, you know, if you're willing to go, if you're willing to go out of your way, you can keep an eye out on Craigslist or marketplace for industrial pallet racking. Like I have in my garage, I have, I. Think it's 8,500 pounds per shelf rated industrial pallet racking for lining one wall. Of my garage. Do I need that? No. Do I have a ton of lead on it? Literally a ton? Yes, I do. So I don't have to worry about that shelf ever failing in my lifetime or probably the next owner's lifetime. Yeah. And, you know, I would argue that even if you find a home that meets every criteria you have, but you're a little short on storage space, there is such a thing as storage rentals. Oh, those are so expensive. But, but it is a temporary solution. Yes. But hear me out. I would argue it's more, it can be more than a temporary solution because let's say hypothetically, let's say hypothetically for a moment. I knew somebody in exactly the situation lived in the city. Really excellent job. Really, really, really excellent job. Paid, paid good money. They lived well within their means. Very affordable apartment, very affordable vehicle. their goal was to retire young. Sure. But they were also a prepper. Storage minimal in this apartment. Sure. And also, the likelihood that they were going to willingly bug in in any kind of emergency was almost zero because it was in the middle of the city. Fair. And an apartment. So he got a climate-controlled storage unit outside of town. And in the climate-controlled storage unit, he had fuel for his vehicle, that he made a regular point of gun out there once a month, dumped the tanks into his vehicle, take them and go gas them up at the local ethanol-free station, put them back in, had spare parts for his vehicle, had ammo, had firearms that were stored in there that were not only hidden in the unit, but were very, very well secured in such a way that what I knew of what he had done You would have had to really have it. You would first of all, it had to have known what was in there and you'd had to have it on your mind. You really want those guns and there was easier ways to get guns. Oh yeah. But he had his, he had the majority of his preps in this storage unit. He had enough stuff in his apartment to make it for about four to five days. Yeah. It'll cover most. But more importantly, he had the stuff in his apartment to make it 30 miles. Because he knew if I can get 30 miles, I can get to the stuff and that's what I really need to get to. So he kind of built his whole prepping philosophy around Where I'm at is an indefensible position. It is not where I want to hole up. It's in a decent neighborhood, but there's lots of not-decent neighborhoods around me. This is not a place I want to try to hole up, and it's not meant to be a forever home. He was renting for a reason. His whole strategy was kind of subletted on the idea that I am outsourcing all my storage because that predisposes me to get away from the area I don't want to bug in. As long as if that's your plan, you follow that plan, fair enough. I mean, it's a way to do it. I mean, I've always. I've never really lived in an. Apartment, so I've never had to think through that. Yeah, I mean, I have lived in an apartment in like. I was not anywhere near as deep into the preparedness lifestyle as I am now by any means. But even back then, like we had enough stuff that if we'd had to hole up for several days a week, week and a half, we'd have been fine. And, you know, I've talked about the fact that like. If you have 10 days of supplies, you are probably set for most midterm problems. Yeah. There are very few emergencies or natural disasters that I've ever experienced that have lasted longer than that. Very few. I think one I can think of where some people were snowed in for two full weeks, so like almost 14 days or about 14 days. But to the point of this episode, the thought process is not, oh, what do I need to– what What do I need to prep for to make it for a couple of days or a couple of weeks? But we're talking about potentially strapping into a 30-year mortgage in a home that may or may not become your forever home. So I agree with what kind of what started this whole thought. Excuse me. That doing some due diligence, making sure that what is about to be one of the most long-term, if not the most long-term commitment you make in your life other than your spouse, purchasing– one of, if not the most expensive thing you will ever purchase, your home. All those things are done with an eye towards the future. All those things are done with an eye towards the preparedness lifestyle. All those things are done utilizing a lot of the principles that bake around an area study. The whole idea of an area study is we're looking to make data-driven decisions around a situation. And that's really a lot of what you and I talked about prepping for this episode was, what do you look for? Like, who cares if the house is the color you wanted? Are there meth heads living next door? Yeah. I mean, there are very few things about a house that you cannot change with enough time, money, and effort. It's kind of hard to change where the foundation sits, though. It is. Well. And I know it can be done. With enough money and effort. Yeah. What did I say to you right before we went live? With momentum and lack of caution, all things are possible. With momentum and lack of caution. That's very valid. But one thing you absolutely cannot change about your home is your neighborhood. Yeah. It is damn difficult to make a change in where the house is located and the things around where the house is located short of picking up and moving. And in the current... economic climate that can be tricky okay in the current home buying trend which is houses aren't really selling much that can be very tricky yeah so it's one of those why you gotta sell yeah and you know the same problem that the boomers have right now where they're trying to sell their house and get the equity out nobody can afford their houses the same problems happening for people that bought starter homes no one could afford their houses either so we're kind of all we're kind of all playing hot potato, but you can't reach for the next potato without letting go of the one you have, and there's no one to grab the one that you have. I would argue that it's not necessarily that people can't afford the house. So people can't afford the interest rate paired with the dollar amount for the house. Semantics. If you can't afford to buy the house, you can't afford the house. Yeah, I mean, look, The housing costs exploded with the extreme low interest rates and inflation. And? Now the interest rates are going. Up. And? Money printing? I don't know where you're going with that. Money printing? Yeah, money. I said inflation. The inflation was directly caused by money printing. Almost exclusively caused by money printing. Although, this has nothing to do with the topic, but an interesting little thought. Maybe we'll save this for another day. My wife and I were complaining about gas prices recently around here. They're like four bucks a gallon, which is probably hilarious to some of y'all, but that's a thing around here. They're like five. They're over five now by me. So my wife was telling me like how frustrated she was about the fact that gas was four bucks a gallon around here. And back in 2008, we were ready to like throw politicians into wood chippers over the fact that gas hit five bucks a gallon. But now it's four bucks a gallon. Everybody's like Republican in office. So nobody seems to care. And I got curious, so I looked up, like, I did the old $ 2, 008 adjust for inflation. I told my wife, I'm like, you know that. That's actually not too bad. Yeah. Given inflation. If you take $ 4 a gallon gas back in 2008 and you adjust that for inflation, it's like $ 6. 25 a gallon right now. Yeah, we're going to get there. Well, I'm sure we will, but it kind of puts things into perspective of, like, It's like the Bart Simpson, Homer Simpson thing, where it's like, this is the worst day of my life. This is the worst day of your life so far. Yeah, you know, back when the Iran war, I'm going to call it the Iran war, because let's be honest, we're at war with Iran, whether people want to admit that or not, Mr. President. I said by the end of the summer, we're going to be at $ 5 a gallon gas. That's just going to be the reality of the situation. And if it continues long enough, we'll see $ 6 a gallon probably by New Year's, if not sooner. Raggle is saying, I drive a diesel truck. Don't talk to me about fuel prices. You made a choice. I have a friend of mine who runs a business delivering dumpsters like roll-offs and everything in this area. That poor SOB has been like, his business plan is getting very, very, very spicy right now. But, I don't know. I bet it is. As a whole, another discussion. Is there anything to toss in here that we didn't think about? I'm looking through the banners, which is my opportunity to be like, what did we miss? Generator connections, storage, mobility, local services, crime, elevation, traffic. I would say infrastructure age. If the city publishes such a thing in your area, my hometown does current town. I live in does. You can actually go down to the city building and zoning office and request the age of the infrastructure on your street. When the last time the sewer main was updated, when the last time the water main was updated and just know that if your house was built in 1946 and the water infrastructure out front of your house has never been updated, uh, Chances are the Buffalo box, which is the connection between the water main and your house, hasn't been cycled. And if you ever have to turn that off, pretty good odds you're getting a $ 5, 000 bill to replace that Buffalo box and the water line coming into your house. Oof-toe. So be aware that these things, even if you're on city water and sewer. The city's responsibility ends at the Buffalo box and the city's sewer responsibility ends at the junction with their main. You are responsible for everything from there into your house. If that stuff is 30, 40, 50 years old, 70 years old, in some cases plan for that expense as part of the cost. Of buying the house. No, I mean, that's all fair and valid. That's all I got? I only got one other thing. So, there's this list of people who do stupid and ugly and horrific things to children. And it is publicly accessible. And it would behoove you, whether or not you have small children, to download this list and apprise yourself of the goings-about and the whereabouts of the local miscreants. They usually even have pictures. And by the way, I would say this applies even to you young strapping men that are single because perverts don't really discriminate that much. No, they don't. And you know what? If you can move to a neighborhood that has less of them, all the better. Yeah. There's too many of them anyway. Yeah. Well, there's that. And there's also things I really shouldn't say in a public forum. Let's just say that the last time someone brought up defunding the police, I wholeheartedly support it because I said... Fair enough. I mean. That's a bold move, Cotton. Let's see how it works out for him. But you've heard me say before that if no one's coming to save me, then no one's coming to stop me either. That's a sword that cuts both ways. That is a sword that cuts both ways. But let's can the rest of that conversation for what happens when the lights turn out and the list gets liquidated for a whiskey night and sew this one up. I have been informed that I have to find another co-host for next Thursday. Or we can pre-record this weekend. I like that idea. We can do that. I don't know when yet. Saturday, I must go visit a tiny baby. Saturday, you must go visit a tiny baby. Sunday, maybe? Sunday, I'm free. Sunday. I mean, not that the listeners will have any benefit of hearing this conversation, because... I schedule things, and you nerds will just get it when you normally get it. And that's just the way things are. But, I don't know. Let's plan for something funny on a Sunday. Sounds good to me. Alright, you and I will talk, and we'll talk to everybody in another week. Good night, everybody. Good night. ¶ ¶ ¶. Clouds are heavy on the county line ¶ ¶ ¶ Signs are flashing reading into time ¶ ¶ ¶ Protecting the home, locking down the block. ¶ ¶. Raising values while we watch the clock. Turn the dial, cut through the tricks. Welcome to Matter of Fact. Well, we talk prepping for the storm ahead. The iron in the hand, the words they said. Guns, politics, and the lines they drew. We uncover what they hide from you. Yeah, lay it down. No spin, no tricks. This is a matter of fact. Static screams through the midnight air. A lot of folks talking, but nobody cares. For the M.O.F. Standing on the track. We look at the. Truth and we don't look back. Well, we talk prepping for the storm ahead. The iron in. The hand, the words they said. Guns, politics, and the lines they drew. We uncover what they hide from you. Yeah, lay it down. No spin, no tricks. This is a matter of facts. No spin, no tricks. Shout out to the MOFers. This is a matter of facts. 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