Putting it all into perspective: Bent’s Old Fort

November 9, 2014March 30, 2018 / Laura Lee Carter / 3 Comments

One of the great advantages in moving from northern to southern Colorado, besides the warmer weather, is having new places to explore. After 30+ years in northern Colorado, we were ready for a change.

Yesterday we took a trip east to explore Bent’s Old Fort near La Junta, Colorado. It’s an old adobe fort built along the Santa Fe trail back in 1833. Charles Bent, along with Ceran St. Vrain, built the fort to trade with Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Plains Indians and trappers for buffalo robes. For much of its 16-year history, the fort was the only major permanent settlement on the Santa Fe Trail between Missouri and the Mexican settlements.

Loved all the insights places like this give into the lives of the early settlers! I suppose I should mention my favorite thing to play as a kid was pioneer woman. Come to find out I would have really hated it…

Their theme yesterday was “Native American Heritage Day” and the highlight of our visit was a talk by Michael Terry on Indian artifacts. What a funny, natural speaker!

Michael is entertaining as well as very informative on the topic of stereotypes and the nonsense most of us have gathered about Native American lives from old and new movies.

On the way out we found this old grave, an artifact which helped me put this all into perspective. Let’s face it, all we do is complain about our lives these days. This young man only lived 31 years of what was probably a pretty rough life. He was a stagecoach driver who died of sunstroke en route to Bent’s Fort in 1865.

Today the plumbing, next week the SLAB!

November 7, 2014November 9, 2014 / Laura Lee Carter / Leave a comment

Do any of you have experience in the excruciatingly slow process of building a new home in rural settings? I’m a new viewer to HGTV, and when they complain there about 6 weeks to remodel I think, try waiting 5 months to produce a slab!

Because we are building a slab on grade foundation, all plumbing had to be built under our slab… and inspected twenty times! But now, we can finally see one big slab in our future!

I never thought I would be planning a slab celebration, but we already have the champagne on hand… we’re even thinking about a slab photo for our holiday cards!

See, once the slab is completed, we can start the actual building of walls. In other words, the house will finally begin to take shape. It’s completely crazy how much time this process takes, but our contractor/builder tells us that this is as good as it gets if you want to hire the best workers out here in rural Colorado.

And we do want the BEST…

How passive solar foundations are different

October 30, 2014November 14, 2016 / Laura Lee Carter / Leave a comment

I bet you were wondering when my husband Mike was going to contribute to this effort. Here is his explanation of how changes in the floor and foundation in our new home in southern Colorado will help to maintain a warm, even temperature in the winter:

Our new house will be passive solar with a direct gain system. This means that in winter, the sun will shine in through our south-facing windows, directly heating our well-insulated concrete floors.

The concrete floors will be 6 inches thick and covered with ceramic tile. The tile will be a dark color to absorb the heat from the sun.

While 4 inches is the optimum thickness for the concrete, additional thickness will add some extra heat storage capacity. We thickened our floor to 6 inches to accommodate a few thermal storage water tubes. You can put colored water in them and they look GREAT, but they can be quite heavy. Please see blue examples at right… more about these later!

The concrete floor is where the light from the sun is converted to heat and is absorbed into the concrete. The floor moderates the house temperature by its mass, which gives off heat when the house air temperature is low and absorbs heat when the house air temperature is high.

The concrete floor will be insulated from the ground with foam insulation, seen in blue in this photo. It is insulated underneath and around the edges. In addition to this, the foundation walls will be insulated on the inside. This creates a longer path for the heat to escape the house, making the ground under the floor warmer, thus cutting down on heat loss into the earth.

Figuring out where you belong

October 28, 2014March 3, 2017 / Laura Lee Carter / 5 Comments

Just took a quick trip out to our building site west of town… Every time I do, I feel even more certain that this is the place in this big, wonderful world that I belong!

I know we all have our own opinions of the most beautiful places in the world. Some can’t live without the ocean, others love the plains, but I am perfectly sure that this semi-arid piece of land close to the high mountains suits me just fine.

It’s hard to say what it is that makes me so certain. The absolute silence is very important to me, especially after listening to the relentless traffic noise in Fort Collins for nine years. The natural beauty and wide variety of birds, plants and wildlife also help… This is simply my place.

This setting makes me feel like I never want to leave. I feel gratitude that we can finally live our dream in our very own place in the sun… solar-powered, of course!

I’m a newcomer to rural southern Colorado. After two years I decided to compile a short journal about the ups and downs of moving from a good-sized city to rural America to build a passive solar retirement home in the foothills:

A Memoir of Retirement: From Suburbia to Solar in Southern Colorado

Please share this information with your friends if they are considering similar life changes. Feel free to contact me directly to discuss any of these challenges, and to order your own signed copies of any of my books! Cheers, Laura Lee (email me: MidlifeCrisisQueen@gmail.com)

Moving somewhere new and making friends

October 17, 2014October 18, 2014 / Laura Lee Carter / 6 Comments

Moving is never easy, at least not in my experience, and I have changed residences more times than I can count at this point in my life. That is probably why most older Americans don’t move past a certain age. That, plus the enormous amount of energy needed to change homes!

Recently we moved from Fort Collins, CO, a major metro area, to a very small town in southern Colorado, population 3,000. Contrary to what I had expected, it is not easy making friends in small towns. Yes, most are friendly when you first meet them on the street, but becoming friends is a whole different concept.

Whenever I meet people I feel I have some connection with anywhere here or in La Veta, I offer them my card with my contact information. In four months here, none have ever called me back. This is a time when having a primary relationship with your husband is essential. I think it would have been very tough to move here without one! And since we don’t have jobs here in town, the people we do meet are limited.

Luckily our new landlord has been friendly and welcoming. He has made us music CDs and invited us out to his country home twice, even offering us produce from his garden. Every other social situation here has gone nowhere.

Yes, everyone is busy in the summer months especially here. Everyone has their lives and priorities. But please be aware when you meet someone new to town, they could probably use a friend. Were you ever new in town?

Delays and Over-Budget Items!

October 15, 2014December 7, 2014 / Laura Lee Carter / 2 Comments

As you all must know, construction is not for the weak of heart or stomach! I’m new to this game. I have never been involved in a major construction project, especially in a rural area. So far I am reminded of that famous movie quote from Betty Davis:

“Fasten your seat belts… It’s going to be a bumpy ride!”

Once we had our blue prints together with full engineer approval, we had a month and a half delay just to procure our building permit!

This was because the ONLY INSPECTOR IN THIS ENTIRE COUNTY had ten building projects ahead of ours. Yes, this county is getting more popular, probably because of the amazing natural beauty in combination with quite reasonable land prices.

Then we got some bad news about road set-backs on our property, leading to the need to spend $10,000 extra on backfill materials. We chalked that up to no use building a home on a less than solid foundation!

Then it seemed like we were making some great progress… for a while. We got the footers in quickly and then the foundation. The plumbing was going in and the slab looked imminent.

That was until Mike realized the builder has forgotten about the foundation insulation. This is essential in a passive solar home. The heat that gets absorbed into the slab floor must be retained by insulation under the slab and at the foundation walls.

That meant another week delay to get the insulation here. Now we’re waiting to get the excavator back up there to install it and finish the slab so the actual home construction can begin.

In the meantime we have been living in a 1,000 square foot rental in Walsenburg built in 1911. For the past four months we have been waiting to get this show on the road! With half of our stuff in storage, we are constantly saying, “Yeah we have one of those. We just don’t know where it is!”

We are so anxious to get out on our land and I can assure you, I am NOT a patient person! Luckily Mike is a master at calming me down when I go off the deep end…