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Last year at this time, we were just beginning to see an actual home emerge from our slab, which took us five months to produce! This brings us to my new year’s revelation.
It’s a whole new year! What’s in it for you?
In addition, I just received this marvelous revelation from my niece’s FB page: Drinking champagne helps you fight off Alzheimer’s! Champagne became my favorite drink during construction, and so lets raise our glasses:
But how can we be bored with fun photos to take, a good book to read, Netflix and lots of snow to shovel?
Did you know Carl Jung used to have his patients color mandalas to help them access their subconscious? It works! When I’m coloring I completely stop worry shopping, and focus on my bright future:
Love what interacting with so many colors is doing for me. It sets my underdeveloped artist free! Everyone go try this! It’s wonderfully relaxing.
Our pets are very slowly getting used to each other, kind of…
Did I mention? The views are incredible up here, especially after a great big snow storm! We get a 180 degree view of the Sangres!
Monday night was exciting up here! We saw first sleet and then snow falling, and it snowed all night.
The sunset was beautiful here last night, a constant reminder of why we choose to live up here!
For example, today the sun is out, but we had a high of 46 degrees outside. Inside we are toasty warm in the low 70s with no forms of heat needed.
You must also start out with the right kind of insulated slab to hold the heat in the floor, instead of it leaking out into the ground. This is essential!
The walls must be well insulated, and then we chose dark gray tile throughout the house to absorb the heat as it enters the house from our south-facing doors and windows. Right now the sun is shining about 10 feet into our home!
Fortunately we were able to find the perfect passive solar perch for our new home, one that faces south and also offers us a 180 degree view of the Spanish Peaks and the Sangre de Cristo mountain range.
Now that our home is finished, I thought I might share the names of the best companies we have worked with down here.
My first caution is to not just go with the companies the local builders use in Huerfano county. We had to remove contracting responsibilities from our builder eventually, when it became clear that he had absolutely no incentive to save us money. He just went with the good old boys down here to line his and their pockets, since he got 15% on top of the subs he brought in to do the dirt work, etc.
As expensive and inconvenient as it was for us to move here before starting construction, we highly recommend it while having your home constructed. If we had not been here checking in each and every day, our builder would have made a few MAJOR mistakes in our passive solar construction project.
We weren’t able to find a satisfactory contractor/builder in Huerfano county, and in the end were disappointed with ours. GOOD LUCK!
Mike and I had an interesting conversation yesterday about retirement. I was talking about how strange, but wonderful it is living here in the southern Colorado foothills, when I said, “This was really your dream, but I love it!” So he turned to me and asked, “What was your dream?” I was totally stumped.
So I asked him when he started thinking about it. He said he began dreaming about it in childhood. That was when he first imagined having a tremendous view in a rural mountainous area. The man has always had so much more vision than myself.
Adventures of the NEW??? Old Farts 
