Living an independent life
New Progress on our Colorado Foothills Home!
This week we have lots of action and progress up at our house in the foothills west of here. This is EXCITING!
We are bringing in the water from the county road. After that we’ll have the septic system put in and finish up on the plumbing.
We are also getting the house wired, not an inexpensive proposition. But we found a great company in Pueblo to help out.
After these systems are all installed, Mike plans to do the cable installation himself, and then we’ll be ready to insulate and get some drywall put up!
Some day all this stress and these hassles will be a distant memory, and we’ll be happily looking out on this fantastic view every morning… Cocktails on the patio anyone?
Why most don’t build their own home
Courage is the power to let go of the familiar…
As we continue building our new solar home from scratch up in the foothills west of here, it often occurs to me why most don’t put themselves through this process ever in a lifetime.
And I discovered only recently, the reasons why others might not want to build their own home can be the same reasons why we wanted to.
The most obvious one is the constant decision-making! Since I’ve never done this before, I hadn’t thought so far as to realize we would need to chose every single detail of both the outside structure and the inside finishes.
How lucky am I to have a recent subscription to HGTV!
Many would not like this process, but that is also the best reason to build your own solar home. From choosing the exact angle the house faces and the thickness of your slab, to window choices, flooring and the type of supplemental heating, these are the factors that determine the comfort and future price of operating your home. If you don’t control these factors, passive solar will not work.
Then if you feel the need to raise the fire-resistant level of your home, even more factors arise. It sometimes boggles my mind! Luckily Mike has quite a bit of experience in building from scratch plus amazing research skills!
Still and all the expenses just keep going up and that can freak a person out at times. It is certainly much more expensive than your home in the suburbs, not to mention the inconvenience of moving into a rental for eight to ten months while the construction is going on…
What makes it all worthwhile? Views like these from every room in the house!
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Midlife Crisis Still in Progress!
Since we’re waiting for some more progress on our new home after another snow storm, I thought you might enjoy reading my thoughts from last year at this time:
There’s nothing like a crisis to define who you are. Like the way my own midlife crisis showed me the way to a brand new life, one where I made better personal choices.
Now a new crisis is turning our lives upside down… but in a good way.
Mike’s disability has made it clear that he cannot work 40 hours a week any longer. So we have decided to move to the place where we would prefer to live, in the kind of setting where we always pictured ourselves.
This week we made our first major commitment to our new future by purchasing three acres at the top of the foothills. (See the view above from our new land.) We also began discussions with builders… our dream begins to come alive.
I’m starting to be able to imagine how awesome (a word I seldom use!) it will be to live in our new solar home down in southern Colorado, and the freedom this alternative lifestyle will offer us. It almost makes all of the hard work we will have to do between now and then worthwhile.
I have been thinking a lot lately about all of the reasons why some decide to stay in place at retirement, while others move someplace else. It strikes me that moving is not for the weak of body or spirit. You need to start early with a strong desire for an alternative lifestyle.
Mike and I have always wanted to get out of the suburbs. When I first met Mike nine years ago, he said he would not move again unless he could get a great view out of the deal. Well, I guess we will have that soon, plus a much more environmentally-friendly, relaxed rural lifestyle.
Every time we go south now, it becomes more difficult to return to our home up north. I guess that’s a positive sign!
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Sacred Journeys, Sacred Mountains…
After watching an episode of Sacred Journeys on PBS, one which included a bit about the sacredness of mountains in Asian thought, I realized how fundamentally important it feels to now own land with views of our own sacred mountains.
The Spanish Peaks, pictured above, have a centuries-old history of sacredness. Dating back far before the Europeans arrived, this area was a crossroads of the American West. Taos Pueblo, located in northern New Mexico today, has been a major Native American trading center for over 1,000 years. One trail headed north out of Taos into the San Luis Valley, crossing east over Sangre de Cristo Pass, through the gap between Rough Mountain and Sheep Mountain.
Various Native American tribes like the Ute, the Navajo, the Jicarilla Apache and the Comanche passed through this valley regularly. To them the Spanish Peaks stood out because they seemed to emerge out of nowhere up to 13,000 feet running east and west, not north to south like the rest of the Rocky Mountains.
The natives peoples considered this a sacred place of ceremony. As far as they were concerned, this is where mankind first emerged from the womb of the earth. In other words, this was their own Garden of Eden.
The Ute Indians named these two peaks Huajatolla (pronounced Wa-ha-toy-a), meaning the “two breasts” which translates as “Breasts of the Earth”.
I loved learning this ancient history, which I first heard about when Robert Mirabal came here to perform this past July.
We moved here to create a dynamic relationship with these mountains, this landscape and the lovely silence. Mike and I have both traveled to many parts of the world. We now find the inward journey more dynamic and essential than outward ones.
For us this is a sacred place, one where we can celebrate and appreciate the beauty of nature every single day, while continuing a long tradition of sustainable living.
Learn more about what it’s like to move from city life to the country for a slower, quieter, more sustainable life in my new memoir. Just send me an e-mail for a great price!
MidlifeCrisisQueen@gmail.com
Adventures of the NEW??? Old Farts 