The NEW look of our new home in the foothills!

July 14, 2015July 15, 2015 / Laura Lee Carter / 4 Comments

I was up there bright and early today to see the new (and final!) stucco color on our house. What do you think? I LOVE IT!

We plan to paint the white door and maybe even the garage door red. We also will add a red awning over the front door.

Here’s the view from the south-facing side of the house as you walk around it.

And the view from below the house.

These photos don’t portray the adobe color of our home exactly how it looks, but trust me, it looks great sitting up on that hill… and only two weeks to move-in day, yikes!

This is a shot I’ve been trying to get for at least 6 months here in Walsenburg. We have coal trains coming through here 20+ times a day, and we have to drive over the tracks constantly here in town. This shows the Spanish Peaks behind the train as it enters downtown.

The noisy trains are something I will NOT miss about living here in town!

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What’s been happening up at our new home?

July 3, 2015August 20, 2015 / Laura Lee Carter / 6 Comments

Big improvements! First we got the first layer of stucco applied and then all the lights and ceiling fans went in! Do you know how stucco is made?

Well, I didn’t until I saw the men applying a special mix of concrete, sand, and who knows what else to the outside of our house.

Then they slap this mixture onto every surface of the house. This is only the first layer. After this dries and cures they’ll come back to add the second coat with the color in it. We have chosen a terra cotta color for the outside of our house. Can’t wait to see it! And speaking of color…

the wildflowers are at their best up there right now! I cannot get over how much of a difference six inches of rain can make!

We have millions of these yellow flowers plus native Lupines, and Indian Paintbrush!

And this mystery flower is a lovely purple, my favorite! Thanks to my botanist friend Jan we now know this is the Showy Four O’Clock, (Mirabilis multiflora). It only blooms in the late afternoon and then all night. I’ll try to get a better photo of the flowers in bloom soon.

In the meantime, here is a great photo of it! Isn’t it amazingly PURPLE?

In the disturbed land around our new home we already have hundreds of volunteers. Lots of sunflowers that will bloom a bit later, etc.

Inside we have most of the tiling done…

Then it’s time to finish the kitchen and baths, and we FINALLY have a move-in date!

The end of July we are out of our rental and into a whole new world up in the foothills. I’m already fantasizing where everything will go in each room.

Now comes the FUN part!

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Back to our very special construction project!

May 19, 2015May 21, 2015 / Laura Lee Carter / 2 Comments

So in the past few weeks we got the drywall, taping, texturing and painting finished in our new house out west of here.

To give you some idea what it looks like now, check out the future living room:

And the kitchen:

From outside the island and inside:

And then we have the Master suite:

And of course the views outside from there!

It can’t be long before we move in now, can it?

Did I mention I am NOT a patient person? I probably should have mentioned that to our builder BEFORE we started… LOL!

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Paradise is Personal

May 4, 2015October 18, 2018 / Laura Lee Carter / Leave a comment

“Paradise is where I want to wake up every morning… where I can be the way I want to be.” — Huerfano: A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture

When we were certain we would not be able to work full-time again, Mike and I began considering our options back in 2013. Where would we find our own inexpensive paradise?

After a quick trip down to Cuenca Ecuador in September, we decided to take a closer look at southern Colorado. Mike had an idea that the Huerfano west of Walsenburg might be a good place to begin our search, so we came down here and camped at Lathrop State Park. As luck would have it, we drove right into our first Octoberfest that fall!

Between the fantastic mountains views, the friendly people, the mild climate, the dark skies at night, and the completely reasonable land prices, we decided to research Navajo Ranch further, and the more we learned, the more we liked this area. It had its own water district, electric and phone service already present, and lots priced between $10,000 and 15,000. We returned in December to look at specific lots.

We found it difficult to distinguish one lot from another and hard to tell which lots were for sale. But as luck would have it, the only one we got out to look at more closely was the one we ended up buying in January 2015!

Then all we had to do was go back to Fort Collins, sell our home, and say goodbye to our life of 20+ years up there, a task that turned out to be far more difficult than expected.

**To read the whole story behind our great leap of faith, check out my Memoir of Retirement: From Suburbia to Solar and please follow us on TWITTER!**

Drywall, Thunderstorms and Libre…

May 2, 2015December 28, 2015 / Laura Lee Carter / 3 Comments

We experienced the most intense thunder storm yesterday in the foothills west of Walsenburg in southern Colorado. A half inch of rain in an hour and the lightening was amazing! We have lots of great progress up at our custom home. Who knew drywall could take a few weeks?

We found an excellent local man, Ron Pino, to do our drywall. He started out working with his Dad when he was only six! He works alone and is doing an incredible job for a very reasonable price. He’ll start texturing the walls today and then we can begin painting the interior.

Not the most exciting part, but it all has to get done!

We have been collecting all the parts we will need to complete the interior of the house. You try to sit down and think of EVERYTHING you need to finish a house inside. It’s tough! Luckily Mike is extremely detail oriented… thank goodness!

In the meantime we met a woman who is one of the original members of the Libre Commune north of here. Libre was established in the early 1970s as an artist community, with lots of unusual dome homes. There are still some members in the area. If you have any interest in this topic, check out the book Huerfano: A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture.

We are invited to go visit some of the original homes up there! How cool is that?

Yes, we are keeping busy meeting new people everyday, and enjoying a different view of life on the long and winding road into rural America…

Health obstacles and home PROGRESS!

April 10, 2015April 14, 2015 / Laura Lee Carter / 3 Comments

In spite of two sets of back problems and two cases of bronchitis, Mike and I are still up to the task of completing this house! Mike is nebulizing here, with Rasta’s help…

Yesterday was my 60th birthday and yes, I know I look older than when we got married in 2005. Suffice to say I no longer believe that 60 is the new 40! We celebrated my birthday by clearing the land below our new home to mitigate fire danger.

Here are the men clearing the land down below. So sorry to see a few beautiful trees disappear… Mike even killed a pack rat as it ran out of one of the big old dead ones!

But we must have our views after going to so much trouble to get them!