Archive for Uncategorized
May 22, 2007 at 9:19 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Today was the confluence of contractors, and I was in the dead center as the General Contractor. The day started at 7 a.m. with verification of our flooring shipment. At 7:15 the roofers showed up with two large trucks and a dozen men. In 15 minutes they had our roof mostly stripped.
While they were working, I went to pick up a 24 foot diesel truck rental. Then I trucked over to the warehouse and watched 5,500 pounds of slate plus a thinset (mortar) and grout get loaded on the truck via forklift.
By the time I got back, the flooring crew had arrived and finished stripping the remains of the old floor. I backed the truck up to our front door and we started unloading. It takes a while to move eight pallets of slate with just a dolly. Meanwhile, the roofing crew covered the Airstream in a tarp to protect it from dripping tar, and the mess really got started.
If you’ve ever hired a general contractor and wondered what he did to deserve his fee, try standing in his tar-covered shoes for a day. I was running back and forth all day, directing traffic, driving the truck, unloading, answering questions, making snap decisions, authorizing expenditures, quality-checking the slates, and solving problems.
There were minor conflicts between the flooring crew and the roofing crew. There were unexpected tar leakages into the living room. We needed an electrician, and a plumber on short notice. We needed to find a pair of drywall finishers. We had to schedule additional work for later this week and even next week after we will be gone. There were deadlines to return the truck and get the trash to the dump, and at the end of the day a line of people waiting for their checks.
But at the end of the day, we managed to solve every problem, clean up the site, get everyone paid, and work up a schedule for the rest of the tasks to be done. It was a success and tomorrow we get to do it all again, with the electrician, plumber, drywallers and flooring team on site, and me on the phone trying to find a painter and gutter company to show up by Friday.
Note to happy full-time RV’ers: You’ve got it perfect already. DON’T BUY A HOUSE!
May 21, 2007 at 9:37 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Since we are stuck immobile for another few days, I’ve been pondering ways to keep the blog relevant to the topic of full-time Airstream travel. While I know watching us renovate a house doesn’t seem exciting, it is really part of the travel experience. We need a home base that we can leave behind easily, without maintenance obligations piling up behind us every time we hit the road.
So, our process of making our house “road worthy” is absolutely a part of what we need to do. If we do it right, we’ll still have the freedom to travel. The trick is to keep the house low maintenance and affordable. That’s why we are making this investment of time and money now.
It hasn’t been much fun. In the last week, we had an electrician, a handyman, a tree trimmer, a landscaper, and a chimney sweep come to visit and provide services for the house. This week we’ll have a a roofing team, flooring team, a plumber, a pair of drywall finishers, a painter, and gutter service. To get all this to happen, I’ve spent hours on the telephone and collecting estimates. Then I wonder if they’ll show up, or even return my call.
I’m beginning to think that the appeal of being “on the road” is really more about not having the hassle and expense of a house behind you. But why kid ourselves? Owning a house is a substantial complication and we knew that going in. The interesting part will be discovering whether we can get the house to fade into the background and no longer occupy such a large slice of our energy and time.
It’s hard to be optimistic about that after the week we’ve had, but in a few days or a week, things will look better. In any case, the countdown to departure is looking better. If everyone performs as promised we can leave as early as Saturday. That means we’ll have time to go visit some national parks in northern Arizona or Utah.
I mentioned this to the roofer today. I said, “We live here now — we can always go see the Grand Canyon later.” He coughed and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “Bull—!” (Have to admit, I was surprised at his audacity, considering he was there to give me a quote. All the other contractors tried to agree with everything I said.)
But he was right. When you live somewhere, it’s easy to overlook the great things to do right in your backyard. There are many people here who have never been to the Grand Canyon despite having lived here for decades. It’s always a place to go “someday”. That’s a trap we could fall into as well. I’ll have to watch for that. So if we can possibly swing it, we will lock the door and leave early, and get back to the business of seeing America one day at a time.
May 20, 2007 at 9:40 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Take a couple of prybars, hammers, a ladder, and a few heavy-duty plastic bags … add one room decked out in the height of 1971 dark wood paneling … and have fun.
Before the fun family day…
We always knew that this room would take some extra effort. It has fantastic potential but basically all the cosmetics are wrong: bad windows, peeling fake-parquet vinyl floor, outdated paneling, and a distinctly dusty odor. When we’re done it should be the nicest room in the house.
Last Thursday the laborers stripped the floor, and today we got in there to pull the paneling. Eleanor and I did the heavy work, while Emma collected the nails from the floor and assisted with sweeping.
Behind the paneling there was drywall, and behind the drywall there were furring strips nailed to burnt adobe block … and about a pound of fossilized mouse droppings and other fun things.
Mystery eggs?
I was surprised to find a clutch of what appeared to be eggshells. They were very thin, white, round, and delicate. Each one was broken open, and there were no other clues indicating what they might have hatched. Any ideas?
… and almost done!
We’re very pleased with the change in this room. It is lighter, warmer, and more authentic. Already it is showing its potential. Once the floor is in, we’ll shoot a comprehensive photo essay of the entire house and figure out what else it needs.
We’ll have a lot of things to consider this summer while we are away. I just wonder if it will continue to command our attention, or if our ardor for the house project will wane when we get a few hundred miles away.
Dinnertime view of the Santa Catalinas from the patio
May 19, 2007 at 8:29 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
This is my 600th blog entry. Since October 2005 I’ve been reporting nearly daily from the road as we’ve crossed the country five times from coast to coast. In June, it will be two years since we sold our house and moved into a rolling home. And now I can see the end coming.
When we started this trip, it was with the plan that we’d be on the road for just six months, and then return to home base to build a new home. But something happened along the way. After just two or three months, we began to sense the approaching end of the trip, and it didn’t feel like enough. The travel experience, the lightness of being mobile, the educational opportunities and all the other things I’ve written about in the past 600 blog entries became our lifestyle and we didn’t want to give it up so quickly.
I’ve often warned other people who are considering long RV trips about this. There’s never enough time. The world — even the bit of it accessible to motorized vehicles on the North American continent — is too big. There are too many interesting people and places, too many amazing experiences, to even scratch the surface of it in a few months. We know full-time RV’ers who have been on the road for fifteen years and they still crave more. So no matter how much time you plan to spend, it may not be enough.
But we now own a house. Things are changing. Emma is going to start a regular school soon, and when that happens we will no longer be free to roam. This summer we have a few short months and then …
So I am looking at the next three months like the first three months. We have a small window in which to do so much, and hard choices have to be made. Grand Canyon or Bryce Canyon? Wind Cave or Mt Rushmore? Maine or Nova Scotia? Each decision feels more momentous because, like most other people, we now have very limited time.
We started this trip somewhat naive, looking only a few months down the road, and having only a foggy idea of where the road would lead. Six hundred memos from the road later, our crystal ball is no more clear than it was, but we do have a rich experience behind us and a feeling of confidence about the future.
So we don’t regret a moment of this, not by any measure, especially not dollars. If anything, we’ve learned that time is far more valuable than money. Anyone can make money, but nobody can make time. Use what you’ve got as best you can. That’s our plan for the last few months of our full-time travel experience.
May 18, 2007 at 9:35 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Well, first the bad news. I’ve had a couple of requests from people to get on with traveling again as soon as possible. With various contractor issues, it looks like we’ll be house-bound for another week. I wish I could “take requests” like a disc jockey, but this is real life, not a TV show, so all I can say is “stay tuned”. If we get all the house work done on schedule, we’ll still have time to visit the Grand Canyon before we head to Lake Mead and Las Vegas.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch … we got awoken again by contractors, this time the flooring crew. Today was demolition day (part I). They scraped up all the peeling vinyl flooring and the stained blue carpet, and now our house looks even more like a disaster than ever before. Only the kitchen cabinets and bathrooms remain, and those are coming out on Tuesday. Our “light cosmetic update” has turned into a full-blown makeover. Perhaps our life is a TV show after all, because right now it looks like one of those house makeover programs on cable.
A scrap of the original 1971 linoleum, found beneath the carpeting.
Despite total havoc inside the house, I am somehow managing to get some work done each day, and we even had our first dinner guest this evening. Our neighbor Carol, an adventuresome soul, popped by and accepted a spontaneous invitation to dinner. Since we have no furniture and the house is virtually gutted, we built a table from sawhorses and a spare door, brought out our folding chairs, and grilled up dinner on the back patio, which included s’mores for dessert. Life is good, even though we are temporarily stationary.
May 17, 2007 at 7:26 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Our new neighbor Tom appeared at the door today. He’d been talking with the former owner of our home, who had driven by and spotted our Airstream in the driveway.
The former owner was excited to see the Airstream, because she and her husband had also owned one and parked it in this very carport. In fact, they came down from Chicago in 1971 in the Airstream, to relocate into their new home. They informed the builder that they’d have the Airstream in the driveway and he arranged for them to have custom enhancements: an extra-tall carport, and an extra water and sewer inlet in the carport.
Is it coincidence that we happened to find and buy this particular house? After all, we saw dozens of houses and few were Airstream-friendly, and none had hookups under covered parking. And this one was built specifically to house an Airstream! I think it’s Airstream karma …
So today we brought Jerry the handyman back to adjust the carport. The last ten feet were blocked off by a wall, forming a storage area. We asked Jerry to remove half of this space so the full length of the garage would be available for parking the Airstream. Three hours later, the deed was done, and our rolling home had a home of its own.
Today we faced the stained concrete experiment and decided it wasn’t what we were looking for. I’m not against stained concrete, because it can be beautiful, but in this case we are going in a different direction. I’ll tell you about that in a few days.
We also had a landscaper come by for an estimate on some backyard plans. The bad news was the existing lawn. Even though it is dead on top, and we’ve deliberately neglected it, we’ve been told the grass will spring back to life when it gets some water during monsoon season. We need it dead dead dead down to the roots, so it won’t come back later and ruin our xeriscaping.
The proposal is to fertilize and water the grass until it greens up a little, then spray it with Roundup (which travels to the roots and kills it), then very expensively remove the top few inches and truck it away. No kidding. All this is estimated to cost $2,200. So needless to say, we’re looking for alternatives. It seems ridiculous to pay such money to get rid of grass, especially in the desert where the darned stuff shouldn’t be growing anyway.
And keeping in the spirit of demolition and destructions, tomorrow morning a crew is going to show up and remove all the flooring in the house, plus all the kitchen cabinets and one of the two bathrooms. It should be total havoc, exciting and terrifying all at once. This is the ugly phase of renovation, but soon enough we’ll turn the corner to making things nicer.
May 16, 2007 at 5:00 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
This time of year, in southern Arizona, early rising isn’t just a virtue, it’s an imperative if you want to get work done outside. So Jesus, the palm tree trimmer, showed up at 6:15 to get started on the single palm tree we own.
It’s strange that a week ago we didn’t own much of anything, and now we can claim a palm tree and a house to go with it. Stranger still, I hardly even know this palm tree and here I am paying someone to give it a haircut. It now sports a sort of palm tree fade, short on the sides and shaggy on the top.
In Anza Borrego the fan palms have never been trimmed and they look very nice in their shagginess. But our tree has been trimmed in the past and so we decided to stick with the clean-shaved look that is more common to suburban areas. Besides, falling palm fronds are heavy, even dangerous sometimes. I don’t know enough about palms to be sure if ours will fall or hang on.
The first phase of the concrete floor test has been completed. Toby finished the floor today, but we had a snag. A last-minute addition of turquoise stain didn’t fully dry, and when he put the sealant on it created undesirable whitish rings. You can see a big one at upper left. That will have to be sanded out and repaired later. Still, we have enough of a sample to base further decisions on.
This photo does not do the floor justice. It looks better than this, but I had a tough time capturing it without glare. The colors are rich and varied, but in the photo it looks muddy.
Eleanor loves it. Personally, my take is that the floor is too dark. That’s an easy change. I’d also like to keep the deep brown and reds to minimal streaks rather than large patches. We both like the turqoise patches (lower left) and the little variations in pattern and texture that you may not be able to see in the photo.
The area by the door wasn’t sealed, so you can see how the color pops out in the final stage of the process. Until then, it’s very hard to visualize how the product will appear. Now that we can see it, we will take some time to consider it, before we commit to the rest of the house.
At this point, however, we are exhausted by home ownership already. Too much, too fast. We’ll all be glad when this renovation phase is over, and we can just treat the house as a place to live rather than as a project. It governs our days, our schedule, and our dreams at night. Just a few more contractors and repairs and we’ll be free again …
This afternoon we got a tiny taste of the upcoming monsoon season. A back-door front swept down through New Mexico and our temperature dropped (to 85 degrees), the humidity spiked, and thunderstorms rumbled past. By Florida standards it was still a low-humidity day and hardly enough rain to mention, but here it was a real event. We had to run out of the house and get soaked by the fat raindrops, and take pictures of the clouds. How much our perspective has changed since we came to the desert …
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