We’re picking up speed on this whole moving-and-developing-the-Deming-property-thing. We applied for our address with the county! That’s a huge thing for me. I feel homeless without an address and it’s awful to have to tell people how to get out to our property because it’s such a looong way out. But worst of all is that Amazon won’t deliver books to me if we don’t have a proper address. And that just cannot happen.
We picked up our camper in Las Cruces and happily moved into it and it’s such a luxury but it also makes everything incredibly easier. Since it’s “self-contained”, the powers that be are OK with us living in it for up to 6 months each year which means they can’t force us to install septic, electric and water. It works great for us because we travel at least half of the year. So, it works out well all the way around. We don’t have to worry about being carted off to jail and we have a SHOWER and a SINK and a microwave and a queen sized bed and a little table. Campers are really a wonder!
We bought the camper without seeing it, based on the previous years model because the Albuquerque store didn’t have it in stock. So when we picked it up in Cruces, we got some really happy surprises as the newer model was configured in a much better way with the bed positioned in such a way that it makes the whole thing look more like a studio apartment, less like a camper. I love waking up in the middle of the night and staring at the stars out the screened windows and I love, love, love sleeping in a bed.
It got up to the low 100′s again the week we were there but we were able to move between the cabin and the camper to find the coolest spot to work or to just sit and read.
It’s perfect having 2 homes, so to speak, on the property because I can get up at 5 a.m. and go to the cabin to have coffee, to journal and to change into my running clothes and I don’t bother Jeff while doing it. When I come back from my run, he’s up and working already, usually in the camper, but because he’s working from home via tethering off of his computer, he can pretty much work anywhere.
The poor phone signal and Jeff’s work was a troublesome worry to us, so imagine our surprise when he was able to easily tether to his cell phone and even with our pathetic signal, he was able to work 8-10 hours a day, no problem. Incredible! It blew us away and made us giddy to realize that, son of a gun, this is going to work!
Silly me, I forgot to take pictures of the cabin after we’d moved in all of the furniture we’re keeping, and after we got all the books put away in the bookshelf and got all of the kitchen stuff moved out and into the camper. I’ll take pics when we go home and post them. I got a few pictures of things as we moved along, so I’ll share those.
In the corner where the kitchen was, is now my studio, which is pretty sweet, I’ll tell you what.
I was able to move all of the kitchen stuff into the camper and the things I rarely use, into the garage where I can still get at them in just a minute if I need them. We’re finding it absolutely a perfect set-up. The camper meets all of our living and legal needs (plus, hey, it’s a camper so we can go CAMPING in it.) And the cabin now makes a good-sized 12×26′ living room and dining room-and studio. It’s so comfortable and completely uncrowded. We even emptied out the two huge lofts because we have so much storage room in the new garage. In fact, we’re only using less than half of the storage space in our camper. When I say we’ve simplified, I mean it.
The garage is really quite humungous at 12×32′. Our tiny amount of stuff looks lost in this big building. We’ll build floor to ceiling deep shelves in December and that will organize everything nicely. In the meantime, things are “organized” on the floor. It’s turning out to be a great system to keep the things we don’t use very often out in the garage and the things we use all the time for work go in the camper and then the things we use to relax we put in the cabin. (cross beam things were just for stabilization during delivery)
Again, I forgot to take good pictures when we were leaving, of the whole place as it’s set up now, but here’s at least a shot. The garage has been raised up now and is on a cement block foundation so it’s about a foot higher than in this picture. The camper now sits all the way at the end of the garage and in the middle we now have a graveled courtyard where we hang out every evening until well after the stars have come out.
I found a shot of the courtyard area in progress at least. Again, the garage hasn’t been raised up in this shot:
We had another 15 tons of gravel delivered and between the two of us we got the courtyard in, the driveway to the garage in and we started a peel-off driveway from the main driveway, along the south gate side, so we could drive around the back of the buildings without disturbing the topsoil. Man, I really fell down on taking the pictures of our progress on that last day because we were in a rush to get back to Albuquerque and catch a flight.
I have more stuff to share but lots to do so I’ll do another update tomorrow.
