Rancho Mañana

We got the toilet done in one afternoon and it was as easy as can be, except that part where I knocked the whole carefully balanced thing over and then when we picked it back up and put it together again we did it completely wrong.Except for that part it was easy. And now I know how to use a drill so I feel all important.

OK, also the part where the plans had us cut the legs too short for our 5 gallon bucket, that wasn’t cool. That part was just annoying. They should have taken into consideration that not all buckets are created equal, or of equal height. Fortunately we had enough wood to cut four more legs.

Our creation has now been stained a nice dark chestnut, which I would show, but right now it’s tucked into the back of the truck with about 9 million other things because we’re heading out to the property in half an hour.

We’ll be there for four days, putting in the cross-posts for the fence so that we can finally, finally, hopefully, finish up, or at least start, the barbed wire around the whole place. That may have to wait for a bit but we have to get those cross-posts in place before it happens. So our mission is to work in the 100 degree heat to get those posts in place. We’ll work from 5 a.m. until around 10:00 a.m. and then again from around 8 p.m. until 10:00 p.m. so we don’t melt into a puddle.

We have a finalized order of business at last: We have a quote for a little more than $3000 for a solar system we’ll install ourselves. Get that done and then we have a quote from an internet place for around $90 a month to get satellite internet and then we’ll be all modern. Except that we’ll still have to buy our water at Walmart for 25 cents a gallon until we can drill our $7000 well. 25 cents vs $7000. We’ll do the 25 cents a gallon for a year.

Four days out at the property and then we drive back to Albuquerque so Jeff can catch a plane to Seattle/Michigan/Seattle and I turn around with a truckload of furniture and head back to our tiny house for a whole entire month on my own. To which I say both “gulp” and “yay!” I reserve the right to be scared, but I’m going to do it anyway. I hope to achieve:

Having 15 yards of gravel delivered and raking it around the house and 50 miles of driveway, leveling the entrances to our property and the exit off the county road because all four spots are “humpy”, installing insulation in the whole cabin and sanding and finishing the floor with a dark stain/poly finish. That should keep me busy. July is the hottest month in Deming so I’m going to have to juggle my work hours and try not to die. That part feels a little tricky at the moment.

I’ll be in town once a week and will be visiting a frosty-cold Starbucks so I can feel civilized and use their free internet. Plus the coffee, the coffee is at the top of the list, actually. I’ll post updates when I can.

When it’s super hot, I hope to sit and swelter while I start some watercolors. It’s been way too long since I’ve painted and being out in the middle of nowhere gives me time and space to create.

We’re heading to the property toward the end of next week and we’re going to take our new toilet with us-our composting toilet that will require no water at all!

Our neighbors out in Deming loaned us a great book called, “The Humanure Handbook”. It’s irreverent and pretty hilarious at times and it’s all about leaving a light footprint on the earth and utilizing some of the best fertilizer ever, if you chose to.

You can inspect the plans here. These are the plans we’ll be using. I’ll take pictures as we work so I can share. You know, just in case you all want to run out and build your own toilet.

Quite simply, a composting toilet can be purchased for upwards of $1000 plus, or you can build your own for under $100. A composting toilet does just what it implies, it allows you to collect and compost human waste and paper. After a period of time has passed, 6 months some say, 2 years, some say, you can literally use the resulting, rich black compost in your garden or on your trees if you’re a chicken about it. It’s quite safe, though you may not believe that unless you research it for yourself.

Instead of flushing away hundreds and thousands of gallons of water each year, you use exactly none. Instead, you keep a bin of either sawdust or peat moss right beside your toilet. You pour about one cup over your “deposit” and that’s it. There is NO smell, nada. And in the end, not only did you do your little part to save the planet, you get to ADD something good back into the soil. And goodness knows our soil could use some help.

And the best part of all is that you don’t have to put in a septic system. Hello, savings of thousands of dollars. Well no, truthfully, the best part is not having to use that lame camp toilet we used last time. What an unpleasant experience that was.

I bought all of the supplies to build our toilet, so when Jeff gets back from his travels, we’ll be working on it in the evenings to pull it together. We like building things together so it should be fun, and Jeff gets a reciprocating saw out of the deal so I’m sure that makes him happy.

Speaking of building, the Tiny House Blog is my all time favorite blog. As we move forward with this grand project, the more we consider what we want, the more we think that it’s possible we’ll NOT build a house in the future, but rather, may end up living very happily in our tiny house, which we already love more than any house we’ve bought, and it’s just a bare shell at the moment. Once we get to spend some time pulling it together and getting it all decked out, I think we’re going to be so happy there.

We’ll be putting up a Steel Shop Kit at some point in the near future, hopefully this winter. We’re thinking the 24×30 foot one will suit us best and we’ve marked off a spot for the concrete foundation to be poured on the South end of the property. In having this large shop we’ll have a ton of space to both work and to store things we don’t want to keep in the house: bulk groceries, off-season clothes, books, sports equipment, etc.

We don’t want a large house anyway, just about 700 square feet. Our little house is already around 350+ with the lofts, so we’re contemplating NOT spending an additional $80,000 or so to build a house that’s just a little bigger. We’re kicking around the idea of adding a small 8×8′ cabin just to the side, to store our solar batteries, the composting toilet and a shower, and then building a 10′ wide, 26′ long, covered, wide portico along the length of the house for year round outside shade and living space.

Our dream has been to live in a tiny house, so the thought of spending 1-2 years building a home ourselves, and spending the money, isn’t sounding like something we’re completely sure we want to do. Maybe we’d like to spend that money in other ways. There’s a lot we can do to make our little tiny house perfect for us and we’re not in a huge rush so we have time to live and work and consider.

This video is just wonderful. Their tiny house is just about the size of ours, though our porch is bigger and while they have a small cottage to work from next door, we’ll have a very large shop, so we’re thinking, hmm, we LOVE what they’ve done with their living space and maybe that is exactly what we’d like to do. Watch it, it’s loads of fun.

We’re entering “interesting” territory. I think it’s appropriate to replace the word “scary” with the word “interesting”, or maybe “exciting” would do just as well. But we won’t call it “scary.” Even though it is, a little. We’re pretty sure we’re going to go ahead and install our own solar power system on the cabin. Like all by our lonesome selves. Like ALONE.

We’ve been watching the Solar Cabin guy on Youtube and he’s just full of helpful information on all kinds of things, including a set of four videos on installing your solar system yourself and on installing wind power, which we also intend to do. He explains the complicated system in such a way that it’s understandable., He sort of takes the mystery out of the whole enchilada.

So we’re checking out systems this week, comparing prices and confusion so that we can find a system that will meet our basic needs. Installing it ourselves can save us thousands of dollars and we like saving thousands of dollars. Of course we don’t like electrocuting ourselves, so we’re also open to tips on how-to-not-die while installing a system. It looks like we could easily get the job done in a few days, or a few weeks if things get dicey.

This company, Northern Arizona Wind and Sun, is the company that supplies the Solar Cabin guy. So far, it’s in the top running because they’re apparently uber helpful in answering all questions, they’ve been around for 20+ years and they put out a good product that’s also affordable.

It’s June 1st today. That means we have approximately 16 weeks left before we move, give or take a few weeks. We’ve been juggling our option lately. We could live in a small apartment in Deming until we get the solar and internet installed at the cabin, but because Jeff travels so much, we’d be paying a full month’s rent just to stay in that apartment for one week out of the month and we’d also be locked into a lease.

So in the end, we think a hotel in Deming for one week when we first move down, is the better option. Jeff can have Wi/Fi to work from home during the day and we can drive the 40 minutes out to the property each evening to work on installing the solar, then staying the weekend at the cabin and hopefully finishing up the job that first week. Hopefully.

Worse case scenario, it takes awhile and we have to repeat the hotel visit the next month when Jeff is home. No big deal. It’s far easier and less expensive to do a hotel for a Monday-Thursday night so he can work, than it is to rent an apartment for the 4 nights per month.

Speaking of all consuming work, we hit a landmark recently. Jeff now has 2 years and 10 months left on his job, at least in its current form. Less than 3 years. Woo hoo! It’s strange to be getting to this point. We’ve literally been working toward him retiring at 55 since we were in our late 20′s. Hopefully this will be one of those “best laid plans” and it’s going to work out like clockwork. You know, like the universe usually does things. Hmm.

Because airline travel and add-on fees are going through the roof, it’s unlikely I’m going to be able to travel with him very often now on, so it’s important to keep pressing forward, doing as much as we can to get out of the Albuquerque house and into the cabin. Our money can be used much more efficiently improving the property. If we can get power and internet in place by the end of this summer it would be awesome. I can easily live without electricity, water and internet for awhile so it doesn’t matter to me if I’m home for a few weeks or months without the niceties, though we really do want to resolve the phone signal issue soon, if we can.

We’ve noticed that the phone signal drops off completely during the night, or almost completely, often we have only one bar, usually none. So we need to resolve that. It may mean that we need to switch from AT&T to Verizon. I think I need a personal assistant to help me with all of this research. Though I guess that planning to live off-grid and having a personal assistant are two things that shall never meet.

Jeff and I have been thinking for months about what we want to call our place. We’ve finally settled on Rancho Mañana, which we find to be hugely funny.

When we first moved to New Mexico from Seattle, the Mañana attitude that’s prevalent across the state, drove us nuts. Everyone is so laid back and no one seems to be in a hurry to get things done, which can drive a driven person round the bend. Over time we’ve come to embrace that Mañana attitude more and more and we think it’s a perfect name for the home of two type A personalities. A little reminder that things can wait for awhile, that the world won’t end if we don’t get something done ASAP. And it’s a perfect name for a retirement home, no?

I’m so looking forward to spending almost the entire month of July at the cabin, working, getting ready for our move to Deming. I woke up this morning after hours of “working” in my sleep. I was a little sad to actually wake up, because I wasn’t yet done with staining the floors.

I’m the “gatherer of information” on this big adventure, so yesterday I gathered so much information that I’m pretty sure I made Jeff’s head want to explode.

I obtained the form we need to apply to Luna county for an address. Our property is so rural, so raw, we have no address, just GPS coordinates. Once we have a real, honest to goodness address, we can get a real, honest to goodness mailbox. I know. It’s uber exciting.

I was looking for a solution to our solar requirements so I jumped on the Camping World site and they were honestly, so helpful. Those poor guys spent 45 minutes online with me in a chat window, trying to help me with a small solar package that would run Jeff’s computer and maybe a lamp. In the end, they sent me a link (provided above) to a solar lantern, and then a link to Sears, of all places, for this portable solar contraption that can keep a laptop powered up. Honestly, great people to help me out so much and then to steer me to another store because they didn’t have what I needed. Wow. I’m checking out all sorts of portable solar gigs now, to see if that’s the way we want to temporarily go.

I’m also waiting for a call from Green Go Solar in Deming. I wrote them a novel-esque note yesterday about our needs for the cabin and our requirement that any solar package be capable of being added onto over the next few years. I’m sure they’re just DYING to talk to me now. Or not. They will cost a pretty penny, but it may be the way we go. Need info!

The guys at Camping World also suggested I contact Best Buy and Radio Shack to see if they have something that could boost our internet reception out on the property. Unfortunately, we both have iphones on AT&T, which gets crappy reception in Deming. Verizon is who everyone ELSE goes with, because they get good reception. So in the end, we may have to switch over. But if that gets the job done so that Jeff can work from home when he’s there, so be it. He can tether his cell to his computer and it works great, but he has to have more than one bar to make it work. Which he can get if he stands under a certain window and holds the phone up a certain way. Not really conducive to doing work 10-12 hours a day though.

Because of circumstances: daughter’s birthday, a race I want to run in New Mexico, a race Jeff wants to run in Washington state, and his work in Michigan and Washington over the month of July, I’ll be staying home for just about the whole month. AND, I’ll be living in the cabin, all by my lonesome. I’m so excited/scared! But oh boy, I can’t wait.

I plan on getting a lot of grunt work done during the month, things that one person can do. If I can get some of those things done, that will free up our time for the big stuff that we need to do together.

My tasks thus far:

1. Level the connection between the gravel county road and the entry to our dirt road which connects to our property because it’s quite humpy. It’ll be me and a shovel for hours and hours.

2. Level the connection between our dirt roads and our driveway entry points on both the north and south sides of the property at the gates, because again, quite humpy.

3. We marked out the driveway that will run across the property, connecting the cabin, shop, house, a circle driveway near the center of the property and the north and south gates. I have to get out there and dig up every plant that happens to lay in the path of the driveway.

Why? The first time we worked out there we came home with two slow leaks from driving all over the property as we fenced. Mesquite thorns are hard on tires. Our tires were old so we replaced them with 4 new tires. When we went out this last time, we came back with another slow leak in one of the new tires. A thorn had caught it right on the side and destroyed that expensive tire. Fortunately, those tires were under a 90 day warranty so they gave us another for free.

Lesson learned: get the bloody plants out of the way and stop driving across the property! We’ll be parking on the dirt roads and wheelbarrowing things in until the driveway is completely cleared.

4. Lastly, I’m excited because I get to do the insulation on the cabin all by myself! I have the whole month, and Jeff is confident that I can handle it. Well, so am I, but I never get to proceed unless he THINKS I can handle it. Eh. Anyway, yay! The insulation will go a long way toward keeping the cabin cooler this summer and warmer this fall, when we move.

We’re going to be doing the interior in this:

5. OK, so the last one wasn't the last one. I'd also like to put in a clothes line of some sort:

There’s nothing like the smell of fresh laundry, just in from the line. There’s also nothing like not having to wear the same two pair of filthy, dusty shorts every day of the week.

Apparently there is just one rancher who runs his cows, free range style, across the whole valley. I’m not sure who he is, but I think maybe we’d better find out. What do you do when you see a cow in distress? When it’s dying? I’m not so good on ignoring things like that. So, frankly, I NEED a phone number.

We woke up to the oddest sound one morning at 5 a.m. It sounded like a long, low growl, mixed in with lots of mooing. My first thought was that a coyote was pestering the cows, but one coyote in with a dozen cows? They’d kick his brains out. And personally, I’ve never heard a coyote growl.

I got up and went out to dig fence holes in the cool of the day and the cows just sort of milled around looking at me while I was working, probably thinking about how great it was not to be a human, out digging holes at 5 a.m.

Then I heard that growl again. It was a big, black bull.

Now I was raised around cows, so I think I’m pretty handy at picking out weird cow things and that was a weird cow thing. This bull would groan out every single breath, then he would put his head up and bawl, no, scream, if it’s possible for a cow to scream, for a full minute. It sounded as if he was getting hoarse from the mooing. This went on for an hour, the kind of sound and behavior that a mama cow does when it’s separated from it’s baby. It’s not a good, happy sound. It’s a raise-your-eyebrows and stop your heart kind of sound.

I went and got Jeff and asked him to listen and asked what we should do. So, basically it was the blind suburbanite leading the blind. We had no idea. I was pretty sure that cow was going to keel over, any minute, and we had no idea who we could contact.

For hours, this cow kept up this behavior, alternately stopping to graze for a long time before he’d start in again. I thought, hmm, how bad off can he be, if he’s stopping to eat for a half hour before he starts in again?

Cows. And I thought teenagers were hard to understand. Finally he wandered off-to die, I figured. I felt so incredibly guilty. Ugh.

Later that night we went to our far-away neighbor’s house for an incredible dinner of brisket and shrimp and ribs and salads, and met their son, one of our other neighbors. We had a great time, talking about all sorts of things we need to know to settle in successfully and discussing the value of underground gardening (I can’t wait to share that!) and of composting human waste (Can’t wait to share that and do that!). I started to tell them about the bull and his behavior, and right away, Richard, our 30 year resident of the valley, said, “Oh, I know that crazy cow. He does that all the time!”

Oye. All that worry for nothing. A bull with an attitude. Maybe he was ticked off at his little harem of cows and was expressing himself. Who knows. Apparently though, he wasn’t dying.

We’re getting the Albuquerque house ready to rent out long around October. Our grown children will be moving out at the end of September, and we will follow soon thereafter!

We’ve decided that it would be best to at least TRY to rent the house out rather than just sit there and wait for the market to improve. We have to pay the mortgage either way, and we would rather be in Deming, working on the property. If we stay in the house, there’s no hope of renting it out and eventually selling it, so doing the math, we’ve decided it’s time to move out. Yay! If we can rent the house out for even half of the mortgage, half of the year until the market improves, it’s an excellent scenario.

Like I always say, just take a step, and the next step comes much quicker than you think it will. So we’re pretty excited.

We don’t have it all figured out yet, by any means. We need electricity and internet at the cabin so Jeff can work from home, the one week a month he’s home. We’re working on getting a small solar package and have found an internet provider who can give do off-the-grid. Worst case, we’ll rent an apartment in Deming for 6 months until we get things set up. But as we’ll only be home for about 6 weeks of time during that 6 months, it would be a huge waste of money to hand over rent instead of using the money to buy a solar power system. So, we’re working it out. Mostly what we’re working out is the “unknown”.

Sometimes we just need time to mentally adjust to changes and moving is a big change. Well, for one of us anyway. I truly would live in a tent as long as I could be out there in the big, wild world. But we’re moving forward, and quickly and that’s all anyone could hope for. We’re happy. We aren’t pressed to hurry. But it’s nice that things are moving along.

Here’s the gate posts on the South side. Oh, they look pretty. We still have to do the cross braces, before we string the rest of the barbed wire. We’ll get those in on our next 4 day weekend out, in 2 weeks time.

We made good progress last week and for the most part, the weather cooperated. There were high winds the first two days of the week so that messed up the delivery schedule of the cabin as the driver didn’t want to die after being swept off the highway coming down from Texas with the cabin. Go figure. While we waited, we spent the first two days gathering supplies and putting in fence posts-and sleeping in a hotel in Deming.

The truck came out on Wednesday morning and delivered the cabin,setting it up in about 30 minutes flat. He slid it off of this funky trailer and then used a riding lift to put it up on blocks and level it and, presto, he was done and gone and we had a little house. And oh, it’s a sweet little house!

The cabin is not finished on the inside. We’re going to finish it off this fall because we’ll be moving down to Deming much sooner than we originally thought we would. We’ll insulate and put up interior siding, whatever you call that stuff, and some sort of simple flooring that will stand up easily to having sand ground into it every day. It’ll make a really nice fall/winter project for when it cools down a bit.

We’ll be living in a little apartment for awhile, so Jeff can work from home when he’s home in New Mexico. We need to have some solar power and decent internet on the property before we can live there full time. So it’ll be weekends for a bit but we’ll be so much closer to the place by living down south that we’ll be able to get a great deal of work done each weekend.

It’s funny how, once you get started on something, things begin to roll at light speed and you can see the path ahead much clearer than you could before. Plus, in a HUGE job, every step that you achieve gives you confidence and courage, and it’s all just a matter of a lot of steps strung together until you meet your goal. It’s not scary to do things one step at a time. And so we are. And it’s going much speedier than we thought it would go.

We’re also willing to compromise and that helps a lot.

This trip out was so much easier and so much harder. Harder because we worked so very, very hard. Easier because having a little home to live in, to sit on the porch and watch the sunset, to have meals in, to wash up, to keep things CLEAN, is very important.

We had water because we’d brought it out, we had light because we had oil lamps to read by at night, we could cook because we have camp stoves. All we were really missing was a small refrigerator (coolers are such a pain) and electricity and internet. Once we resolve those issues it’s going to be perfect for us. But then our needs are extremely simple and we like it that way. Other people might not be so happy, I get that.

It’s so wild and quiet and peaceful out in the valley and it suits our personalities so perfectly. We feel so at home there and are making very good friends so when we have to leave, it stings a bit. It’s incredible to step back at the end of the day and see that the things that happened, the progress that occurred that came from your own hands and the sweat of your own brow.That’s seriously awesome.

Coming back to Albuquerque feels different for both of us now. Of course we still love it here, but not in the way we love our Deming home. We are the best US out there. We’re both hard workers and this is really the first opportunity we’ve had to put who we are as people, completely into play. We can see the fruits of our labor from hour to hour and day to day and it’s really quite wonderful to see what two people working together are capable of.

We have such fun together even though we each work so differently. You’d think we would drive each other crazy, but we know each other and we cut slack for one another. Jeff needs to think a lot and go slow, but he does things as perfectly as they can be done. I like to jump in and do 10 things at once, the dirtier and harder the better, and I don’t need perfect. Together, it works. He measures and checks and marks off things and does hideously hard work that I can’t even THINK of doing and I do the grunt work and the ick stuff and as long as there’s plenty of it to keep me busy, I’m happy. If I’m just sitting around waiting? No. Double no.

Lots more to talk about and now that I’ve replaced my old broken down computer with a new one, as of yesterday, I’ll be able to do more updates on last week’s progress.