Category: August 2018

John and I are all over the map about houses. That’s what the exploratory phase is all about, right? We’re starting to look into where we want to live after John retires. I think we’ve narrowed it down to New Mexico, as long as we can be somewhere else during a lot of the first half of each year (after I’ve retired). A big unknown is how long I’ll work after he retires.

Option 1 – Placitas house on the hill (which we currently own).

• Pros: amazing views, sentimental value, solar panels, already own it.
• Cons: No trees, incredibly windy, too far for me to commute.

Option 2 – Nambe house.

• Pros: tons of New Mexican character, in the cottonwood trees, a long commute for me.
• Cons: Would need to build a garage and a courtyard, older section needs work.

Option 3 – Southwest Albuquerque (more details below).

• Pros: It has a pool! Irrigation rights! Trees! Outdoor kitchen. Standard, boring, nice interior that doesn’t need any remodeling.
• Cons: Standard, boring, nice interior. Flat landscape. Waaaay too far to commute, I would have to continue occupying my Santa Fe townhome during the weekdays as long as I was working in Santa Fe.

The funny thing about this one is it doesn’t even look like it’s in New Mexico. I’m not sure if that’s a pro or a con. Maybe some of both? It’s got a ridiculous amount of grass. I could spend the rest of my life replacing that grass with trees, bushes and meandering pathways (this actually sounds appealing to me, UNLIKE REMODEL PROJECTS!)

The crazy thing about this house is it looks like it would cost a shit-ton of money, but it doesn’t. All three houses are worth just about exactly the same amount. This house is the same as what I would expect to sell the Placitas house for, now that we’re almost done with the remodel. It costs slightly more than the one in Nambe, but by the time we built a garage and courtyard at the Nambe house, Nambe would come out more expensive than this one. Of course if this house were in Santa Fe, it would cost 10 times what it costs down south of Albuquerque.

This is in the northern section of what’s called the “South Valley.” It’s a very mixed, rural area, a floodplain of the Rio Grande. The schools are awful and it has a poor reputation. It also has large lots, and some very nice homes. It’s on city water but irrigated with a well – best of both worlds. Unfortunately I expect it’s directly under the flight path to the airport (it’s about 6 miles west of the airport, on the other side of the Rio Grande). So it would be important to check that out.

The entire acre appears to be fully fenced.

Speaks for itself…

Covered outdoor kitchen

This looks like a gas fireplace like we had at the Hampton house.

Entry courtyard

A bit too much like California…

Very well staged. Don’t expect it to look like that with us in it, lol.

Couple steps down the the family room. Dates it to the late 1990’s, oh well.

Gas stove, island, open concept.

1990’s style gas fireplace in the master bedroom.

Good sized master bath

Is that an actual real laundry room and not a walk-thru?

What a crazy amount of grass. This is the back yard. There’s even more grass in the front.

This is the front yard. What exactly would one do with all that flat space? Knowing us, we’d start building things! Don’t even go there. La-la-la, pretend there’s not a half-acre front yard.

If you’re wondering why I haven’t been blogging much lately, it’s because every night after work, all I do is play in the sand in my backyard.

Remember how it took Sam, the brick guy, forever to lay my patio brick? He never did finish, really. He laid the brick, but didn’t sand it. In New Mexico, brick is traditionally placed tightly together without any grout or mortar, and then sand is pushed into the cracks, lodging the bricks tight. In this photo you can see how there are notches in this style of brick, to help them interlock.

I was so tired of Sam being randomly, occasionally, in my backyard, that when he declared himself done, and the brink wasn’t sanded, I just decided I’d sand the brick myself. How hard could it be to sweep a little sand over some brick?

I figured I had until first frost heave to get the brick sanded in tight. I did not anticipate flooding. Remember the storm we had a couple of weeks ago? My bricks weren’t sanded in yet. They didn’t float away, but they definitely loosened under all that water.

The empty cracks filled with slit from the muddy flood waters. Ta-da, all set, right? Sanded in, silted in, what’s the difference?

Unfortunately, fine silt won’t hold bricks tight. It needs to be fairly course sand to wedge between the bricks like miniature boulders. Then the finer sand fills in between. (If you’re thinking that this next photo doesn’t look like brick, it’s not. This is actually steps to the doggie door, made out of some sort of blocks). But it was a good shot of how the sand lodges in the cracks, holding the brick in place.

My first step was to hose the fine silt deposited during the flood out from between the bricks. The silt blasted right out easily with a garden hose (proving it was not stable enough to hold brick tight).

Next, I started sweeping sand around. It was easy to imagine that all it would take was a few sweeps across the patio and the sand would fall into the cracks and ta-da, done!

Uh no. It’s actually a slow process. Every evening I spend an hour or two sweeping the patio and contemplating the physics of sand, brick and friction. (Except for the evenings where we’re getting thunderstorms.) This is the pattern of rain on the scattered sand on the brick.

Sanding brick is actually fairly relaxing, as long as I don’t get impatient or overly goal-oriented. There’s a fine line between meditative and tedious. With each sweep, little bits of sand disappear down the cracks. A few grains at a time. Sometimes the sand gets clogged and it looks like the crack is full, only to settle a few minutes later, and the crack reappears.

A small crack doesn’t matter.

But after spending many hours of filling cracks, if I happen to see one my brain goes, “Oh no! A crack! Fill it! Fill it!” I can no longer ignore them. “Must fill in all the cracks!”

Sometimes there is a lot of empty space under one small hole. Here’s a section I thought was done, but when I put a patio chair down the brick shifted slightly, opening back up cracks along two edges.

The edges are tricky. The gap between the patio and the house I’ll fill with sand. But the cracks in the brick along the planter won’t hold sand, it just flows out into the planter.

Right now the brick is a dusty pink, but once it’s all done and washed up, it will be red again.

It’s very dusty. The dogs are here this weekend, and we’re keeping the doggie door closed or else there would be a layer of sand in our townhome as well as in the backyard!

John and I went and saw the coolest house for sale the other day. (Wait, what? House hunting? Again? Another house?)

No, not really. I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t know. I’m not going to predict what John and I are going to do in the future regarding houses. Because whatever I predict will turn out to be wrong, and then you all will be like, “But you said…”

Let’s just say we’re not pre-approved yet, and we don’t have a real estate agent yet. (Then how did you see a house?) Ok, in a slow market, sometimes it’s possible to talk a listing agent into showing you their own listing. They’re not going to take you around on a grand tour of every house in your price range until you’re pre-approved. And in a fast market you’ve got to have the cash waving in front of their face before they even answer your phone call.

But Nambé (pronounced Nom-béh, with the accent on the second syllable) is not a fast market right now (or probably ever). The house we saw has been on the market for months. And the listing agent apparently had nothing better to do on a warm Sunday afternoon than head up to Nambé and sit on the front porch of a  really cool house and chat with us.

The reality is, I’m not fond of our house in Placitas, and our townhome in Santa Fe is quite small, so maybe someday we could consolidate into one house that works for both of us. Nambé is way too far north to commute to Albuquerque, but John will be retiring within the next few years. At the moment (plans can change) I am expecting to continue working in Santa Fe after he retires.

Anyway – the house. It’s in the bosque, which in our case consists mostly of cottonwood trees, as well as irrigated fields. There’s a time in my life – back when I lived in the Pacific Northwest – when I would have derisively called the cottonwoods “river bottom trees” or even “trash trees”. But after several years in the desert I’m now like “Oooh, bosque…”, with a mysterious lilt in my voice as I savor the ending kaaaay. The bosque makes the house feel like it is actually in the countryside somewhere, instead of stuck-in-the-middle-of-a-desert. John and I both like that part. Look! Trees! Green! Trees!

From the outside the house is a tad funky looking. Or shall we say, it has character? It’s very New Mexican.

Me in “thinking pose” talking to the agent.

The back side:

Then the part that I think is truly amazing is the great room (living room, dining room, kitchen) that looks like a courtyard. An indoor courtyard.

Isn’t that the coolest thing you ever saw? White doors under the white eves, just like in a territorial style courtyard. And above those trusses are clear glass skylights. I’ve never seen a house like it.

There’s no views like we’re used to in Placitas. In fact, the two small windows on either side of the fireplace in the living room look out at a gravel drive and the wall of the neighboring house.

The best views are from a glassed in porch in the old section, which is strange-looking from this angle, but beautiful from the inside looking out.

John would grow tropical plants in there. And palm trees (short ones, we hope).

I was a little dismayed by the amount of cars sitting around on the neighboring lot. I didn’t think John would appreciate messy neighbors. But John says they’re the “right kind of cars”. Uh-hu. I would want to build a courtyard for the dogs, and it would block most of the car view anyway. Plus, look at those trees!

The classic blue and white kitchen has a high-end gas Thermador stove.

Each of the two main bedrooms has it’s own en-suite bath.

The main section was built in the 1990’s and has in-floor radiant heat (my favorite) and evaporative cooling. That’s the main living space with the kitchen-dining-living great room, and two bedrooms each with its own bath. That section is all in good shape.

There’s also an older adobe section (built in 1920’s) with an office, laundry, bath, and the glassed-in sunporch that needs a lot of work. It’s cute and quaint, but the electricity doesn’t work in the old section of the house.

The old section has a lot of character, but it needs a lot of work.

There’s no central heat in the old section, so they put some little wall heaters in some really stupid places. Like in a door. (The door is blocked off, I’m not sure where it goes).

The older section is not insulated (that’s the roof of the little turret).

It’s actually not a turret, it’s a traditional New Mexican architectural element. Unfortunately I forgot the story behind how that style developed, or what it’s actually called. It might be from the Pueblo or Chaco Indians. They had round structures or rooms called kivas, that contained a central fire pit. We now call the rounded adobe fireplaces in New Mexico “kivas”.

Inside the turret-that’s-not-a-turret is a bathtub (in case you’ve been wondering what the heck is in there). John says it’s a good place for a sauna. Sometimes the Minnesota in him comes sneaking out.

Here’s more funky bathroom near the turret-that’s-not-a-turret (also in the old section)

There’s bunches of potential issues we have to slowly get figured out. It’s on a shared well (just this house and the neighbor) which is the same as what we’ve got in Placitas. But we’d need to know the allocation (how many gallons per year we’re allowed to use). Also there was some big regional water lawsuit and settlement, such that there’s going to be a water system put into the neighborhood. We’d need to find out if it’s mandatory to hook up to it, and what that would cost.

We’d need to make sure the septic system is in good shape. And I’d want to know where a new drain field could be installed, if we ever needed to replace it. (Remember the house we didn’t buy last year because of septic issues?)

Another big issue with this house is that there’s no garage. John needs a garage – we’d have to build one. We might be able to put one in the corner of the lot where those two sheds and that car is. But there’s quite a bit of slope, so it may need a fair amount of excavation (think $$).

Also we’d want a courtyard. So between a garage, a courtyard, and a significant amount of work in the old section of the house, we need to figure on a minimum of $100,000 in remodel costs on top of the purchase price.

But have you ever seen a house like that?