Category: Rentals, Remodels, Relocations and Real Estate

John had wisely arranged to pick up the U-haul the evening before the morning we were scheduled to load. As we were about to leave to pick it up he got a text saying that the truck he had reserved would be in Rio Rancho instead of Albuquerque. He called to find out what that was about and after some careful questioning, he realized that there wasn’t a truck at all.

No U-haul truck in Albuquerque, and the replacement in Rio Rancho that they were going to give him wasn’t actually there yet either. The Rio Rancho truck they assigned us was already a day late coming in, and they had no idea, and no control, over when or whether it would show up. They were just hoping it would be in soon. There were no actual U-haul trucks available in Albuquerque or Rio Rancho. So much for having reserved a truck.

What were we going to do without a moving truck? We had movers lined up for the next morning! So John called Penske and it cost us nearly twice as much, and we had to wait an hour at the Penske shop while they cleaned it, but we got a truck. Whew!

The next morning our movers showed up on time and they were excellent. We’ve used them before for unloading, but we didn’t know how good they were at loading. A good loading job takes skill, and it makes all the difference in the world. You can get twice as much in a truck if it’s loaded tight, and your stuff is less likely to get damaged because it doesn’t shift around.

We had a huge truck, but we also had a ton of stuff. I told the movers to load the couches I got from Craigslist last, because they took up a lot of space and I hadn’t paid very much for them. I planned to abandon them if we ran out of space. Luckily, our movers got it all in, even my lumpy second-hand couches.

For my Albuquerque readers, if you every need movers in Albuquerque, use these guys, https://affmove.com/. They also deliver furniture and can get oversized items from the hardware store, etc. We discovered them when Jackalope (a furniture store in Albuquerque), recommended them a couple of years ago when I bought a heavy sideboard and needed it delivered.

Ignore the U-haul trailer in the picture, that wasn’t ours. The enormous truck was big enough, lol. The movers had the trailer with them for another job later in the day. They were smart to have picked it up early!

They spent several hours carefully loading our truck on Friday morning. We were glad they took the time to do such a good job, but it was mid-afternoon before we could get on the road. Luckily we planned to stop partway anyway. We were driving two vehicles, John driving the enormous Penske, and me following behind with the camper van.

I’m not up to driving huge vehicles late at night. My goal was to get off the freeway before dark. We didn’t quite make the goal. Nightfall found us driving down a twisty road toward a mysteriously missing state park campground. We had accidentally passed our turnoff and found ourselves at a dead end, in middle of nowhere, in the pitch black. The road just stopped. Getting both the truck and the van turned around at the end of the road in the dark was a challenge! John couldn’t see behind him at all, so I had to tell him what to do and he just had to trust me. Once we got turned around and headed the right way again, we didn’t have to backtrack very far. We found the campground and (eventually) found the site we had reserved. Whew. Glad to be done for the day.

The next morning we still had almost 5 hours of driving ahead of us. We had unloaders coming at 2:00, so we left the campground promptly at 8:00 AM, expecting to arrive in Tucson by 1:00. But what a headwind! We had alternating crosswinds and headwinds the entire drive. It was miserable.

The 26′ Penske truck has a huge profile, of course, and the van is the “tall” version, so we were both being blown around. And the truck didn’t have as much power as we would have liked. John spent most of the time with the accelerator pressed to the floor as we slowly chugged along, struggling against the wind.

We finally got to our new house, with 15 minutes to spare before the movers were due to arrive to help us unload.

One of the movers actually beat us to our house and was waiting when we arrived. But that’s the only good thing I can say about the couple of guys who unloaded for us in Tucson. They were lousy. The whole process was miserable. The winds were still gale force, rain was threatening, and I just wanted those guys out of my house and away from my stuff.

I try not to blame movers for breakage, because I figure it’s all in the packing (and I packed). But I watched this happen, and the guy was simply being sloppy and boneheaded. The container was balanced precariously on top of a bunch of other things, dropped way too far, rolled, and came open spilling its contents.

Finally, the truck was empty and the guys were off to help their next unfortunate customers.

I took solace from this welcoming flower in my new front yard. Blooming red cactus!

This other member of our welcoming committee was equally brilliantly red, but not as welcome.

The reason I was able to get a clear shot of the red hourglass on her belly is because she was hanging upside down on a wall. Yes, she was alive when I took the picture. (No, she’s not still alive.)

I shouldn’t post that picture because now you’ll never come visit me! I’ll make sure we’re spider free, don’t worry. We had black widows on the back patio when we first moved into our house in California and in Albuquerque too. It’s just part of moving to a new house in the southwest. That kind of spider doesn’t like people and won’t hang around in the yard once the house is occupied. And the pest guys can take care of them anyway.

At least our house is fairly centrally located in town, so we’re unlikely to get rattlesnakes in the yard. Last year our vacation rental in a rural area just outside Tucson had a rattlesnake in the dog run one morning. Not good!

Here’s our new home sweet home (not looking its best yet, that’s for sure)

Meanwhile, the house back in Albuquerque looks great, now that it’s not jammed full with an entire second house’s worth of stuff!

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com

I’m thinking I don’t even have to narrate this post. These pictures speak for themselves.

I called this post “organizing the office”, but in reality, I’m still unpacking. STILL UNPACKING!!!

When Monica was here in September she helped me buy a few more pieces of furniture to store stuff. Here’s my new bookshelf.

And here’s the books!

Perfect fit, right? Just a touch of room on the bottom shelf for the few books we have stacked on the nightstands. Right? Wrong. I discovered three more boxes of books after I had filled the bookshelf! Now what?

So I moved all the travel books to a cabinet in the guest room. Yeah, those are ALL travel books. We are optimists.

While I was at it, I decided to put all the maps in the guest room too. Now when you’re staying at our house you can dream about everywhere else you’d rather be!

So here’s the deal with all the maps and travel books. In a marriage, each person usually has a moderating effect on the other – you can’t go off the deep end because your spouse is like, “Uh? Do you really need another map?” Except for the cases when you and your spouse have the same weaknesses. Then you’re just screwed.

I’m hesitant to confess we also own all these CD’s. Actually I think these are all mine and John’s are still in a box somewhere.

We’re old, what can I say? Old, and determined to be organized.

Don’t give me a hard time about how many Santana CD’s I have! I live in New Mexico, Ok? Santana is like a god here. Actually, I had all those CD’s before I even moved to New Mexico. It’s my brother’s fault. A lot of my music is my brother’s fault. Santana is the least of it 😉

Here’s the CD cabinet hiding behind a bougainvillea bush in John’s study. (Which he calls the dog room, because that’s where the doggie door is, and the dogs sleep there at night. But I keep telling him, it’s not the dog’s room!)

That bougainvillea only looks so great at the moment because we just pulled it inside for the winter. By the end of the winter it will be suffering. Bougainvillea don’t make very good house plants. John and I have a dream of living where the bougainvillea can grow naturally outside all year around.

Fun fact from a long time ago: we wanted bougainvillea for our backyard wedding, but suddenly in early August it quit blooming for some unknown reason, so we scrambled at the last minute, and added silk flowers to our potted bougainvillea so it would look like it was blooming.

Here are photos of the bougainvillea we bought for our wedding, when it still had flowers that summer:

Here’s our bougainvillea on either side of us on our wedding day, with silk flowers added because it was refusing to bloom in August:

Here’s my beautiful bridesmaids with fake bougainvillea flowers in the background. Their bouquets are real though, lol.

That was a total digression down memory lane. Now, many years later, it seems like all we do is deal with too much stuff…

Here is John at the storage unit this weekend. We’re taking a big load from the garage to the storage unit, and then we took another big load from the storage unit back to the house. It’s musical chairs with the stuff.

Unfortunately when I got up the next morning, I realized that I left a couple of Halloween decorations out of the bin that just went to storage. Now what? Do I get in the car and drive to the storage unit just to put a Dio de los Muertos mask in the right bin? Maybe I can incorporate that mask into my everyday decor. Year-round Dio de los Muertos.

Plus, I now realize that I want a piece of artwork that just went to storage.

Meanwhile, am I finally now done unpacking the office? No, unfortunately not. The books are unpacked, and I’ve got a file system started. But I still have lots of office supplies that are jumbled in various drawers, including some in boxes and bins still in the garage. It’s ongoing.

Beautiful picture, hu?!?

The traditional flat roofs of New Mexico were originally designed to collect water, and channel it out spouts called canales for collection in rain barrels. That makes total sense given the infrequency of rain and the scarcity of water in the desert. However, nowadays, we just mindlessly turn on the faucet.

Having roofs that were originally designed to be water collection systems, also has its downsides.

I was standing at the sink in the bathroom one afternoon, minding my own business, when all of a sudden a large volume of cold water dumped down my back! It had poured out of the ceiling fan! I can’t describe how disorienting it is to have a large amount of freezing cold water suddenly dumped down your back when standing alone in your bathroom! I did not understand what was happening. I think the neighbors heard my scream for blocks away.

After some observing, I decided it was dumping a cup or two of water every 5 or 10 minutes. Apparently (we figured out later), due to a quirk of the fan design, the water was collecting there until there was about a full cup’s worth, and then dumping all at once. By total crazy coincidence, I was standing there in the exact position to get the first cup’s worth dumped down my back.

Collecting roof water in the bathroom:

John was unavailable, so I climbed onto the roof myself. Don’t ever say there’s no lakes in New Mexico! Here’s a beautiful, reflecting pond right on my own property.

The entire roof was covered, although some areas were deeper than others.

I decided to sweep the water through the canales with a broom. It would have drained through the canales eventually on its own, but meanwhile, it was leaking into the house.

As I swept, the water poured out the canales in big waterfalls, but I couldn’t take a picture and sweep at the same time. So here’s pictures of when I paused, and the water is no longer pouring off, and is back to its natural state of slowly dripping.

You can see the big puddle on the ground below.

When I started, it was mostly about to my ankles.

Here’s the section where the bathroom vents are located, after I’ve gotten a lot of the water swept off.

We did some patching up there. We’ll see what happens when we get a big rainstorm again. Someday.

John and I would be happy if it were always summer. Summer forever! But New Mexico has a surprising amount of winter. So we decided we’d splurge on two winter mitigation methods – a gas fireplace and a hot tub.

Our fireplace was wood burning with a gas-assisted starter. In my mind, if there’s already a gas line going to the fireplace, it would be a shame to not have a gas fireplace!

Gas fireplace inserts can be expensive, but they can also be extremely good heaters. I don’t like to run the furnace all the time because it’s very drying and our air in New Mexico is already overly dry. Plus the furnace heats the whole house indiscriminately, and there’s no point in heating back bedrooms. The fireplace is very centrally located, allowing me to heat only the rooms I use during the day.

I contracted to get a gas insert installed this summer. One of the things I made sure to ask for is an easy on-off switch. Our previous gas fireplace had a switch on the wall – it was great, just flip the switch and the fireplace came on. No messing with lighting it or anything. The salesman assured me that it would be even easier than that – it had several settings, all controllable with a remote. Great!

But then, when the installation guys came out to do the site check, they mentioned that there would be a plug coming out of the fireplace, running on top of the hearth, and plugging into a nearby outlet. I was like, what? That’s so dorky. I had requested a switch on the wall.

So I had to go back down and haggle with the original salesman. He and I had an agreement about the remote operation of the fireplace that did not involve a plug hanging off my hearth. He was resistant at first.

Then he noticed me looking at the hot tubs at his competitor’s store next door. In the end, he agreed to hardware the electrical line from the fireplace, which required a little bit of drywall work. He was hoping that if he kept me happy, he could sell me one of the ridiculously expensive hot tubs in his store.

But the hot tub project was on hold until I got the fireplace project done first. Good thing I started the fireplace project early this summer, because they took forever. Even after the fireplace was in, it took awhile to get the electrical done. And then we got to look at patched drywall for several weeks while waiting for someone to finally come and do the tape and texture. Even after they finally did the tape and texture, they never did paint it. I ended up doing the painting myself.

But it looks great and works great now. It puts out a lot of heat!

The next step was to redo the mantle. Here’s what our fireplace mantle looked like when we bought the house.

The oversized clock was part of the staging, so it was gone once we took possession of the house. But I disliked the stark white mantle, particularly because the brick is actually darker than it looks in that picture. Also the style of my furnishings is muted, with gray and beige tones, and a bit rustic.

I wanted a more natural looking mantle. I also didn’t like the clunky style of the support pieces. I briefly looked into buying a new mantle, but decided I would try to sand off the white paint myself.

My goal was to sand off nearly all the white paint, leaving just a few flecks to make it look aged. As I ground through the paint, I discovered a thin layer of dark stain. I wanted to leave little bits of the stain on, to encourage a weathered look. The stain ground off much faster and easier than the white paint, so mostly I either undershot – and left on too much white paint, or overshot – ending up with the stain ground off with the last of the white paint. But in the end, I got it to a mostly sanded state that I was happy with.

When the previous owners had painted the mantle white, they made a lazy mistake – they didn’t take the mantle down off the brick first. They must have assumed it would be difficult to remove and replace. Turns out the mantle pops right off. It sure would have been nice if they would have realized that. Instead, they left streaks of white paint on the brick, outlining the mantle and its supports. We tried to use a solvent to get the paint off the brick, but in the end we had to grind it off.

John also installed a new support system for the mantle, which is thin and black, just along the bottom edge of the mantle where it meets the brick – it’s barely visible unless you bend down and look under it.

The ends of the mantle were the most challenging to sand, because the wood was roughest on the ends. The ends were very pitted and the paint had sunk far into the wood, requiring lots of sanding.

Done!

After the fireplace was done, we ordered a small hot tub from Home Depot, and installed it ourselves. It cost a fraction of what the fancy ones in the hot tub stores cost. And it just plugs into a regular outlet, no electrical work needed.

The delivery agreement was just for them to drop it curbside. We were worried about getting it into our backyard ourselves, but it turned out to be easy. The guys dropping it off left it up on its end, on two of their roller dollies, so we could move it into the backyard ourselves. (I tipped them well for the gift of the dollies.)

Then all we had to do was move the boat, maneuver the hot tub through the gate and lower it onto the deck we had built for it.

Here’s our simple, little 2-seater, plug-in hot tub, all set up and ready.

We’re ready for winter now!