Category: Rentals, Remodels, Relocations and Real Estate

Our real estate agent met me out at the Placitas house today to talk about what needs to happen to get it ready for the market. The major remodel is mostly done, but the house is still really rough around the edges.

There are pits in the yard where holes were dug for various reasons and never filled, and dead plants that need removed.

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There’s missing baseboard trim and general touchup needed.

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Paint mishaps (oops!)

There are stained and gouged places in the walls as a result of various projects.

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We’ve got a missing gate,

Old cabinets that need touched up (or the vanity just replaced)

A new front door that was never stained or finished and is now showing water staining

Heater controls that are unreadable and look like the 1960’s (these are in every room, right at eye level).

And the handyman list goes on and on.

John was planning on doing it all himself, and he has been working very hard. But there is still way too much to do, and it’s just not realistic with his work schedule. Meanwhile, we have an enormous amount of belongings at the house that need to get moved out. Just getting moved is going to be about all that we can manage ourselves.

So my agent, who is fantastic, is going to bring in a crew to knock out all the many little interior issues. She’s going to write up the list of items, get them out here for the quote, and oversee the work. All we have to do is write the check. It’s unusual for an agent to do that much, and I’m very grateful.

She’s also sending a yard guy out to fill in the holes, remove the remaining rubble, and basically tidy up the yard. The yard currently looks like the tail end of a construction site, because that’s exactly what it is.

We’re also going to do some work on the long, steep, driveway so it is less intimidating.

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After we’ve gotten our junk moved out and the crew has handled all the remaining items, my agent is going to help me stage the house.

Then this house should sell well! We hope. It’s such a relief to have professional help, because I’ve known for awhile that we were in way over our heads.

Maybe tonight I will sleep well!

And…we are under contract! I bet you thought we were just going to look forever.

In case you’re confused, this house is in Albuquerque, where we plan to stay for a little while longer.

It’s a modest house, and if I wasn’t used to New Mexico, I’d think it was a funny looking house, but this architectural style is quite common in Albuquerque. Plus, it looks pink to me, but that color stucco is everywhere here.

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A gated front courtyard is also common here, like down in Mexico. However, I don’t like the cage-like look of the full height gate. We’ll take that metal gate down right away.

Initially we’ll probably leave it without any kind of gate. It’ll be a nice spot for potted plants and will be sheltered from the wind.

Eventually we’ll probably either install a lower gate, or expand the courtyard. The windows to the right (in the picture below) are the master bedroom, and I don’t like the bedroom window facing the street. An expanded front courtyard would add privacy and value to the home because front courtyards really are part of the culture here. They are especially common in Santa Fe, where often they are built all the way up to the street, like in Mexico. Albuquerque city code probably requires set-backs from the street, but I’m pretty sure we would still have enough room to put something additional there in front of the house. Luckily, there is no HOA to worry about.

The house was built in 1979, but the interior has recently been redone, which is nice. We didn’t want a huge remodel project. I’m not a fan of carpet and it’s unfortunately throughout the house, even in the dining room. But it’s brand new, so we’ll just leave it.

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There are two living rooms right next to each other with a wall between them. The listing calls them a “living room” and a “family room”. We don’t need two adjacent living rooms, but we do need an office. A lot of newer homes I’ve seen recently have an office near the front entry, separated from the entry by a set of french doors. So I’d like to add French doors and make the first living room into an office. The French doors would go in the open doorway you see near the front door in this photo:

That would leave the “family room” to become the living room. It is adjacent to the kitchen, providing a more modern “great room”, that looks out to the backyard.

It has a “gas assist” wood burning fireplace. The gas is just used right at first to light the wood. That’s crazy, what’s the point of that? But maybe we could convert it to a gas fireplace fairly easily. We’ve made that conversion twice before in different houses, but in those cases there wasn’t already already gas piped to the fireplace. So maybe it would be easier since there’s already gas to the fireplace.

There’s a breakfast nook between the living room and the kitchen, with a sliding glass door to a generous sized backyard. The ceilings are low and there’s no vaulting, which is a disappointment, but it gets good light. And the backyard looks very nice out the windows.

The kitchen has been updated and has a gas stove. We’ll need to buy a refrigerator.

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There’s just two bathrooms. The master bathroom is small, but upgraded. The hall bathroom has a tub.

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There are also two guest bedrooms, for a total of three bedrooms. The rooms and the closet space is small, due to it being an older house. We will be pressed for storage space and will need to get rid of stuff and get really organized.

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It has forced air heat, which is by far the most common in moderately priced houses in Albuquerque. It’s not my favorite because it’s very drying, and the air in New Mexico is already extremely dry. My townhome in Santa Fe has radiant heat in the floor, which means I can run a humidifier and the air will actually hold some of the humidity. So I will miss that. It has evaporative cooling, also the standard for most modest homes in the region.

It has a good sized backyard. A lot of backyards in New Mexico aren’t landscaped because the weather is harsh and it’s a desert. So it’s nice to have one that is at least partially landscaped, and the solid patio roof will be great. I’ll put a table out there because I love to eat outside.

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Unfortunately there’s a house on the hill above, just behind the backyard, that looks down into the backyard. This is a major pet peeve of mine. It’s hard to see the neighboring house in these marketing photos, because obviously they wouldn’t want to advertise that flaw, so they did not take a picture of the overlooking house. And I didn’t take any pictures myself when I was out there. You can sort of see the overlooking house in the top left of this next photo:

From this angle the trees mostly obscure it, but from the other part of the yard the house is RIGHT THERE looking right down on top of you. I’m already plotting to remove the juniper bush, which isn’t tall enough to screen it and to plant more trees, and install some sort of pergola or gazebo on that far side of the yard to help shield the yard from the looming house above.

However, there is a major advantage of having a depressed yard like this – it is sheltered from the wind. Wind is a huge problem in New Mexico and one of the biggest issues with our house on the hill in Placitas. My backyard in Santa Fe also has a hillside behind it, and it limits the wind considerably and makes the backyard much more useable. In Santa Fe, the houses up on the hill behind the townhome are screened with numerous trees, so they aren’t bothersome.

There are generously sized side yards on both sides of the house. The side you see in the distance in the previous photo we’ll make into a large dog run. (I don’t have a good picture of it, but the side yard for the dogs is nearly as large as my entire backyard in Santa Fe.) We’ll have to do a little bit of work to get the dog run set up. The wall is too low on that side, so we’ll have to add a couple rows of cement blocks. Also it needs a bit of fencing and a gate between it and the rest of the backyard. There is a garden patch that is currently just bare dirt. I’ll plant a small lawn there for the dogs to do their duties.

I know lawns are not politically correct in the desert, but even if we put gravel in the dog run, we’d still have to water it because otherwise the pee smell just reeks after awhile. We don’t get enough natural rain to wash it through the soil. I need some sort of nitrogen fixing ground cover or lawn or something out there, and it will need regularly watered to keep the smell down, even if it’s just rocks. So I figure if I’m going to have to water rocks, I might as well water a lawn.

The other side of the house has a large access gate and cement pad where we can park the boat and the van. John is happy about that.

You can almost see the mountains in the distance from the street, but from the house and the yard there is no view at all. I’d be pretty worried about buying a house with no view at all, after the stunning views in Placitas. But we’ve discovered that we really like the “cozy” feel of our Santa Fe townhome, and don’t really miss the views.

I hope we don’t end up regretting selling the house Placitas. It’s such an impractical house, and we’ve been so frustrated with it these past 12 years. But we also have a lot of history with it, and have put a lot of time and money and effort into it and are attached to it. I suppose we will occasionally come across pictures of the astounding views and ask ourselves, “Why did we sell that house?”

Well in case I forget, here’s why:

https://youtu.be/LKOTkwDDunE

That’s not clouds in the air, by the way, that’s dirt.

I’m pretty disappointed, but we’re not going to move on to our next location yet. We had been hoping to get closer to family, into a less harsh climate, and into less-stressful jobs. But John’s not ready yet to get a new job.

For me it would have been the perfect timing. We had already decided to sell the house in Placitas this spring, so we have to move anyway. John is retirement eligible next month, so in theory he could start that up and go work somewhere else, and have both incomes. Management changes at my job have largely removed my ability to develop programs as I had been, so I don’t feel like I have a meaningful role anymore, and am ready to find a new job. Everything seemed lined up.

Except for John’s job. He is in midst of a project that he is enjoying, even though it is very stressful and requiring way too much overtime. He’s worked at his same company his whole life, and although he’s changed jobs within his company before, he’s never worked elsewhere. We’re concerned that a new job might mean giving up some of the perks he’s earned for being there so many years, such as a lot of time off. So a job hunt is more daunting for him than it is for me. Also his career is more specialized, whereas I am a generalist in my field and can fairly easily find a job pretty much anywhere.

I’m very concerned that if he stays with this same job he will continue to work ridiculously long hours, which is really taking a toll on us. But he’s promising that he will be cutting back. He says he’s training a new early-career coworker, and soon that coworker will be able to take over some of what John is currently doing. John says then he will be able to drop to part-time. That would be wonderful, although I’ll believe it when I see it. At the moment I’d be ecstatic to just have him working a regular 40-hr week without all the travel.

So the plan is we’re going to stay in Albuquerque for a little while longer before getting moved to the next location. It’s hard on me because I’m not sure what I’m going to do with myself for a year or two or three, without ending up feeling like I’m just waiting to move again. We do still intend to move out of the area. Just not yet. It’s discouraging to have to move while knowing it’s temporary and we’ll have to move a second time fairly soon. I totally hate moving (who doesn’t?). Moving is so much work and we move so often. I wish we were ready to settle down somewhere. But maybe I can think of the time as an enjoyable phase and not just a waiting period.

We’re going to go ahead and get a house in Albuquerque near where we lived before moving to California. The one we’re making an offer on is a comfortable house, and doesn’t need much work. It’s not our dream house. It doesn’t have a swimming pool or a workshop for John, or anything special we were hoping to have eventually. But we want to keep our budget down and buy something that will be easy to sell later.

We are not going to stay living in the Placitas house because we are at our wits end with that house. Plus, it’s a very difficult house to sell, and we feel like we need to get it sold while the market is strong. We’ve tried and failed to sell it two or three times in the past 12 years. We really just need to get it sold.

The house we’re looking at in Albuquerque is much more practical of a house, in town, and costs much less money, and would sell much more easily than the one in Placitas, even if the market softens in a couple of years. The new house in Albuquerque will be fine; the house is not the problem. I think we’ll be comfortable there. The difficulty for me is not being able to get started on what I had imagined was going to be our big new phase in life. Instead, I’ve got to figure out how to create a shorter, temporary new phase, and avoid the trap of feeling like I’m just waiting to move again.

Last week we looked at this house (or rather, my mother-in-law and my agent looked at it, I was on Facetime).

Tomorrow I’m looking at these two houses:

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No, last week’s house and tomorrow’s houses don’t look very similar. No, they aren’t in the same budget range. No, they don’t have the same type of climate. No, it’s not the same sort of neighborhood. No, they aren’t actually even in the same state. No, we don’t know what we’re doing!! (Thanks for pointing that out.)

I realized I should talk a little about career changes, because John and I have been looking at houses in various parts of of the southwest and we’re confusing everyone. Actually we’re confused too, but at least we have a general idea of what we might be trying to accomplish.

Are we retiring? No. Are we going to work our same jobs for the rest of our career? No, not that either. Are we moving elsewhere to find new opportunities for bigger, better promotions? Nope.

We are transitioning into a middle stage, something between “peak earning years” and complete retirement. I think this is a growing phenomenon as our society changes. I suppose there have been words coined for this intermediate stage, but I’m not sure what those words are. I’m going to call it “deliberate career downsizing.”

I think the previous generation or two tended to work at their regular job until quite near the end of their lives. Then life expectancies started rising, and a few lucky people ended up on pension-funded retirements, sometimes for decades. That wasn’t a sustainable business model and pensions are much more rare now, and the benefits are starting later in life.

Still a lot of people are on that same old model – work your regular job until suddenly you don’t work at all anymore. But some of my generation are starting to look at ways to work differently as we get older.

As we get older, our values and needs are changing. It’s no longer about how much money we can make. Partly it’s about making a difference with our careers – but it’s also about hiking to the top of that mountain while we are still healthy enough to do so.

John is “retirement-eligible” next month, but the benefit amount is far short of his current salary and doesn’t include health care. We’re still relatively young and are not ready to retire. But we are working too hard; harder than we need to work, harder than we want to work.

We’re looking for less work hours and more flexibility. We’re not quite sure how to find it. Part-time jobs would be great, but they are rare in our specialities. I’d be ecstatic if John would simply limit himself to 40 hours a week with no business travel. He’s still working like he’s new in his career and out to save the world. It’s taking its toll on his health an our relationship.

I was enjoying my job for awhile, but because I’m new to this particular agency, I was given an entry-level amount of time off, even though I’m late in my career and qualify for advanced level jobs.

This significant lack of time to do other things in our life is not how we want to live the next several years, or however long it is before we retire completely.

But because this transition stage isn’t well entrenched in our society, there aren’t a lot of clear and obvious ways to decrease our workload gradually. A lot of people have managed to successfully do it, but their routes to get there vary greatly. Some change careers into something more socially conscious. Some move to a tropical paradise and start a cafe. We’re not sure how we want to go about it.

One potential option is for John to go into consulting. He has a high level of expertise in his field and would be very valuable to clients. We can imagine him being able to work from home most of the time, with occasional flights to client locations for important meetings. Our concern is that John has never been good at limiting how much work he takes on, and he could end up working every bit as hard as he does now. The clients aren’t going to limit what they ask of him – he would have to figure out how to do that himself somehow.

I am more of a generalist so it would be a little harder for me to figure out what to offer. It’s possible I could find a part-time job that was advanced enough to hold my interest. Another option is I could freelance for a small consultancy – having someone willing to work sometimes but not all the time, could help them avoid having to staff up and back down as their workload varied.

Regardless of what we end up doing, the key here is that it will evolve and change over time in ways that we will not be able to predict. We will have to make decisions and take actions without being able to see all the way to the end of the game.

We can make guesses – for example, I can probably more easily pursue career-type activities in Austin than Tucson. John probably just needs a convenient airport.

At some point, we’re probably going to buy a house somewhere south of here. I know, you’re thinking, “But you love New Mexico!” And we do. We always miss it when we’re away. New Mexico is magical and enchanting. It’s also a fairly difficult place to live for a lot of practical reasons. Don’t we all have those impractical things we love in life? Those amazing, special, beloved people, places and situations that get lodged in our hearts but are possibly more trouble than they’re worth?

We’d like to live somewhere less intense as our home base. Somewhere comfortable. New Mexico is not comfortable. It’s dramatic, it’s unique, it’s special and amazing, but not comfortable.

I’m looking for more welcoming weather, where I can sit outside in my backyard most of the year. I’d like somewhere quiet, with gentle rain and seasonal flowers. I want to lean over the fence and talk to my neighbors. I want to walk to the local grocery store. John wants to feel safe and relaxed. We want walking paths and parks. We’d like somewhere with a little better economy and services than poverty-stricken New Mexico, but not as much wealth sloshing around as in the big coastal cities.

From there, from some modest, practical place, we can visit the intense and amazing places; the mountains of the northwest, the deserts of the southwest, and the warm, shallow waters of Florida. We can visit our family who live in vibrant and expensive places like Boston, San Diego, and Silicon Valley.

There is no perfect location, and location isn’t the point. What’s far more important to us is that we figure out how to shift our lifestyle (downsize our careers) so that we have more time.

Now that you better understand our underlying goals, let me go ahead and catch you up on the actual developments.

I have resigned from my job, and my last day will be April 30. We are going to list the Placitas house on the market on May 1.

Beyond that, we shall see! We’re not quite sure what we’re going to do. I have no idea where we will be living this winter. Initially we might temporarily move into one of our rentals in Albuquerque and/or occupy the Santa Fe townhome.

We’re going to continue looking at houses in places like Tucson and Austin, and at some point hopefully buy one. It’s likely that we won’t always be living in exactly the same house at exactly the same time during this transition time, because our careers won’t always line up right. I am leaving my current job now, but John may not leave his anytime soon. (I’m hoping for sooner rather than later).

But regardless of exactly how the details play out, as we start to de-emphasize our careers, our lifestyle should improve and we should have more time to spend enjoying life together.

At any rate, that’s the plan!