Working vacation

Sorry I haven't been blogging lately, but I really have been busy here in the mountains, where we usually just go to relax. Moving mattresses and furniture around, hauling truckloads of discards to the local resale shop and dump, etc. That kind of busy. [Not to mention that, when you have to climb a steep hill (at 9600' elevation!) or drive 30 minutes into town, to get the internet, you find you don't have to be connected that often!]

You see, we’ve recently become owners and co-owners of some property in the most beautiful valley in the Rockies (that of the south fork of the South Arkansas River, which I have written about before). Unfortunately, although we’re very attached to said property and very fond of it and the area, there’s a lot of deferred maintenance needing to be made up for up here (sorry for grammatically horrible ending to that sentence...maybe it's the altitude?)

Top priority was the large place that we are part owners of, the Schoolhouse Chalet. (It was built in 1879, back when our sleepy little mountainside town was booming (more about the history of this area in my next post, I promise) and served as an actual school into the middle of the last century. Now it’s a nifty vacation rental that sleeps up to 20!).

So, our trip started with a stop in Fort Worth (where I took my last Wordless Wednesday photo) to pick up some furniture from our co-owners, Henry's sister and brother-in-law. Blessedly, they have a very shady front yard, as you can see on the left, where we loaded the trailer, since it's just as hot there as in San Antonio (a fact that’s going to make it very hard to head south in a few days).

The boats on the trailer came from San Antonio, but we’ve been so busy we haven't had a chance to use them yet! The large item under the blue tarp (since, unlike Texas, Colorado occasionally does get some rain) is an almost new sofa and some chairs and other items for our joint property.

The living room of said property had a lot of old, saggy, stained furniture, stuff that generally didn't project the kind of first impression that you would like to project in a rental unit.

Unfortunately, I didn't think to take very many "before" pictures so you can't really appreciate the magnitude of what we've done. But below is some of the stuff hauled off by the wonderful furniture delivery guys (and that doesn’t include the stuff we personally discarded).

And here is the newly furnished living room, with indications of the furniture hauled and the furniture bought as part of our "support the Salida economy" drive.

We're not done with the living room yet, as we plan to put up some new curtains. But we're pretty happy with what we've accomplished so far.

[The reason we haven’t put up the curtains yet is a good example of the dis-advantages of living far away from urban areas: we couldn’t find long enough curtain rods without driving a few hours. So Sally is bringing them up with her on Saturday from Austin!]

But you can’t really complain when along your trip into town (where you can get almost everything you need) you get views like this:

Shabby as the living room looked, many of its beds were in really bad shape. And not being able to get a good night sleep is a good way not to get repeat rental business.

One of the few "before" pictures I took is on the right, showing one of the bedrooms. If you click to enlarge you can see where the bunk beds impinged on the door to the bathroom.

What you can't see is that the larger bed was partially supported by some big rocks (as was one of the beds in another room). That's right—rocks!

Looking below, though, you can see this room as it now looks. A brand new bed, no bunks (which were disassembled and moved—through incredibly narrow doorways—into another room, replacing a more rickety bunk set).

And the new bed is supported by its own sturdy frame, with no rocks! [I wonder what Don Draper would say about this advertising line for the rentals: No beds supported by rocks! We also replaced the rock-supported bed in the other room with an almost-new frame. So this would be truth in advertising!]

Looks a little better, wouldn't you say?!

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Since the Schoolhouse had renters coming at the end of our first week, we were somewhat pressed to get all this re-furnishing done. But once it was, we could turn to the less seriously needed, but more satisfying, work on our own little piece of heaven, what we call the Mountain Deck, just behind the Schoolhouse.

We had our own share of bounty from the furniture store, getting a new mattress that has been really nice to sleep on, as well as a new refrigerator (one that doesn’t freeze the strawberries!). But Henry’s main project was to make the deck that gives the place its name at least somewhat more childproof.

This deck is the greatest feature of the place and runs all along the back of the house, affording wonderful views of Monarch Ridge, like this:

As well as great exposure to the wonderful sound of the south fork cascading its way down to the Arkansas in the valley below. (And the rushing water sound is particularly loud this year—loud enough to make conversation on the deck a little difficult!—because of the area’s late heavy snows.)

But you might notice in the above picture that the deck’s railings are spaced rather far apart. For some time we’ve worried about a kid (or a ball or a rolling pin) falling through them and down the cliff.

So Henry, with help from some very knowledgeable and helpful friends, devised a great method of closing up the gaps a little without spoiling the view. It involved cutting & grinding smooth 120 feet of “cattle panel” wire fencing (luckily our area is rural enough to have very well-stocked farm-and-ranch retail establishments) then securely attaching the sections. Whew! What a job! (You can see a section of the finished product on the left.)

(I wasn’t exactly idle while he was doing all this. In addition to getting the curtains ironed and ready to hang when the rods arrive, I completely reorganized our stock of supplies, discovered a wonderful new locavore produce/bakery/gift shop, replaced a gazillion shabby mattress pads, and worked several challenging jigsaw puzzles!)

Now that Henry’s finished with the biggest job, he’s turning his fertile mind toward more substantial improvements to the place. You can see the need for several of these in the picture on the left below.

The stairway leading to the tiny bedrooms on the upper floor bears too close a resemblance, we think, to one in a not-too-capacious sailboat (note even the rope handrail, to accentuate the nautical theme!). We’d love to figure out a way to make this stair easier for old people (like us and our friends ) to ascend and descend.

And you might also notice the somewhat unattractive paneling and the really unattractive carpeting. Replacing these two items (which extend throughout the place) is high on the wish list of us and our kids.

So we’ve done a lot, but have lots more to do. However, spending all this time up here doing mundane tasks, instead of just doing fun vacation stuff like hiking and boating, has made the place feel more like home and less like a once-a-year destination. And since I could see retiring up here in a few years very, very easily, that’s a feeling I’m really savoring.