Many of you have asked for details about our transition from an RV to a house, and about the house itself. What follows is a bit of a hodge-podge of events as we went through the process of home purchase.
9/29/01: At the insistence of our realtor, we hired a licensed inspector to do a detailed inspection of the house condition. It turned out to be a useful exercise, since the "official" and impartial report of the inspector allowed us to ask the owner to correct some of the more major problems -- actually a few rather minor things, and one really major problem. While squirming around through the crawl space (literally *crawl*) under the house, we found that three of the wooden beams which support the central part of the house had shifted out of alignment and started to twist.
At some time in the past, these beams were reinforced with additional steel posts under the beams. But where the beams rest on the slightly flexible posts, there was nothing to restrain them from twisting, and over the years they had twisted enough to endanger the entire structure. Clearly, this had to be fixed immediately. Carl, the owner, was crawling around down there with us during the inspection, and agreed.
Our realtor wanted to immediately hire a professional engineer to come in and make recommendations on structural reinforcement. Carl (who grew up in a family of house builders, and was a housing contractor himself for a number of years) wanted to consult a friend or two in the construction business and do the job himself. After listening to his ideas on how to fix the problem, I agreed, reserving the right to bring in an independent engineer to approve the plans and/or inspect the resulting repairs. Our realtor was horrified at this casual agreement concerning such a major problem. (I, on the other hand, with an engineering and physics background, felt that I understood the structural issues, and agreed with the proposed solution).
A couple of days later, Carl had developed a structural reinforcement procedure, collected the necessary equipment and materials, rounded up helpers (one of whom was a master carpenter), and started work. I spent many hours under the house watching the work and helping where possible. The whole job was finished in two days. Section by section, they positioned temporary beams and hydraulic jacks, carefully jacked up the house just enough to take the load off the twisted beams, and installed new beams on each side of the damaged ones, tying the new and old beams together with steel straps and lots of nails. Fortunately, the original concrete piers that support the old beams were wide enough so that the new beams could also rest on them. I believe the house is now structurally stronger than when it was new. After watching every phase of the work, I agreed that it was satisfactory and waived any further inspections. Our realtor (with whom we had signed a contract for her to be a "buyer's agent" -- representing our interests, with no obligations to the seller) -- was again horrified.
Carl, the seller, had divided the original lot and built a new house for himself right next door. It's fortunate that this entire process has proceeded in a friendly manner since he will be our closest neighbor for many years to come. He has a huge collection of tools and supplies, and has already offered to loan me anything I need -- the best possible kind of neighbor
10/8/01: With the house closing imminent, it's getting urgent to retrieve our possessions from the storage locker in Rochester, New York. I've considered flying back and renting a U-Haul (or Ryder or Penske) truck to drive back to Denver. We also want to visit relatives in Michigan, Ohio, and New York, which would have entailed an extra week's truck rental, or breaks in the airline flight with car rentals, and the whole thing started to sound rather awkward and expensive.
I also searched unsuccessfully in the Denver area for a suitable trailer that I could rent for the two-week expedition. I finally found a reasonably suitable used cargo trailer for sale. It's a 24' enclosed trailer manufactured by Cargo Mate. This particular model is intended as a car hauler, with a load floor quite low to the ground, extra floor reinforcements, heavy anchors in the floor to secure the car, and a drop-down ramp in the rear. It's only two years old, and has only been driven about 50 miles. The woman who owned it had simply parked it on her property and used it as a garage to shelter a restored classic automobile. I'll spend another $200 or so in parts to install adjustable E-Trak cargo anchors on the walls. So it's considerably fancier and more expensive than I needed. But it also should be easy to re-sell, and I hope to sell it for approximately the same price I paid, which should end up far cheaper than the alternatives.
Figuring out how to get cash or a bank check quickly to pay for the trailer was a hurried but interesting learning process. (I couldn't expect the owner to take a personal check or a credit card). I ended up opening an account at a local bank and then having my remote Internet bank do a wire transfer into my new account. The wire transfer is one of the few banking transactions that still can't be accomplished completely on-line -- for some anachronistic reason, it still requires a physical signature. The Internet bank (Charles Schwab's SchwabOne account) would, however, allow me to download a wire transfer form, sign it, and fax it back to them. It can take as long as 24 hours for the money to become available in the new account. And it's not cheap -- they charge $25 for this kind of transfer. (As it turned out, Schwab waived this fee, for reasons that are unclear to me).
10/16/01: The appraisal on the new house came back today, comfortably above the price we're paying, and the mortgage is now fully approved. I used the now-familiar wire transfer process again, to move money from our Schwab account directly into the Title Company's account to cover the down payment and other closing costs, which the title company had tallied to the penny over a week before the actual closing.
10/22/01: The house closing went smoothly on Friday. It was an interesting experience, as the representative of the title company presented dozens of documents for signature, one by one, briefly explaining the contents and purpose of each. It took over an hour, even with tight, efficient organization.
After everything was signed, Carl and Dana Kelly, the sellers, presented us with a fancy new door knocker, solving a problem I had been wondering about -- the existing door knocker had their name engraved on it, and Carl explained that he had removed the old knocker the day before. The new one is identical, and will mount in the same holes.
Over the weekend, we "sort of" moved in -- unloading everything from the travel trailer and storing it in various temporary places in the house. Below freezing nights are becoming common, and we wanted to winterize the travel trailer before we headed back East with the cargo trailer to pick up the rest of our belongings.
We made a hurried shopping trip to buy two essentials -- a refrigerator and a bed. The new cargo trailer was very helpful in transporting these big items to the new house. I went next door to ask Carl if he could loan me a hand truck to transport the refrigerator into the house. He showed up a few minutes later with his muscular adult son and a special hand truck designed for transporting appliances (which he had driven a few miles to his father's house to pick up), and they then did most of the work of getting the refrigerator into the house.
Carl and Dana (his wife) both were born in Golden, lived here all their lives, and seem to know everyone in this small town. What a marvelous resource! I'm going to enjoy having this guy for a neighbor.
10/23/01: After getting the travel trailer winterized, cargo anchors installed in the utility trailer, and the house prepared for a two-week absence, we hitched up and headed east to retrieve the contents of our storage locker.
Interstate 80 has a huge amount of heavy truck traffic. I counted vehicles for a while and found that 50% of the vehicles were 18-wheelers (including some 30-wheel tandem semi-trailers).
We saw one interesting (and slightly frightening) tandem rig: A big pickup truck similar to ours, towing a long gooseneck horse trailer, behind which was a tandem-axle dolly to which was attached another long gooseneck horse trailer. These were brand new trailers, being delivered from the factory.
We've always been intrigued and impressed by the huge self-propelled irrigation systems, which dominate the landscape over large portions of the prairies. The most common variety is a long boom, which is fixed at one end and moves in a circle. These result in a circular irrigated field, which, from an airplane traveling cross country at 35,000 feet, are very distinctive circles of bright green surrounded by the faded grays of un-irrigated semi-desert. I've speculated about the mechanisms, which control the speed of the drive wheels under each of the many sections of the somewhat flexible boom, keeping the boom perfectly straight as it travels over gentle hills and valleys and over varying terrain and soil conditions.
On this trip, we saw a new variant. The outer section of the long irrigation boom is articulated, capable of bending back more than 90 degrees to the main boom. This system allows watering a nearly square field, reducing the wasted acreage. In the corners of the square field, the boom is fully extended. As it rotates toward the midpoint of the straight field edge, the articulated section gradually folds back so that it doesn't collide with the side of the field. Presumably, the water flow to this section is reduced, proportional to the angle of folding, turning off completely when it reached a 90-degree fold.
For the first 500 miles of our trip, from Denver nearly to the Missouri River, we generally followed the South Platte River, and then the Platte River. It began to feel like an old friend after seeing it off and on for nearly two days of driving. Interestingly, the South Platte and North Platte parallel each other, just a couple of miles apart, for many miles before finally joining at the city of North Platte, Nebraska.
This is our first multi-day road trip without the RV in over five years. We'd forgotten what it is like to stay in motels, carrying suitcases into the room each night and then packing up again the next morning. Motels are more frequent and easier to find than RV parking, and it's nice to walk away from the room and leave the unmade bed and wet towels for someone else to clean up. But overall, we find RV travel much more pleasant. Once the RV is parked, we are "home", with access to everything and almost no unpacking to do.
The overall trip was rushed. We were concerned about the lateness of the season and the possibility of snowstorms on the prairies as we returned with a heavily loaded trailer. So our visits with relatives in Michigan and Ohio were each too short, although very pleasant. Similarly, our stay in Rochester, New York, was much too short. We were fortunate that old friends threw large parties for us - one couple invited all our friends from the choirs with which we sang for many years, and on the preceding evening, another couple invited Dave's friends and ex-co-workers from Xerox. These wonderful evenings enabled us to see a great many old friends during a very short visit, although it was frustrating not to be able to have time for extended conversations with anyone.
Emptying the storage locker and loading the cargo trailer went smoothly, and faster than we expected. The trailer was just barely big enough, requiring careful planning and organizing to get everything in while maintaining the proper weight distribution to get an appropriate tongue weight on the trailer.
Having accomplished all our visits with relatives on a meandering route through Michigan and Ohio on the way east, we were able to drive straight back west, taking 4 days with three nights on the road, and one stop at Jocelyn Art Museum (in Omaha, Nebraska.)
11/7/01: We arrived back "home", and started the process of unpacking and settling in. The rest of November was spent in working on the house (many little things), unpacking a zillion boxes, scratching our heads over where to put things, building additional storage shelves (which required setting up a woodworking shop first) and furniture shopping.
12/8/01: The Christmas music season opened for us. We drove to Boulder to attend a concert by the Cantabile Singers -- a 38-voice chamber choir, augmented by harp, guitar, marimba, and piano for portions of this performance. The performance quality was adequate -- minor technical flaws didn't get in the way of our enjoyment of an interesting selection of music, ranging from the renaissance to a collection of contemporary arrangements of familiar and unfamiliar Spanish-language Christmas pieces. Music Director Robert Farr's interpretations were occasionally heavy-handed and not to our taste. Overall, the group isn't quite up to the high standards set by several other choirs in the area.
12/13/01: The Christmas music season is in full swing. This evening, we drove to downtown Boulder to hear the Ars Nova Singers, a 40-voice "semiprofessional" group based in Boulder. It's an easy trip from our house, perhaps 40-minutes door-to-door. Finding parking near the church was difficult. We arrived quite early, fortunately, and were able to purchase tickets and grab good seats in what turned out to be a full house. (This concert is being given four times. If all were as well attended as this one, the group is doing well financially.)
The concert was at St. John's Episcopal Church, a modest-sized sanctuary with interestingly rustic architecture - overall, quite a traditional old European design, but with varnished wood ceilings supported by exposed wood beams, a few soaring natural stone arches of rough-cut native stone, and surprisingly contemporary stained glass.
The acoustics, from where we were sitting down front, were excellent for this type of event. The program spanned an unusually wide period -- from the 12th century right up through last week. The group normally performs unaccompanied, but this performance included Anne Marie Morgan, a superb internationally known viola da gamba player, as well as members of the chorus playing a wide range of instruments -- recorders, hurdy-gurdy, shawm, tenor sackbut, percussion, guitar, and modern brass.
The first half of the concert featured music of the Middle Ages through the High Renaissance -- some familiar pieces and some new to us. The second half was all contemporary compositions by Colorado style composers and arrangers, and included four world premieres. We were particularly taken by recent works by Terry Schlenker and R. Anthony Lee. Other new works were by Luis Jorge Gonzalez and John Hyde, and new arrangements of traditional pieces by Tom Morgan, the Artistic Director of the group, were also featured. Gonzalez and Lee were present at the concert and took well-deserved bows after the performance of their works.
12/15/01: We drove through a beautiful snowstorm to a Christmas concert by St. Martin's Chamber Choir at St. Elizabeth's Church, on the Auraria Campus in Central Denver. Snow was sticking to all the trees, muffling all sounds, turning the campus into a lovely sparkling winter scene and putting us in exactly the right mood for the concert. We've previously raved about the quality of this group, and won't repeat it, except to say that they again proved that they are clearly the best in the Denver area and among the best in the country.
The first half of the program was all new music by Colorado composers -- all but one piece dated 2001, and the exception dated 1998. Several of these new pieces are very interesting and we hope St. Martins will record them so we can hear them many times again. This entire program was relatively quiet contemplative music inspired by the Virgin Mary, and was performed with no speaking and no audience applause except at the ends of each of the three major sections into which the program was divided.
The second section of the program was titled Portraits of the Blessed Virgin from Around the World. Each was well chosen: some were unfamiliar (to us) works by familiar composers (Rachmaninov, Grieg, and Poulenc); others were by composers who were new to us.
The final section ended with a long piece titled In Terra Pax by Gerald Finzi, written in 1954 only about a year before his death. The new arrangement for choir, harp, and piano (by St. Martin's singer and pianist MB Kruger and guest harpist Carolyn Kuban) was of limited success -- the harp and piano didn't really complement each other. Baritone soloist David Farwig was wonderful. I'd like to hear this piece again in its original form.
12/19/01: Dan and Leata arrived this evening -- having scheduled their flights from opposite sides of the country to arrive within an hour of each other, allowing us to make only one trip to the airport (the driving time is about 45 minutes each way).
12/20/01: Dave and Leata got an early start for the 80-minute drive over the Continental Divide to Breckenridge, where they spent the day skiing -- the first time either of us had been on skis in many years. It went quite well, although we both had to stop and rest our thigh muscles part way down any long slope.
12/21/01: The morning began with a short trip to downtown Golden for the Christmas parade. This is a small, low-key, homegrown activity, but still attracted a large crowd. We then headed to Boulder to visit NCAR -- the National Center for Atmospheric Research. They have assembled a small science museum, which attempts to interpret and explain various atmospheric phenomena such as lightning, tornados, and the intense Chinook wind that are a frequent feature along the Front Range. Unfortunately, many of the exhibits were in poor condition, perhaps because of budget cuts or because the entire public area is scheduled to close soon for a major renovation.
Dan and Leata are off to a contradance in central Denver this evening, while Dave and Helen attend a Christmas party at our next-door neighbor's house. These neighbors (Carl and Dana Kelly) are also the ex-owners of our house, and have just completed their new house next to us, which we were anxious to see. The party was a wonderful opportunity to meet our neighbors and others in the community. We indeed got acquainted with nearly all of our immediate neighbors, all of whom seem to be very interesting people. One neighbor is the Athletic Director at Colorado School of Mines (the campus is just a few blocks away) and has also been Mayor of Golden. The new house is large and very unusual and interesting -- very individualistically designed to express the interests and personalities of the owners. It wouldn't suit us, but seems to suit its designers perfectly.
12/22/01: The much-heralded Lord of the Rings movie opened this weekend. Dan and Leata are both Tolkein fans, so we all went off to see it -- choosing a matinee at what we expected to be the least-crowded time, and purchasing tickets in advance.
Dan and Leata are off to Boulder for another evening contradance. We headed the opposite direction, to a Kantorei concert at Bethany Lutheran Church, a few miles south of central Denver. (We've previously described this church.) It's the first time we've heard Kantorei, and the 33-voice group was a delightful surprise -- technically excellent and interpretatively satisfying. It is particularly notable that this group, unlike most, does not sacrifice clear diction in the quest for other musical values. The group is performing in March 2002 at the regional ACDA (American Choral Directors Association) conference -- an honor that confirms our own judgment of their quality. Conductor Richard Larson has recently retired from a distinguished 40-year music-teaching career. Kantorei has been in existence only since 1997, so it is particularly remarkable that they have been able to assemble such a uniformly high quality band of singers.
The program ranged from the Renaissance to contemporary and from very familiar pieces to a few that were unfamiliar and quite unusual. In particular, a stunning arrangement of Jesu Parvule by Andrzej Koszewski makes us want to hear more by this Polish composer. A quiet and contemplative choral sound was blended with faint but virtuosic whistling by two chorus members, creating an effect reminiscent of Tuuvan Throat Singing.
12/23/01: We awoke this Sunday morning to sluggishly-flushing toilets, and soon also became aware of brown water beginning to fill the bathtubs in the lower (one foot lower) portion of the house. It quickly became obvious that the main sewer line was blocked -- well out of reach of any amateur remedies that I had available. Browsing the yellow pages revealed that several plumbing companies advertise quick service 7 days a week. I called one who had good ad-writers and was promised that a serviceman would arrive before 3 p.m. At about 2p.m., their dispatcher called and said that previous stops were running behind schedule, and they couldn't make it until tomorrow. I'm now pondering the possibility of the four of us trying to survive a night without a working toilet. Go to a hotel? Unwinterize the RV? But another round of phone calls led to another firm that promised to arrive by 5 p.m. The guy indeed arrived about 4 p.m., and had the main sewer line cleaned out in less than an hour. Now we're left wondering whether this will be a regular occurrence.
12/25/01: No White Christmas -- only a few small patches of snow left in the shady corners of the yard. We left home mid-morning to get the kids to their flights home. Christmas day seems to be a good time to travel -- the airport was very quiet, the flights were on time, and the lines were short.
1/1/02/02: As partial compensation for a snowless Christmas, we got a lovely white New Year's Day. It began lightly snowing at dawn, and by noon, about two inches of cold fluffy snow covered the ground and decorated all the trees.
This will probably be the last "travelogue" for a while, as we settle into routine life in a new house. We're unlikely to do any significant traveling for the next year or two. The travel trailer will be sold, and we expect to eventually buy a relatively small motorhome for part-time travel.