Banana Belt Race - Ready set go!

Banana Belt Race - Crossing the finish line!

Dig dig dig! 

A soil test hole or Kirk's grave? 

Kirk digging the hole for the post. See our well? 

Jodi showing our address post 

Our POS trailer that we temporarily owned 

September 19, 2006

We're making some progress finally! We spent all day Saturday working on our property to get it ready for our site inspection. Several weeks ago we submitted our site plan and other required paperwork to the local Environmental Health Department to acquire our septic and driveway permits. In order to get these permits they have to do a preliminary site inspection to verify that we have an 8 foot deep hole dug where our leech field will be for a soil test, that we put up a post with our address at our driveway location and that we have staked out the house location. Kirk decided he was going to dig the soil test hole by hand which he started several weeks ago. It was a burly task, but I think he felt a sense of accomplishment in doing it himself. He also didn't want to tear up our land by hiring someone to dig it out with heavy equipment. We'll have that problem soon enough. So after several iterations of digging a day here and a day there over the weeks we ended up with a 6 foot hole. Kirk was nervous about digging the next 2 feet because holes like that have been known to cave in and kill people. He braved it anyway and within a couple of hours it looked like he was literally standing in his own grave. Yikes! Then he went to work digging a hole for our address post. That took no time as he is now a professional hole digger. Then we moved on to staking out the house. That was quite a task as we ended up doing it three times. The first time I decided I didn't like the location. It needed to move about 7 feet to incorporate the views better. The second time we moved it too far and somehow our corners were out of square. By the third time we got it just right. It certainly was a struggle though. We are finding this is a common occurrence throughout this process because...go figure...we don't always agree. It probably doesn't help that we are about the two most stubborn people you'd ever meet. We managed to get through it though and finished all these tasks by sundown. We retired to our shed (where we have our camp kitchen set up) to cook dinner and enjoy a cold beer. It was well deserved.

Our site inspection was scheduled for Wednesday September 20th. The next step will be submitting our house plans to the building department, but we can go ahead and get our excavation permit ahead of time which we are considering. We met a couple on our Cataract Canyon raft trip last month who built their own house in Idaho Springs. They offered to rent us their excavator and skid steer so I think we may try to break ground in October weather permitting.

We woke up to frost on the ground this morning and we've definitely felt it cool off in the last week. In fact Saturday night it actually was in the teens. Brrrrr! Thankfully we're still staying warm enough. We have our 2 man tent set up inside the tepee with a futon inside of it. We bundle up inside our down sleeping bags and use extra sleeping bags as blankets. So far it's pretty cozy, but it's not very easy to convince yourself to crawl out of bed in the crisp morning air when you can still see your breath. The patio heater works well for that purpose though. We just have to brave the cold long enough to light the heater and then pretty instantly it warms up inside the tepee.

Sunday (Sept. 17th) Kirk participated in the Banana Belt Mountain Bike Race in Salida. He placed 7th overall and missed placing in the top three of his age division by less than a minute. He is pretty happy with his performance as he should be. He rode in with sponsored riders that were extremely fit! Kirk lost about 30 pounds between our 2 years stint at the South Pole and our 4 month bike trek across SE Asia. He's kept it off and finds his physical performance has increased significantly. He is also pretty proud of his new titanium mountain bike that he purchased through a pro deal at Pole. It was state of the art at the time we bought it, but now of course it's not. The same thing happened to me with my kayak. I bought a brand new one before we left for Pole which was a popular boat at the time. Now it's considered to be outdated. It’s crazy how fast that happens with gear. Although we're happy with what we have and don't feel inclined to purchase anything else.

One thing (among many) that has been really great about living in the mountains is the wildlife. I think I've gained a real appreciation for wildlife after not having any (unless you can count Polies in that category) for 2 years in Antarctica. Every time I see a non domesticated animal now I "ohhh and awwww"! I love seeing deer, bunnies, squirrels, birds and llamas every day (we pass a llama farm every day about a mile from our property). Recently we saw a huge owl fly above the truck as we passed the llama farm and another evening a badger ran out in front of us. Those are two animals I’ve never seen in the wild so that was pretty cool. I think my excitement also comes from the fact that I grew up a city girl so all of this is still new and exciting to me.

Happy Ramen-Don! 

September 13, 2006

Today is our third year anniversary, three years of wedded bliss. Our wedding was a crazy affair with a party that lasted two days. It included naked hot tubing, karaoke, and a visit from the local police department. Our first wedding anniversary was celebrated at Pole where the cook and the station manager had a blow out over some petty thing so the cook made Ramen that night for dinner. Yum! Since then our anniversary has been known as Ramen-Don because the cooks name was Don and he made Ramen. Our second year was again at Pole and we made a huge celebration of it by having a large feast of Ramen complete with posters and station wide recognition of Ramen-Don. This year we were not at Pole but our Polie friends made sure we were included in the Ramen-Don events as can be seen in the photo. Jodi and I sent them a picture of us eating Ramen for lunch and they posted it on the galley line window. When I received the pictures I nearly busted a gut laughing. I hope they had as much fun as I did! Thanks Polies!

Slackers! That’s us! We haven’t been very good about keeping up on our blog this summer. And we found out from the few people who actually read this blog that they check on it every so often for entertainment purposes and we’re letting them down. Shoot! I don’t know where the time went. Here I thought we’d come back to Colorado and have ample time to fit in everything we wanted to do. HA! Reality has set in and it doesn’t quite work like that in the real world now does it?

Let’s see. I haven’t posted anything since June when we built our shed. A lot has happened since then. That same weekend that we built the shed, we acquired a trailer that someone on the ranch wanted to get rid of. It was a huge POS…really old, but we thought it could at least serve as a kitchen if we could get the refrigerator to work and maybe give us shelter in really bad weather. Well we picked it up and hauled it very slowly and cautiously over the few miles to our property hoping that it wouldn’t fall apart on the ride there. It made it just fine, but we were not very excited about it when we realized it would take a lot to get it level and usable. It smelled like mouse pee on the inside and it felt cramped compared to the tepee. We tried to overlook those things and went ahead and hooked up a propane tank to see if it worked. The stove and lights worked, but the refrigerator did not. Kirk pulled it out to inspect it and found a huge dead rat that had died inside the flue. Gross! Taking the refrigerator out uncovered a load of rat poop that was under the appliance and inside the cabinet space. It was soon spread all over the camper floor as we tried to clean that space up. It gave us both the heebie jeebies. So we left cleaning the floor for later and focused on leveling the trailer out. We accomplished that and actually used the stove once to heat up water, but we were just too grossed out to continue using it since we didn’t feel like cleaning it out any further. Then Kirk found a leak in the gas line and decided to just set up our camp stoves and camp tables in the shed. It turned out to be a nice little set up that we liked much better. So then the trailer sat untouched and became our little eyesore.

Back in May we were trying to decide a path for our lives and set some priorities. We found it wasn’t easy. Redefining our lives again after 2-1/2 years of being gone seemed so overwhelming since we just didn’t know which direction to go. Too many choices maybe? We eventually made a decision to rent an office in Buena Vista at the BV Professional Center. We thought this option would give us a place to start up our business, JK Mechanical Design, again and have a high speed internet connection. Actually I think the internet was our real priority at the time. It was a great decision because it helped us establish a routine and focus on getting our business and our lives established here.

Every Monday morning the office building is cleaned by a very nice man and his son. Somehow in conversation we told him about the trailer. He said that he would love to take it off our hands. We were shocked and pleased at the same time so we told him he could come and pick it up whenever he wanted and it was his. He called us later that same afternoon and asked if he could pick it up that evening. We were ecstatic! We really didn’t want it anymore since we hadn’t used it and lacked the motivation to make it clean and usable. We became worried about how we were going to get rid of it and along came someone who seemed to really want it. Yea! We came home that evening relieved to have it gone. It was a pleasure to come back to our pristine property once again. I think we owned it for about 2 weeks total and that was enough.

We found that this house building process is very difficult. We thought we would come back to the states and start the house in the summer and have something to move into by the fall or early winter. Well it didn’t exactly go that way. We kept getting input about our floor plan from several different people. This ended up being both a good and bad thing. Every time we thought we had made a final decision, we found that we second guessed ourselves based on other people’s input. It was good though because eventually we filtered through it all and figured out what we want. In the meantime though the summer passed and we didn’t make much progress. We finally had our well drilled a couple of weeks ago which is something. They hit water at about 60 feet but drilled to 100 feet so that we could get the maximum flow on our well permit which is 15 gallons per minute. Unfortunately the drill rig tore up our land a bit which we weren’t too happy about, but I guess that goes along with the construction process.

The next step is to finish digging the 8 foot deep soil test hole where our leech field will be. We also have to stake out the house and put up our address post. Then we can call the Environmental Health Department to come out and do their site inspection. After that we’ll be issued our septic permit and driveway permit. Then we have to submit our final house plans to the building department in order to receive our building permit. We’re hoping to get our plans submitted in the next couple of weeks so that we can possibly break ground in October. We’re not sure how cold it is going to be and if that will hinder the process so we’re just trying to remain flexible and play it by ear. If worse comes to worse we’ll wait until spring to start construction. We are going to try to start next month though because we also have the opportunity to use a friend’s heavy equipment (excavator and skid steer) for an entire month for the same price we could rent the equipment for a day at a rental shop.

The original plan was to build a strawbale house, but after further research we have decided to use stacked concrete block instead. We recently met some folks who built a strawbale house and they said it was like working with insulation all the time and not very pleasant. I have an allergy to hay anyway, so it probably wasn’t the smartest idea for us in the first place. It also will give us more interior space to have walls that are less thick (bale walls are about 16” wide as opposed to concrete block which are 8” wide) and concrete block has more mass which is better for passive solar purposes. Any ol’ joe shmoe can stack concrete block too since it’s a technique doesn’t require a lot of skill. That’s a good thing!

We also had talked about building a garage first and living in it over the winter. It would be a smaller structure to build and serve as practice before building the house. Well, we found out that is not allowed in Park County. Our property is just on the other side of Chaffee County where they actually do allow you to build a garage first and live in it which is where we came up with the idea. Park County requires you to have a minimum of a 600 square foot main structure first before building any smaller structures. So we have had to revamp our plans as we got further into the permit process. It’s not a bad thing though because we currently have a solid direction to move in now that we are fully aware of the requirements.

Needless to say we’re learning a lot in this whole house building process and I’m sure that will continue as we proceed into the construction. We are hopeful though because we recently met two different couples that have built their own homes and didn’t have any prior experience. They were one of the few people that actually told us ,“Yes, you can do it all yourselves, except you probably want to sub out the drywall to someone else”. The majority of people look at us like we’re nuts when we tell them that we plan on building our home ourselves…meaning doing the labor ourselves and not just GCing the project. But it’s not the first time people have given us that look nor will it be the last. You should see the look on people’s faces when I tell them we live in a tepee. Or when we said we were going to the South Pole for the first two years of our marriage, or when we said we were going to cycle across SE Asia. We’ve come to believe that when people think we’re crazy we’re actually doing the right things. It’s very comforting to meet other people who are like us and can testify to achieving the same goals that we are going for even though they may be the minority.