It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Home

Robert Redford, eat your heart out

The cabin is beginning to look, and feel, a lot like home.  The roof with its black paper coat awaiting shingles is weatherproof, so we have been able to experience the shelter the cabin will provide from sun and precip.  The closer it moves towards completion, the more we love it.

The view from the loft

It’s been a week of decisions.  We reverted to our long ago flooring picks when we were advised that the vinyl floors we fell in love with were not only quite pricey, but required mar-free subfloors and days to mop up the oozing glue after putting them down.  Actually, going back to some original thought will give us a cabin with more of the casual “good enough” flavor we wanted in the first place.  The kitchen, bath, and bedroom will have foot square Armstrong commercial vinyl tiles, quite rigid, in a speckled color they call Granny Smith, reminiscent of the apple with some sages tossed in the mix.  We found an engineered laminate “wood” floor with a hand-hewn look named Sand Hickory which is very pretty with the hickory cabinets.  I’ll be looking at tile or slate for under the wood burning stove.  

I simplified the kitchen a bit, making it a straight L shape without the little return on the far end, saving not only on the cabinets, but more importantly on the Formica countertops which are a pretty hazy soft yellow just touched in places with apple green.  The simpler cabinet configuration saved some money on the countertops which are frankly, to me, the most outrageously expensive part of the build so far.  But you’ve gotta have them.  

What the Rocky Mountains DOESN”T need is another brown cabin with a brown or green roof.  We’ve chosen a sandy gray/beige color for the semi-transparent stain and the shingles are a driftwood color of mixed brown, blue-gray, and light beige speckles.  I’m thinking of painting the front door a dull medium red color.  I picked up interior paint chips in a color that looked good with the flooring and cabinets and put them up on several of the cabin walls and a week later they still look right, a yummy color I have only just recognized as the color of dulce de leche ice cream, pale caramel with a hint of yellow.  I’m bound to be hungry all the time here.

The view from the bottom of the stairs

Fireweed, the slimmest of silver linings

We’re getting afternoon into evening rains now -- one day we had 2.6 inches in just a couple of hours! -- and it is hurt-your-eyes green here.  The wildflowers are doing well, making a recovery from the late season hailstorm that drove us out of here almost two months ago.  I have never been here this time of year before and our site is riddled with thousands of raspberry plants, burgeoning with ripe wild berries.  You can eat as many as you can stand to pick, fighting off the chipmunks and golden mantle ground squirrels.  Our contractor, Brian Shelton, cannot believe we have never seen a bear up here, a critter that would be serious competition for the fruit.  Maybe it’s just that since we’re never here this time of year -- that is, up to now -- we’ve just missed this pilferer.  We know black bears inhabit these mountains and hear about their escapades in the interfaces between humans and wilderness -- scattered trash, stolen 40 pound sacks of dog food, and a taste for the sweet syrup from hummingbird feeders and cooling cherry pies on kitchen counters.  This is a place that makes it clear to you that you are only borrowing this land for a brief time and are still obliged to share it with its original inhabitants.  It feels right.  

Wild (and delicious) raspberries on red rocks behind the cabin

Wall Raising

June 1st

What a difference a day makes.  After the long holiday weekend -- which we put to good use with hiking, reading, and snoozing in our anti-gravity chairs or the hammock in the shade of the ponderosas -- we appreciated the drama of raising some walls.  

After our little Florissant excursion on Friday afternoon -- ooh the excitement of visiting the Joe’s Philly Cheesesteak trailer, the library, the post office, the feed store, and getting bread and milk and an ice cream sandwich at the gas station stop ‘n’ shop -- we arrived back to find the subfloor completed.

Nothing is quite so exciting in the building of a framed home as when the walls are raised and you suddenly can walk around in your rooms and gaze our your windows.  Our contractor Brian is usually a one man show at this point (though he is appreciating Bob’s help, especially with the hauling and lifting) and has developed lots of strategies for working solo, such as building the sections of framed walls up on sawhorses and then almost virtually tipping them into place.  

It’s great for everyone that we’re onsite now.  Even though there are building plans, we have the option of last minute changes, such as deciding to add back a window we’d taken out; the view from it will be too wonderful to miss.  Mostly it’s just minor tweaking of an inch or two here or there or deciding where to put the access to the crawl space, but it’s great to have the chance in real time.  After living in this cabin in my head for most of a year, I realize the time was well spent as there are very few things I haven’t already considered and feel confident that any decisions are well thought out over a period of months, not minutes.  I’ve worked with contractors before who made it seem like a federal offense if you asked for the most minor, non-structural adjustment, but Brian is so engaged in our build that he’s looking for clever ways to make our cabin even more unique and wonderful without adding costs.  At less than 1,000 square feet of interior space, this is the smallest home he’s ever built, and has encouraged me to “get creative” in the kitchen especially to make best use of the space I have.  A meticulous and exacting builder -- no, make that carpenter -- he knows little details will stand out even more in a smaller cabin, and wants this to be a little gem.  And we have no doubt that it will be.

And forget “onsite”.  It’s just lovely to be here.  I am so very aware that when we’re sitting outside reading, needing a fleece to keep warm enough in the shade, that we’d be holed up inside if we were in Tucson.  Not that there aren’t strange reminders of the desert here -- downy woodpeckers swoop through the pines, reminding us of gila woodpeckers flitting from mesquite to saguaro, and we hear the call of the great horned owl at night as we sometimes do in the desert.  The pussytoes are starting to bloom here, the loco weed is appearing overnight, and yet we occasionally run across cactus (at nearly 9,000 feet)!  Several of these mountain pincushions dot the more exposed saddle of our five acres, and we run across shin-dagger type yucca on some of our hikes.  Reminiscent to say the least.  I do wonder about the fruiting of the saguaro, the blooming of the ironwoods, and just big those baby quail are now, but if you are going to split time between two wonderful landscapes, it’s best simply to love the one you’re with.

Bob’s readying himself for another day of wall raising, but alas, I must do the Woodland Park run -- we’re out of clean clothes and dinners have gotten quite creative -- so I’m off with five loads of laundry to do at some charming (NOT!) laundromat and a big provisioning (needing everything from bread to bat house paint).  That sort of chore needs a reward, so I’ll stop in at The Hungry Bear for a pile of Blue Bucks (buckwheat pancakes with blueberries) and peruse an antique-y shop or two during the spin-cycle.

The only one more excited about our cabin is Happy, Brian Shelton's dog who comes to the site every day.

The View from Here

May 25th

We drove over 800 miles, 14 hours, in two vehicles, to reach our friends in Colorado Springs.  Thankfully they welcomed us with a garage to park the loaded truck in, dinner, and a comfy bed.  The next day they followed us up Ute Pass to our place in the Rockies, bringing their dogs to show our dog the ropes of being unleashed in the mountains.  It worked.

Our contractor, Brian, is away fetching his son from college in Spokane, so we’ve had a few days to settle in, acclimate, take a hike or two, and do some tidying up around the building site -- a chore we begged for.  We have a gorgeous foundation, concrete pouring into insulating forms of styrofoam connected with plastic strapping, sort of like giant Lego’s.  Brian has worked hard to keep the cabin low to the ground instead of perched on the site.  The foot wide cylindrical piers are poured for the deck footings, and the wood is onsite to build the subfloor.  By the end of the week we’ll be able to walk around our cabin. 

It is heaven to be here.  The pines, fir, and spruce look fabulous; so green from a wet winter.  The aspen buds are opening to fill the space between the evergreens with a spring green mist of new leaves.  The kinnikinnick, more often than not what is underfoot, is covered with tiny pinched white and pink bell flowers which will eventually give way to glossy red berries.  Tiny white asters, minute white and yellow daisy-like flowers brighten hillsides in small patches.  Today’s hike yielded strawberries leafing out, some with flowers, and a small bouquet of tiny violets in a damp spot on the “around the block” trail (a two mile loop behind us into Pike National Forest).  But the most exciting wildflower has been the lovely pasqueflower, pale violet teardrop shaped heads that open to a startling white six pointed flowers with a spectacular yellow center.  I have never seen the flowers before -- we’re always been too late for these early bloomers -- and have only been able to wonder at the spidery hair-like remnants after the petals are gone.

We had some crazy winds yesterday.  We’re guessing there were gusts of over 50 miles per hour.  The wind screamed around the trailer, rocking it like a cradle at the hands of an angry nanny where it now sits up on the saddle, more exposed than where it sat for years on the cabin site.  We lost power for hours and when we decided to get in the car and go see how extensive the outage was, we first had to fire up the chainsaw to clear a tree that had come down on our long driveway.  It became obvious that this was a sizable outage, with many trees down, often taking power lines with them.  After being blocking on one road, we managed to get to our friends Fran and Don’s cabin high up the far side of the valley.  Last time we’d seen them was September.   They’d come for brunch and we were squeezed into the tiny dinette of our trailer while it sleeted and snowed outside.  We caught up with them while enjoying heat from their wood burning stove, and gazing at their breath-taking view of a snow-clad Pike’s Peak.  

Aside from being a bit more subject to the winds, the trailer is also now far from the outhouse, probably about an eighth of a mile, a good long block away.  I’m not complaining as it is terrific exercise (even get some uphill in on the way back) and Bump usually accompanies me.  I will confess to using some nearby conifers after dark.  It is convenient to the building site, however Brian tells us that it will have to be disabled prior to getting a certificate of occupancy for the cabin per a new regulation.  We think we’ll simply bang a board across the one holer, and retain this historic structure for a tool shed.  We’ve already installed some art!

It’s been fun to watch our desert dog turn into a mountain dog.  Four days ago she didn’t know how to navigate stairs, was never walked off leash, and had never seen a pine tree.  Now she’s negotiating the metal trailer steps with ease and is living off leash and making little nests for herself in the mulchy soil underneath the ponderosas.  She’s enough out of her element to stick close by, but confident enough to lead the way on hikes and cavort in the streams and creeks that abound here.  Instead of learning to avoid stepping on cholla cactus segments, she is getting savvy about not walking on the tiny Douglas fir cones that are just the perfect size to get wedged in the pads of her paws.  Our dear old dog Max, gone just over a month ago, road shotgun with me from Tucson, his ashes filling a quart sized white plastic box.  He would have loved it here, and Bump seems to be enjoying it enough for both of them. 

Today the sun is warm, the air cool and perfect for a long-sleeved tee if you’re working, and a light fleece if you’re slacking.  We’ve been getting things done, but also taking time to walk, read, and talk about the cabin project and our future years with many months spent in this idyllic forest.  We’re quite excited about our contractor arriving back on site tomorrow, probably with his son to help, and Bob will get to spend the next three and a half weeks building a new cabin where the old A-frame once stood.

The sky is a deep China blue.  Fluffy innocent white clouds drift by overhead.  The crisp air is filled with the sharp clean scent of pine.  Life is very good.

We're ON!

After all the years of "that's crazy, the trailer's good enough", the yearning for a wood burning stove to cozy up in front of, the desire for a bit more of a kitchen WITH running water (the outhouse never bothered me), and wanting enough space to have family and friends join us in a way we could all actually enjoy, last summer we made the decision to rebuild a cabin to replace the one that stood on this land from the mid-60's until the Hayman fire claimed it in 2002.

Honestly, there were a few things that made the decision easier.  My husband is no more than two years from retirement, and hopefully only one.  We'd spent enough years there in longish vacations in the trailer to know we both loved it and would be happy with the simple life of puttering, hiking, bird watching, and star gazing -- and sharing all of that with family and friends -- for the rest of our years to make the investment in money and the commitment in time.  Perhaps the clincher was my husband's grandsons, at five and seven old enough to know if they enjoyed their time in the mountains, and it was oh-so clear that they did -- from fort building in a rock outcropping down the hill to tirelessly hiking to the meadow and Karen's overlook and trails beyond, to crying half way back to Denver when it was time to leave, this was a way to give to them what my husband's children knew their whole lives, at least until the Hayman fire.  More time to look like something out of Where the Wild Things Are:

Our contractor, Brian Shelton, called this morning to say that the building permit would be in his hands come Monday and that work on the foundation would begin this coming week.  It's been over seven months since we first met with him up at the trailer, thinking then that we'd not be building until next year and later deciding not to wait.  This year will be the building year; next year the occupying year.  Hopefully we'll get a bit of time in the cabin before summer's end and are planning a week at Thanksgiving, but we have our fingers crossed that next summer will be the first summer of the rest of our lives, with months of time spent in the Colorado Rockies, getting used to the wonderful rhythms of life spent enjoying the long days at 8,600 feet.


By the time we get there, four weeks from today, there should be a foundation fully decked and lumber staged for the framing of the walls.  My husband will get to help raise those walls just as he did over four decades ago with his father, other family members, and neighbors.  After the nightmare of losing the original cabin, being part of rebuilding of the new cabin will be the fulfillment of a dream.

A Little Alchemy Help Please?

We made the decision to rebuild a cabin, found a terrific contractor, and took the financial hit on the well (but at least we have a GREAT well).  We've scrambled to find the money, sold off things we'd held for over a decade, and are doing all we can to live simply now, storing up our financial resources for this project.  I've been "living the cabin" for months, wandering through the floorplans, thinking through materials and colors and hardware and lighting, ferreting out retro items to mediate the shiny newness when it's built, grappling with plans of how to manage two good-sized dogs in a trailer in the wilderness, all while managing our life in Tucson from a phone and Internet free location in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.  I'm not ready yet.

A large part of this plan included my husband's taking up to three months off from his job to go up and help with the final stages of the cabin, something our contractor, Brian Shelton, actually encourages -- he understands that folks need to be able to save some money by doing some of the work, and that it also helps them feel invested in their new home.  It's one of the reasons we decided to hire him.  We were hoping the timing would work out so that he'd need us in mid to late May, and that we could spend most of the nicest part of they year there (with the rampant wildflowers) while avoiding the hottest part of the year in Tucson.  With the support of his boss and the financial troubles municipalities these days we figured he'd get some kind of award for volunteering to take three months off without pay during a time when employees have to take furlough days.  Not so.  We were shocked when the request was flat out denied.

So, where does that leave us?

When my husband ended his 24 year career with the state he was getting nearly six weeks of vacation a year.  Now he works under one of the most archaic vacation policies I've ever heard of -- two weeks off a year for TEN years.  It was almost a deal breaker for him, but then he struck a verbal agreement with his boss (and her boss, and her boss's boss) that he could take up to 12 days a year of unpaid leave.  After five years he's never taken a minute of it.  Adding up his meager vacation days, fulough days he has to take before June, and a couple of holidays, we've scrapped together a little over three weeks to be in Colorado this summer -- no where near what we need.  Oh, they've suggested he revisit the request in a month or two and request just a month.  And we must be one of the rare families that is praying for more, a lot more, furlough requirements starting in July.  Rumor is that there will be 80 more hours, so that gets us to over a month.  And even if we can just get one set of 12 promised days for this year, that would be helpful.

This plan to spend time during the build was much more than helping reduce the cost of the cabin -- my husband makes more in his job than he will laying floors.  He helped his father build the original cabin in 1963, and spent many vacations as an adult doing serious cabin maintenance and land stewardship.  It was his favorite place on earth, and still is even though the cabin was taken eight years ago in the Hayman fire.  He wants, badly, to be part of the rebuilding of the cabin and not just the guy signing the checks.

That's where the alchemy comes in.  How do we stretch somewhere between three and half weeks and a month and a half into three months?  We need a presence on site during the finishing of the cabin.  We trust our contractor Brian completely, but I have a clear vision of what I want the cabin to look like and how I want it to function and need to be there while decisions are being made.  We're not sure how we'll work it out, but it appears that after an initial and critical few weeks together, there will be airlines involved, with flights between Tucson and Denver shuttling my husband between work and cabin building to stretch out the time.  I'll stay behind, with decisions and sourcing and labor and trying to keep track of the dogs by day, and lonely evenings and long walks to the outhouse by night.  I'm still hoping we'll manage to be in our new cabin for my 60th birthday early in August, joined by my daughter and her husband and a few dear friends if they can manage to get there.

In the midst of the unwelcome problems created by the leave without pay denial, a sweet surprise arrived.  I'd been haunting Ebay for cabin stuff -- mostly vintage things like tablecloths, hammered aluminum, depression glass, and lighting -- until I discovered Etsy.  Etsy was a whole new world, more of an online community than a place to shop.  One of the things I found was a set of vintage hanging lights for over the kitchen counter.  They were from a farm in Canada with softly frosted half round shades that were like the best beach glass and brown Bakelite fittings.  I'd looked and Looked and LOOKED for something different but not weird, and certainly not from Home Depot.  These were perfect.  Over the course of the transaction I got chatting via email with Penelope, whose shop it was, and sent her the address for this blog.  When the lights came, along with some charming little owl decoupage plaques I'd also purchased, there was something else in the box -- our first cabin warming present.  This delightful little hand-painted pitcher will be used frequently at the as yet non-existent cabin, and will never fail to remind me of an unexpected bit of encouragement from a near stranger at a time when close associates had let us down.

Thanks Penelope!

Click here to visit her shop, Birch Beer Boutique, on Etsy.

Quiet Time for Reflection

We've hit that quiet time in the cabin building process -- for us, not for our contractor.  While invoices are prepared, drawings completed, well reports written and submitted, engineering checks  performed at the site for the suitability of the ground on which the cabin will sit and perc rates for the septic system, and the Colorado Rocky Mountain weather either opens the door to progress or closes it, we are far away in Tucson. 

We've just sent off a rather sizeable check to pay for the work to date, primarily the well.  The well bid had been for a standard dig, 300 feet and a pump to accommodate that depth, and we had been warned that that was just as estimate and that were the most nebulous part of the equation that would give us the cabin we wanted.  Instead of 300 feet, it was 600 feet, and essentially dry.  The hydrofracturing was expensive but wildly successful -- and I understand already a bit of a legend in those parts -- so it was all worth every penny.

Still, neither my husband nor myself are used to writing five digit checks and it gave me a bit of pause about the magnitude of this endeavor.  While I was fighting off nausea, my husband, whose money it was, was cool as a cucumber, an odd reaction from one of the most frugal people I've ever known.

"Doesn't this freak you out?" I asked him, amazed at the nonchalance with which he signed away new car buying money.

"Not at all," he replied.  "I've been frugal all my life and this is my reward."

I knew this was going to be a huge decision in our lives, one that took us several years to make, and a commitment to where we'd be spending several months a year from now until our own forevers, as long as we were able.  He has almost half a century of history with this place.  I don't.  But after several years of spending all the time there we could manage, we knew how happy we were there and that we wanted more of it.  More of it in a way that we could enjoy more fully ourselves and with family and with friends.  No more chilly mornings and evenings in the trailer, bundling up to withstand inside temperatures in the 50's, wishing we had a woodstove to feed and to relax in its warmth and flickering light.  No more apprehension about the weather when we have guests -- how am I going to house everyone if it rains?  No more attempts at feeding a dozen, or four, out of a kitchen where you can take no more than two steps and with no running water.  We are building a home, small and cozy and significantly different enough from "real" life to be meaningful, adequate to the life we want to live and share and eventually pass on to family.

For me this is a wonderful surprise and the unexpected fulfillment of a life long day-dream to have a place in the mountains.  But for my husband I'm beginning to suspect this will be one of the defining acts of his life.  His parents were clear in their expectations and wishes -- when they were gone the cabin and land were to be kept and maintained for their children and their children's children.  His father was gone before the cabin burned.  His mother often said she wished she had been too.  It was one of the great heartbreaks of her life.

We like to think they'd be happy with what we're doing.  We certainly are.

Well deserved excitement...

We've been at the point in the cabin project where there's been a lot going on behind the scenes, but not much we were directly involved in. Not that I've been idle. Far from it. I've done my bit to stimulate the economy by shopping on Ebay for some treasures to make the new cabin a home with a feeling of history from the get-go. I believe I'm single-handedly responsible for driving up the cost of vintage hammered aluminum housewares, not to mention depression glass, old Colorado souvenirs, and a wall light so old it needs rewiring.

I had jumped on getting our well permit ASAP in October, an interesting exercise in and of itself. With a BS in Geography, the required Township and Range information rang a bell, but I couldn't find any online maps or info about what ours might be. Luckily I had our Easting and Westing data stored in our hand held GPS -- precise latitude and longitude coordinates. Proposed maximum pumping rate? Annual amount to be withdrawn in acre-feet? Total depth? Aquifer? After speaking with a very helpful man at the Colorado Division of Water Resources I learned the answers to those four questions were 15 gallons per minute, one third of an acre foot, 500 feet, and granite respectively. Oh, and our Township is 11S and Range is 70W. We received word that we'd gotten our well permit while we were in Hawaii for our fifth anniversary, and it was one of the most exciting moments we had there, and that's saying something.

Our contractor, Brian Shelton, has made many trips to our land with earth movers and well diggers. He called tonight just as we were finishing dinner and deep into a bottle of Spanish Jumilla, a red wine that sounds way fancier than it is -- we're on a budget. Brian announced that they'd been clearing snow and doing the necessary work to the drive and were going to dig us a well starting on Wednesday! I wasn't nervous about that until he talked about how nervous he'd been when they'd dug their well from over a thousand miles away. We did take his hard-learned advice and hired a water witcher, and I am a believer (see water witching post below). Before the end of the week we should know the outcome and see just how close we came to those "proposed" amounts we filled in on the well application. The good news is that the weather is allowing this work and that it appears the road and site prep will come in under budget, leaving us wiggle room in case something comes in over budget later (well issues or maybe some nicer tile in the kitchen and bath?).

Tomorrow they move the deck and the trailer to a flat spot on the saddle, the place we'll call home when we go up this spring to lend a hand with the finish work. Once we can get a certificate of occupancy for the cabin we'll put the trailer up for sale and begin enjoying running water, indoor plumbing, and a wood burning stove among many other things. Being there during some of the construction is important from a personal standpoint. My husband especially wants to be a part of the build, just as he was over 40 years ago with the original cabin. Deciding to move ahead with the cabin now, before he's retired, was difficult only in that we'd miss some of the construction. Even now it's hard not to be there, to see trailer moved off the building site and the drill rig set up shop. The next time we see the land there will be a cabin sitting on it.


Stay tuned for the outcome on the well...

Change of Plans...

No, we haven't changed our minds about rebuilding a cabin. Just a change of the plans for the cabin. The contractor we met with during our last trip, Brian Shelton, has gently revised my amateur drawings, one step at a time. And they're good changes.

We first contacted Brian via his company's website in mid-August. I'd spent the time since we'd gotten back from the trailer in early July with my graph paper, thinking through our needs in relationship to how much we had to spend. I poured through cabin books and looked for plans online, stealing ideas. By the time we were ready to send the design out for bids I had 13 documents -- floor plans, elevations, electrical plans (for godssake), and a six page narrative specifying materials. It takes a brave builder to deal with that. We had several discussions on the phone with Brian post-contacting him and pre-trip. He'd voiced concern about my roof and suggested more of a Cape Cod style. Of course I knew that would change the way we'd access the loft, which would change the kitchen, which would change... "Let me show you the drawings when we meet," said Brian.

When Brian arrived the day after we'd gotten to the trailer it was glorious weather. A comfortably warm, sunny afternoon, just a bit of breeze, huge cumulus sailing by like ships. We were able to use the picnic table on the deck under the awning; what could be a better venue for the initial steps in rebuilding the cabin? Brian pulled out the plans and I pounced on them. Well, it's still 20'x32' I thought, and the living room still faces the best view. For weeks I had been living inside the cabin I designed, moving around in it, cooking, entertaining, sleeping, reading -- this was like being teleported to a new locale. I had a bit of whiplash. But then I really looked at the plans. The kitchen had a much better work triangle, the bedroom was bigger with better storage, there was no space wasting hall, and the stairs to the loft would be a lovely focal point for the cabin. The roof still soared, but at the center, not to one side, and with a knotty pine ceiling it promised to make for a cosier feel. There were some details to work out, but I could see how much better Brian's design would be. And all my work had not been in vain. Not only was it terrific fun and had given Brian a good idea of what we were trying to accomplish, I'd thought through so many aspects of living in the cabin that I recognized a terrific plan when I saw it.


Brian spent the whole afternoon with us, reviewing the plans and walking the property with us, discussing the county application process, wells vs. cisterns, septic systems, material options, construction schedules, and where our efforts could help save us money. One of the things that had appealed to us about Brian was his philosophy of welcoming owner participation, both as a way of saving money and for the owner to feel more personally invested in his new home -- sweat equity, not just financial investment. My husband had helped build the first cabin that stood on this spot over 45 years ago, and he wanted to be involved in this one too. We'd felt good each time we talked with Brian on the phone -- he was relaxed and enthused about our project, responsive and full of terrific ideas. After the day at the trailer we knew we'd found our builder.

By the time we left Colorado we'd met with Brian one more time for the hand-off of the latest rendition of the drawings. We've been through one more iteration, slightly changing the dimensions of the cabin to 20'x34', giving us two more feet of width in the kitchen, which will be the heart of the house. I love to cook and entertain and we have many friends in the area we enjoy sharing time with, and a meal is usually involved, and friends farther afield are already making plans to visit. Also, we are hoping the cabin will again become a hub for family gatherings, and this kitchen will allow for lots of people to participate in prepping and cooking the next family feast, from both sides of the kitchen counter.

There's room for a large table to gather around, and space to cosy up near the wood burning stove. The loft will have room for many sleeping pads and the landing a space for the little ones to spy on the adults below. Our window to living space ratio is high, but when we're not outside, we want to see outside, and we'll have views of every direction in the cabin. The deck space is also extravagant, only slightly smaller than the main floor, and it wraps around three sides of the cabin, including the very important shady afternoon side with its up close and fascinating view of the voluptuous 25 foot red rocks flanking the cabin to the east. And yes, the railing facing the view will be a bench, just as it was in the cabin that burned. Even with a full house and more, there will be space for everyone to find a place to sit and enjoy the view or a good book. And that's important.

With the reality of rebuilding the cabin upon us, we're facing some interesting changes. After so many years of being so careful, so frugal really -- still driving our decade-plus old cars, considering a trip to the Costco food court for a hot dog a "date", and socking away all we could, it is a shock to stop the deferred comp and talk about selling investments to fund the building of the cabin. But we know, in our heads and in our hearts, that this is the right thing to do. Our plans are to spend at least four months a year in this new second home, avoiding the activity-limiting searing heat of the desert during the summer, and providing us a healthy outdoor lifestyle filled with nature and motion in the two places we love best on earth.

When do we start!!!???

The Wellspring of Inspiration

Where does inspiration come from?

Is it a sudden desire, a leap of faith? The first time I saw my husband on his land I knew this was an integral part of who he was. Brokenhearted over the loss of the cabin a few years earlier in the Hayman fire, his first visit back was the first time he'd seen the land without the cabin in over four decades, and it was a tough homecoming. By morning I knew he needed this place in his life again. Surveying the surroundings from the rocky outcrop above the old cabin site, I was ready to help make that happen, for him, for us.

Is inspiration an outgrowth of experience? When we decided to make the considerable investment (and I use that term loosely as the cabin will never be sold -- just enjoyed, shared, and handed on) to rebuild the family cabin it was after four years of experiencing weeks living the simple life -- no phone (cell or otherwise), no Internet, no television, no mail, no stores without a serious trek. Just us, our five acres, and seemingly endless wilderness, enough to get lost in (and I have), and we loved it, more every year. We couldn't get enough of it, even without running water or indoor plumbing. We were certain we wanted all of the rest of the summers of our lives on this hillside in the Rocky Mountains.

Is inspiration something that percolates up from your subconscious? How was it that within an hour of making what felt like a seemingly sudden decision I was able to sit down and sketch out a cabin that was quite similar to the drawings and specifications we've just put out to bid after a month of working on them? Were we processing the possibility all those years in the trailer, all the time saying "no way, this is fine"?

Is inspiration a pull from the past, a desire to recapture a time or a dream from your personal history, bring it to fruition for yourself and to share with those you love? I had a brief summer, my 21st, at a cabin in the mountains outside of San Diego. Fully indoctrinated in an appreciation for beautiful landscapes by my father who made Sunday roadtrips a family tradition, I've found love of place a determining factor my whole life. Here I am at that cabin (sitting in the plaid shirt) with my parents, my best beloved grandmother, and my sis.


In order to come up with the floor plan for the cabin, I had to visualize us in it. As it's small, by desire and by necessity, we had to think about what mattered most and how we were going to live in it and share it. I thought about other small places I'd enjoyed in my life and how they worked.

I was swept back to my grandmother's apartment, upstairs in the family home in Dearborn. Her biggest room was the kitchen/dining room. The treadle Singer sewing machine that she spent so much time at making me clothes shared the space. There was a corner hutch in the dining room, and always, on the table big enough to seat all five of us, there was a cheerful cloth with borders of fruit or flowers. I couldn't get the idea of those tablecloths out of my mind and went in search of vintage linens online. And they're out there. Well, not so many as before as I now have a nice little collection of them. The heavy smooth cotton, comforting spring colors, and patterns of abundance reminded me of a time when a carefully pressed and optimistic tablecloth was a sufficient decoration in a working kitchen -- no granite countertops or high end appliances required. Since the cabin will be primarily a summer retreat, I'm finding myself drawn to simple materials and playful colors, as carefree as we hope to be when we're there.

Is inspriation an effort to restore a family tradition for my husband and his children and other family, and to create a new tradition for us? Continuity is a powerful thing. There'd been a vacuum in my husband's life since the cabin burned. The trailer provided a means to an end, maintaining a relationship with the land, which is even more important than the abode that sits on that land. My husband's father was an excellent steward of the land, as well as the community of which the land is a part. Since returning to the land post-Hayman Fire, my husband has cleared burned trees and planted nearly 200 seedlings and young trees, more to replace those lost to beetles than to fire (blessedly few). He tends his land well and is a good neighbor and is following in his father's stewardship footsteps.


Inspiration grows out of all that we've been, experienced, and dreamed. It can be an outgrowth of the shared aspirations and desires of someone you love. My husband wants this huge part of life back, for himself, for me, for his family, and to honor a promise he made to his parents to never let the family retreat go. I'm going to do all I can to make certain that he gets it, and gets it with our own inspired spin.

The Heart of the Matter

After four years of summer vacations in a 33 foot long trailer, and loving almost every minute of them, during our recent 18 day stay we looked at each other and almost simultaneously realized we wanted to rebuild the cabin. Frankly, I often found the trailer quite romantic with its train car proportions, boat’s galley kitchen, and the encapsulated queen-sized bed in the aft. When we were alone there, adept at the waltz required of two people living in what was essentially a long hallway, our life was simple and intimate. Add even one person to the mix and suddenly the dance became a clumsy shuffle and everyone felt a slight tightening sensation of shrinking personal space. Add six to the mix with multiple dogs whining at the door and we became a sharp edged Chinese puzzle. The out of doors was our escape valve, but the usually welcome afternoon storms seemed to know when we had company and forced their way onto the guest list. We love our friends and family and want to experience our mountain retreat with them. But that is far from the only reason we’ve decided to rebuild the cabin.

A great deal of it is purely selfish. I grew up in San Diego, and almost every Sunday from about the time I hit a double digit age until my mid teens we had a family tradition of packing a picnic and hitting the road. It might be a short drive to the beach, or Silver Strand State Park on the bay side, a slightly longer drive into the rolling hills of Otay dotted with cattle and the occasional ranch house. Or we might go farther afield – Palomar Mountain with a visit to the observatory, Borrego Springs with a hike to the clustered palm oasis, or my favorite, Rancho Cuyamaca State Park. The narrow two lane road curved and twisted through oak pine forests, the roadside crowded by manzanita only to open suddenly to meadows and running creeks. There was a smell that I found nowhere else, sort of a dry dusty smell with the roundness of roasted nuts and the sharp clean notes of pine. That is the smell at the trailer on a warm rainless summer afternoon, and it evokes some of the best memories of my life.

I always wanted a cabin in the mountains. The closest I got was the summer I turned 21 and lived for a few months in a wonderful old house in Descanso, scant miles from Cuyamaca. I baked heavenly high-altitude oatmeal bread, watched the jays try to dominate both the feeder at the back of the house and the one at the front at the same time, and wandered around with my black lab. In the end the commute to San Diego, more the 5,000 foot ascent on the homeward leg than the hour each way travel time, rendered that adventure impractical with old cars. My lab, fond of following people on horseback down the dirt roads, didn’t come home one day (or ever), and I took it as a sign.

I never saw the A-frame. It was just a month after my husband and I got together that it burned. We had talked about a trip there soon – some simple provisions, hiking shoes, and a bag of books. The cabin looms large in family lore, from the summer in 1963 that the family camped on the land and built it, to my husband’s father’s first heart attack trying to clear the driveway of snow one winter, to his mother’s attempt at disciplining the hummingbirds warring at the feeder and her legendary trout fishing prowess. My husband, a teen at the time the cabin was built, remembers later weekends on his own there, stoking the fireplace and reading to his heart’s content. His children never knew life without the cabin until it was lost. His daughter recently said that there were three key elements for her at the cabin: the deck with its built in seating and its view of the valley and the mountains beyond, the fireplace which roared during the cooler months, and the kitchen table where they gathered for family meals and cutthroat board and card games.

In the end the wellspring of inspiration for the cabin will come from many places. From my grandmother’s vintage tablecloths in an upstairs apartment in Dearborn to a lifestyle ingrained in my husband’s family history. We’ll do our best to honor the family memories, re-creating a place where the family can resume its traditions, and creating new traditions for my daughter and our friends who, like me, never saw the original cabin. There will be a big table, a deck with built in seating, and a wood burning stove to gather around. It will be built to accommodate, without fuss, grandkids and dogs. We’ll have a retreat from the Tucson summers that keep us inside far too much of the time, and a simplified life where the nearest place to get a gallon of milk is at the end of 16 miles of dirt road, which does tend to focus the mind during provisioning trips. But the time between provides one with the space to settle on what matters most, where whole long days, waking and retiring with the sun, can seem an endless meditation, and the most arduous decision you make is what to cook for dinner. Time for the heart of the matter – reflecting on the natural world and being with the ones you love.

Beginnings, endings, and beginning again...

The first person I met when I moved, in a leap of faith, to Tucson at the end of 2001 was my next door casita neighbor. Five months later we were a couple. A month after that he lost his 40 year old family cabin, high in the Colorado Rockies, to the Hayman fire. It had been a cherished constant in his family's life, a gathering place and retreat for all of them, and was a devastating loss. A loss of much more than a well-used A-frame cabin.



Around the time we were married, he took me on a road trip through Colorado. I'm a landscape junkie, and though I find our mountainous Sonoran desert environment in Tucson spectacular, Colorado was a whole different category. Green. Surface water. Soaring rocky mountains. We camped with our heads a few feet from the Dolores River, wandered Telluride, marveled at the cravasse that is Black Canyon of the Gunnison, soaked in a vast pool fed by the hot springs in Glenwood Springs, and wept at the beauty of Rocky Mountain National Park. Our last night in Colorado was spent sleeping on the old cabin site.

The site is in a collection of five acre plots of land. The neighbors across the lake from us had invited us for dinner in what I can only describe as an enchanted cottage. Hand built, from the ground up, they'd created a Bavarian wonderland. I felt I'd walked into a fairy tale -- one with a happy ending. The evening was warm and welcoming in every possible way. When we returned to the old cabin site, our tent pitched, camp chairs out, we built a fire under a full moon. The cabin had been nestled against a softly eroded granite wall which reflected the fire's light. Hy husband's daughter had given him an unopened bottle of Chivas Regal that had belonged to his long deceased father, the father who he'd helped build the cabin over 40 years before. We decided to open that bottle and drank a toast to his dad, thanking him for all the cherished times and memories.



When we woke up the next morning, snug in our sleeping bags, I knew that my husband needed to reclaim his connection to this place in a concrete way. The land still belonged to the family. The outhouse still stood! In less than two months we were back for Thanksgiving, staying in the 33 foot Airstream Argosy that he'd bought and had parked on the old cabin site. It was a wonderful visit, but one in which we realized that this was not a cold weather abode, but one that would allow visits from mid spring to early fall.



For the past four years we have spent as much time as we could eek out from working lives at our breadbox (as it is affectionately called) in the Rockies, usually a little over two weeks in the summer and another week around the autumnal equinox to see the aspens turn.

Now, as my husband is considering retirement, we've decided to rebuild a cabin on the old site. We love Tucson and will keep it as our primary residence [see my Sonoran Desert blog Writing Down the Desert], but loving Tucson for the long haul means leaving it in the cruelest summer months - June, July, and August at minimum. We're outdoor people and like to hike most days of the week and residing at almost 8,700 feet in Colorado summers will allow that. It will also allow the rest of the family, those who knew the cabin and feel the loss, and the grandchildren who have gotten to know the place and already love it, to reclaim that part of their lives.

Join us as we share this experience of rebuilding and recreating -- more than just a structure -- a home, a way of life, and a family legacy.