The plan was to buy a retirement property up in the mountains. We agreed to start looking
in Paonia, where I’d gone to solar school and Gail loved the organic-farming culture.
On our second visit, in November 2016, we found the perfect place: an 1894 farmhouse,
renovated in the late 1980s, with a three-story apple-packing shed. That building would make a perfect workshop/studio/office/storage facility. A tilled garden plot promised an instant veggie garden. We could have dogs and cats and goats. Across the road a sheepdog tried to herd cows, horses and burros.
We made an offer on the spot. We closed the deal in December and celebrated the holidays in our country home.
Now the van became a cargo hauler. I bought a used utility trailer. When I wasn’t teaching skiing, and between “business” trips for ISHA, we hauled stuff and stashed it in the barn. It was a 250-mile haul over three mountain passes. Gail sold her house in Longmont and we hired contractors to refinish the farmhouse floors and repair the barn stairs. We moved in for good on March 31.
We instantly adopted a nine-year-old beagle, Gracie, and a five-month-old snowshoe kitten, Zorro, who came to us as a
stray. New appliances, new kitchen counters, lots of electrical work and paint, and a new wall to separate the library from the dining area. We got rid of the wood stove and ran in a natural gas line. Cleaned out the barn and winched the 50 cartons of books into the loft. Tilled the garden and Gail got her
plantings in, with a drip
watering system gravity-fed from the irrigation ditch marking the western border of our lot. I got to buy a lot of cool new tools, like a 1975 John Deere lawn tractor. I got the motorcycles into the barn and set up my workshop.
And we put up a 2.6 kW solar array, standing on 11-foot steel posts to get above the berry trees on the south side of the house. It’s a relatively small system but now that we heat and cook with natural gas, it offsets our annual electric bill.
gailandsethtravelling 
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