Before I get to the events of the last six months or so since I last posted, I wanted to take a moment and recognize a big milestone in our lives.  Looking back through this blog, I realized our first post about our Colorado adventure went up two years ago yesterday.  It’s certainly been an interesting journey, and now that we’ve got a couple of mountain winters behind us and we’re starting our third summer up here, I think we have a much better understanding of the challenges that we could only imagine when we first began.

The last six months:  We felt like the house was far enough along to move into it back in August.  Even though the flooring still needed to be put down and the finish work had to be done, the essentials; like the kitchen, bathrooms, and utilities were all useable, so it seemed silly to remain in the cramped (albeit cozy) fifth-wheel.  While we were certainly more comfortable down here, the move might have dampened our sense of urgency toward overall project completion.  In fact, we both sort of took a break from it all.  Days became weeks, and then a couple of months passed with not much actual progress.  Granted, winter had set in, and much of our focus turned towards little things like keeping warm and making sure our driveway was passable.  We also figured it might be a good time to get some surgeries out of the way and use the down-time for recovery.  Sandi had back surgery and I had both hands and wrists operated on.  We’re both doing better now, and we’re hoping winter is finally over, so it’s back to work on a list of projects that lately has been getting a little shorter each week.

Winter:  This one was a challenge for sure, especially after how easy we had it last year.  We had snow on the ground on Halloween, and had about three inches fall a week ago last Wednesday.  For those keeping track, that was snow from October to the end of May; eight months running.  Our driveway was impassable several times, so we have a new contact in our phone list…..  the Plow Guy.  When I couldn’t handle things with the quad and it’s snow plow, we called him to come up with his pickup and blade.  When it was too much for that set-up, he brought the front end loader to literally dig us out!

After the blizzard in March, that meant seven hours of digging to clear the road. Sandi spent those five days in town and I had spent them stranded up here at the house.

We had bought an older pickup and a plow of our own, though it wasn’t doing us much good when we needed it the most since we hadn’t been able to find the correct mounting hardware at that point.

Fortunately, we managed to get our hands on the proper brackets and with some help from our son-in-law, everything should be ready to go for next year!

I’ll try to post about some of the individual projects we worked on, like the tiled entryway, the tiled mudroom, refacing the fireplace with stone, building a hearth, etc., but probably the biggest change was the addition of a fireplace insert.

What a tremendous difference it made in keeping the house warm.  I have no idea what the science is behind it, but burning wood just makes the whole house feel so much warmer than the gas furnace does by itself.  Of course, someone has to find, cut, split, and stack all that firewood, but that’s probably a subject for another post.

For those still following us, thank you and sorry for the delay.