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Tag: 10 year plan

  • Update…

    It’s been about a month since the last installment of my ongoing journey through this thing we call life.

    The fencing down south happened a month quicker, and a thousand dollars more expensive, than projected — but it’s done. So everything is cleaned up (there was a dilapidated shack in the east 40 that I had buried) and fenced up now.

    I had to drive down there on the 3rd to talk to the attorney and go over the stipulations on the purchase; the fellow I’m buying the land from wants right of first refusal if I sell it, and there was some verbiage for the easement through the neighboring property… My gate comes off the side of their driveway, so it’s not a complicated situation fortunately.

    The attorney is an interesting fellow; he’s in his 70’s and once upon a time worked at NASA Houston.

    Anyway, the adjustments to the language for the deed required some re-writing, but that should be done by next week and then the deed will get re-signed, filed, and I’ll finally own what I agreed to purchase about a year ago.

    Huzzah for governmental efficiency!

    Once the ink is dry and the paper filed in whatever antique cabinet they use down there in Walsenburg, then I have to start on foundation work…

    As I’m only planning on a ‘manufactured home’ (aka; trailer), the foundation should be pretty easy — like concrete slab easy… But once again the governmental machine is involved and I have to get an engineer to do a soil compression and irrigation study, have an engineer bless the location, get another engineer to design the foundation, yet another engineer to doodle out the utility connections, and get it all rubber stamped by Walsenburg before I can actually do anything.

    You know; spend thousands to get permission to spend thousands.

    I’m not holding my breath, but if I can get all of the above engineering and rubber stamping done before winter then next year I might be able to pour concrete. Once there is a foundation on the property that’s enough to generate an address, and then I can transfer things to that address where stuff is far, far less expensive.

    For example; moving my car from “Denver Tech Center” to “20 Miles West of Nowhere” reduces my insurance cost by about 30%, and my tax/title costs by roughly 50%.

    Granted, this cost reduction is minuscule compared to the costs of getting the address to get the cost reduction — but I’ll take what I can get.

  • Fences…

    Just put the $1000 down on the new fencing for the property, which will be about $4000 when all is said and done — sometime in August.

    So I’m $8880 into this property plan now… Hopefully I don’t go bust before I get something on it to live in.

  • Road trip…

    Spent the night in Walsenburg for the planning commission meeting today — which took all of 15 minutes.

    They determined that the county needed to determine a few things before they could determine my purchase — so everything is still pending. I’ll know more when the next meeting with them happens — in February.

    Fortunately I’m in no real hurry. 🙂

    I got to Walsenburg at about 4pm yesterday as it was looking like snow (despite the weather folk saying it wouldn’t snow), and by about 7pm it was blizzarding sideways thanks to the 40+ mph winds.

    There are a few fringe benefits to living here for half a century I suppose…

    The snow did make it mighty pretty this morning though:

    Looking east from the Best Western at exit 52 on southbound I-25… There’s a whole lotta nothin’ down there. 🙂

  • 10 Year Plan Update

    Was down in southern Colorado this last weekend going over land details.

    I’m buying 10 acres in a sort of upside-down “L” that looks a bit like this:

    And here’s what it looks like from the ground:

    I will own from the car to that second fence back there

    And all the way out to that first ridge

    And along a line out to that house in the distance…

    This is where I plan to retire. 🙂

  • Update

    In accordance with my “10 Year Plan” I started in 2016, I traded in my 2016 370Z “Nismo” on a 2018 Murano “Midnight Edition” on Friday.

    It looks like this:

    The reason for this sudden outburst of adulthood centers on the fact that with all of the land and house stuff that will be going on soon(tm) down in southern Colorado, I needed a vehicle with less of an alergy to unmaintained roads. There’s also the fact that Colorado has winter and the 370Z is pretty much paralyzed when the pavement gets wet… And while I usually carpool with folks who own Jeeps and whatnot when the weather gets bad, I like to get to work about two hours before everyone else does.

    Enter the Murano…

    The Murano is pretty much an AWD spaceship, and coming from the wonderfully analog 370Z the Murano is something of a culture-shock; it has more radar than an airport that it uses to control everything from lane changes to cruise control, no less than five motion-tracking cameras that it can stitch together in this almost Star-Trek fashion to make it appear that you are looking down at the car when parking or pulling out of a spot, an 11 speaker Bose surround system, power everything, and the interior is all leather and looks like the bridge set for the Enterprise.

    Performance-wise it does well enough to not have me regretting driving it anywhere as it’s a naturally aspirated 3.6L V-6 with enough torque to get the 2-ton beast moving fairly quickly, but the transmission is a CVT… I was a bit leery of the CVT as they tend to be very “squishy” and overly sedate, but the unit in the Murano is quite nice and can adequately fake being a real transmission. There are two up-sides to the CVT; one being that it can happily go all the way down to 0.38:1 and up to 2.41:1, so it can really make the car scoot when you put your foot into it, and the second is that if you don’t drive it like a racecar it’ll get 40+ mpg on the highway.

    Ultimately though, it gets twice the gas milage of the 370Z and burns cheaper gas while doing it, the insurance is $150/6-months cheaper, the tires are about a quarter of the price of the litteral racing tires on the 370Z, rides a lot nicer for road trips, holds a lot more stuff (makes moving easier), and it has all of the latest safety gizmos…

    The motion tracking cameras have already paid off as the typical oblivious pedestrian just walked out behind me as I was backing out at Microcenter; I mean as in the car is moving and is sticking six feet out into the lane when Joe Cellphone just strolled into the back of the car – and the Murano halted when it saw them… It’s a bit disconcerting that the car is in that much control, but I also didn’t flatten an idiot – so I’ll give it a pass.