Coveys Great Adventure: #91 April 2022

April 2022 – Las Cruces NM

First night in the new house. Excellent wine from Jay and Kathryn: Thanks!!

I’m getting too old for this @%^$. As I said last month, we signed the papers for the new house on April 14. On the 17^th we drove to Phoenix. Monday morning we picked up a 20’ UHaul truck and headed across town to the 1-800-Pack Rat
(never, ever use this company!) warehouse to unload the container of stuff we hadn’t seen in almost eight years. But, they couldn’t find any record of our container in their local system. After an hour of phone calls and much computer typing they finally found it in an old database that no one uses anymore. From there, things went smoothly. Our hired help showed up on time, worked hard, and we transferred the contents of the container to the truck in two hours and hit the road for Tucson for the night. We celebrated that night with long showers and decent take-out sushi.

Tuesday morning we headed for the co-op in Benson to load all of the casita stuff into the truck, too. Before we left for Las Cruces at the end of January, we packed everything in the casita as compactly as we could. By paying close attention to really packing the truck as tightly as possible in Phoenix we just had room for the casita contents, too. By noon we were on the road to Las Cruces, arriving back at the coach about 7 pm. The next morning another labor crew met us at the house and we emptied the truck.

The whole house looked like this.
The garage was worse

We tried to route stuff to the right room, but the whole house seemed to be filled with dozens of boxes that couldn’t be unpacked until I assembled shelving that we’d stored, built new shelves and reinforced some of the existing ones. It turns out that our seller was a NASA rocket engineer but not much of a carpenter. Over the next few days we made a meaningful dent in the pile of boxes and got to the point where we could see progress.

I built the ramp for Lucy,
but it sure came in handy

By the middle of the following week we had some new and used furniture delivered, and the new mattresses were delivered, too. We unpacked all the lamps we had forgotten we had in the container, which made a big difference. After almost a week of non-stop work it finally looked like we could actually move in, so on the 27^th we brought Ripley to the house and spent a very long day moving all of our clothes, house wares, pots, pans, wine, food, bedding, golf clubs, tools, more tools, many books, computers, etc, into the house. It went smoothly, but oh, my, did we have a LOT of stuff squirreled away in the 91 cabinets and drawers that made that coach such a good home for almost eight years. We found things we had forgotten we had and that we never used or missed. But, that evening, we opened a very good bottle of wine and declared ourselves home.

On the 29^th a crew washed and waxed the coach and we moved it to the first covered storage it had ever been in. Next month we’ll get it thoroughly clean inside, too, ready to sell to the next adventurers.

So, a brief description of the new digs at 3529 Sierra Prado Ct, Las Cruces NM 88012: The house is about 10 years old, single story, 1760 square feet. It has three bedrooms, but we have set up one as a shared craft room / office.

The master suite is smaller than the one we had in TO, but is working out. We found Kayeanne's "new" dresser at an estate sale!

The guest room has a brand new king bed, just waiting for our friends to visit.

Despite the southwestern look on the outside, it’s pretty contemporary on the inside. The kitchen/family room/ living room/dining room is all one space, which seems to be working for us as we settle in. We both thought the kitchen was too small to be really useful, but the large pantry and a very large island that we insisted convey with the house has actually made the space quite efficient.

We didn’t want to maintain a half acre again, but this one might be just a tad smaller than we thought when we bought it. It is quite private, though, which was one of our priorities. The garage is much too small, but I’ve got some plans for making the space as efficient and useful as possible. I don’t think I need as many large power tools as I once had. We’ll see how that goes as we continue to settle in. One of the significant selling points of this house was the solar system that is already installed.

Here are a more few pictures. We still need a few items that we are going to try to find at garage sales, but we are pretty comfortable as is. I think it took us about an hour to get used to the walk-in shower, bath tub, walk-in closet and full size kitchen. Oh, yes, and the laundry room and the dishwasher.

More soon,

Bob