Some small idea that’s been kicking around in the back of my mind and all it takes is some even smaller event to bring whizzing to the front. That’s what happened to me last week. We were out walking our dogs and we bumped into an architect friend also ‘walking’ his dog if buzzing around on his electric scooter (that came free after a cock-up from Amazon, but that’s another story) with a coffee in one hand, the dog charging around quite happily in his wake. Can’t see Mrs Summerhouse and myself getting into this form of dog-walking. We’d undoubtedly fall off.
Anyway he’s supposed to be looking into the possibility of getting a change-of-use for the barn from art studio to residential. He seemed to think it was definitely an option. We’re not bothered really but his enthusiasm was infectious and maybe we’d be doing him a good turn work-wise.
So conversations about this property led to us telling him about our frustrated plans for building a cabin on our land in Colorado. Regular readers of this retirement blog will remember my ambition to build on this three acre plot, 7,000’ up in the Rockies, near Lake Vallecito and the town of Durango in South West Colorado.
We kicked this scheme around but I certainly didn’t make any commitment to employing him to design a cabin. I’ll wait and see how he does with the barn project. Yes, as you can see, projects are the order of the lockdown / retirement day. Barn, cabin, Irish passport, history courses, posting retirement blog from the beginning, mangle into printing press (a tale for another time). I digress.
So no commitment but the conversation sowed a seed, another of those seeds that populate my brain. As Mrs Summerhouse says, life’s never boring with you. I never know what’s next. I think she meant it as a compliment.
The seed was the ‘cabin project’ – again. And in case you’re wondering about the photos above. The first one is of my ancestral home. It’s been in the family for well over 100 years so I think it can fairly be called ancestral. This property as you know from past blogs, I own.
The second one is of a cabin in Colorado taken from the internet. I have no connection to it whatsoever. I.e. this one I don’t own. But, and here’s the dilemma, I could own something similar if I were prepared to sell the first one. I can’t have both.
So how do I compare apples with oranges? Well I will take it one criteria at a time. Break the problem down into accessible parts. First then, is what you might call kerb appeal. In this category there wouldn’t seem to be any contest. An idyllic Rockie mountain cabin compared with an urban terraced house.
The only factor that takes an edge of the cabin might be the inside. The ancestral home has the stamp of what I’ll call Mrs SH’s and mine artistic flare (see photos below). We like what we’ve done to it since deciding not to sell it and ‘make it our own’.
The view’s not bad but it doesn’t really compare with the view from our Colorado mountain-side. I must just point out that although the actual view from the house is just OK (see first photo below as opposed to view from land in Colorado, second photo), we’re only 20 minutes or so away from the beautiful Derbyshire Dales. So not a completely one-sided equation.
Also in the Heanor house positive column, we do have an emotional investment in the family home in more ways than one (I lived the first 18 years of my life in it). True, I couldn’t wait to get away to college but I think that’s not unusual for a young person. But there is a nostalgia quotient in play here.
Of course if we sold the Derbyshire cottage apart from the hassle of selling we would then have the even greater hassle of building the cabin. And at a distance. And in the term ‘at a distance’ we have the biggest factor in the negative column – it’s 7,000 miles away. We have occasionally thought the Derbyshire cottage to be too far away and that’s 70 miles distant.
Before all this lockdown business we used to visit the house about once every two weeks. With the cabin if it existed I shudder to think how often we would get there*. In past times, the journey to Durango (the nearest airport) was – Leeds, Heathrow, Denver (not always without a change at Dulles), Durango. A very full on days’ travel. As against an hour and a half from Leeds to Heanor (the nearest ex-pit village).
Along with the issue of accessibility there are a couple or three other negatives in the cabin’s column. One, associated with the distance of travel, is of course the cost. You wouldn’t want to do it more than once a year from this point of view. And then there would be its potential interference with our other modest travel arrangements – to Ireland for example. The third would be the dogs.
We’ve looked in the past at the possibility of taking the dogs to the USA on a plane (how else unless the Queen Elizabeth or whatever it’s called today but that didn’t look very promising for our dogs, they have to stay in a cage for the whole Atlantic crossing). I can definitely guarantee they wouldn’t like that. And the flights are hideously expensive, so not an option.
Well leave them in kennels or with friends then, you say. Neither are an option we feel. The first they wouldn’t like and the second they would like too much (and so not want to come back to us).
So there we are. If I was hoping that by writing all this down in this retirement blog, things would be clearer in my mind, you would think well surely it has. It’s a no brainer. Keep the ancestral home and leave the land to the kids, then it can be their problem. It might make sense to you the reader but, problem is, this is not about making sense. It’s about heart rather than head. Watch this space for any future developments in this retirement area.
*There has been talk of building it as a rental property. It’s not all that far from the ski slopes of the area. Sensible but not emotionally engaging.
