With the snow mostly melted but the temperatures bottoming out over the past week or more, we have not done anything exciting.
Walks have been brief, mostly of the "Kory running while LC and Karin hunker down against the strong and freezing cold wind" variety.
Outside just long enough to satisfy our energetic dogs' continual need to run and then errand running and back to the house.
Which is all OK.
February is turning out to be the coldest month of winter so far, and now that we have found a place to live for a while we are both beginning to think seriously about how to get all of our belongings from Idaho to Wyoming without breaking the bank.
Two 200 sq foot storage units piled high. A Suburban. A camper. A fishing boat and trailer.
Even a wonderful Native American picture that we gave on loan to a library in Challis ID because it was so big and so heavy we weren't sure what else to do with it.
There were thoughts of home improvements. And then thoughts of selling a house.
And then surprisingly actually selling a house.
That piece of art needed to be somewhere safe at the time, and so it sits on a wall two hours up the Big Lost River Valley now far away from where we live, far away from where our camper and boat and trailer and extra vehicle are, and far away from where our belongings are holed up in storage.
For goodness sakes...........what a cluster................
If I think about it too much it is simply overwhelming.
Early next week we'll be making a quick out and back to Idaho to pick up a Suburban and boat and camper (and maybe a picture).
A week or so later we'll be making a quick trip out and back to Idaho again, this time to clean out two storage units.
I will be glad when February is over because then moving will finally (finally) be done................
On a very cold but also very wonderful day late last week the wind finally stopped blowing and I ventured outside for a walk with my dog.
We eagerly climbed a trail in what is quickly becoming a favorite place for the two of us to hike and explore.
This trail was adjacent to the trail from the previous blog entry.
One more hill in a vast series of hills located just a few miles outside of Cody.
We set out, both of us excited to explore a new trail, and as we climbed I was eager to find out what was on the back side of this hill.
We were on a power line trail.................
Unlike the previous trail that alternated between steep climbing and short flats, this trail was straight uphill in a long, gradual incline.
This hike was not as lengthy as the one we had taken previously and 30 minutes after first setting out from the truck I had my answer.
The trail opened up to a vast expanse of the Oregon Basin.
I stood at the top of the high rise and looked around me, enthralled with the view and trying to get the lay of the land.
Looking below me I could see the tight and rutted out trail that LC had tried to drive for a while before eventually turning back out of concern for the vehicle sometime late last fall.
I could see the trail out in the basin that led to Circle Rock - our most favorite desert place.
I could see the rise to my left that I had climbed on my last trip out this way with Kory.
And endless other rises in all directions.
And then my camera died.
Or more specifically..........the battery died.
Damn!
I'll have to do that same trail again just so that I can take more pictures................
Out at Red Lake (a vast area of BLM land that contains a dry lake bed).
It is another favorite of ours simply because it is right at the edge of a subdivision and only a few minutes from the house.
A quiet and isolated expanse of ground for our puppy to run and for us to walk and wander, without having to drive very far.
Below is a video of someone climbing a hill in the summer on four wheeler out at Red Lake.
Our dog climbed this same hill on this visit - chasing a bunny.
She loved the chase although she never had a chance of actually catching the rabbit.
This winter has been an endless cycle of heavy snowfalls and then enough mild days to melt it all away time and again.
We haven't ventured onto many of the endless trails that make up Red Lake.
Eventually the weather will be warm, the ground will be rock hard, and we will explore some of the trails in our Suburban.................
Me with Heart Mountain in the background.
If the wind hadn't been blowing it would have felt warm.
But it was blowing.
And it felt freezing cold..................
We spent months looking for an affordable house to buy.
We spent months looking at houses all over Big Horn County and Park County.
We knew how expensive houses were in Cody so told ourselves early on that Big Horn County would work for us - affordable homes and close enough to Cody to get to everything it had to offer within a reasonable drive.
We told ourselves that and so we looked at homes in Basin, Greybull, Cowley, Deaver and Bryon.
We looked in Burlington.
We looked in Powell.
We looked in Meeteetse.
We looked at a lot of junk - some of it obvious junk, some of it was deliberately concealed junk.
We found a lovely home on one acre in Cowley but ultimately couldn't make an offer on it after realizing that we really did not want to live that far from Cody.
We made an offer on a manufactured home on four acres in Burlington, only to find out that the home wasn't strapped down and there were roof issues and serious water issues that the owner had no desire to remedy.
We made an offer on a home in Meeteetse that was immediately turned down.
In the meantime we talked to people in Cody about Meeteetse and every single person told us the same thing - that Meeteetse was cliquish.
Very cliquish.
Unwelcoming to outsiders cliquish.
Unwelcoming to outsiders cliquish.
And that new businesses were not welcome.
Enough people told us the same thing (most of them unprompted) that it simply confirmed what we had grown to suspect, and so when the home owner came down to our price a month after our original offer, we declined.
We toyed with the idea of Clark but Clark is extremely isolated and is renowned for both hurricane force winds and grizzly bears.
The bears and wind weren't deal breakers.
The deal breaker was the distance from a hospital (one of us is getting old and the other is getting older).
Neither of us was 30 anymore.
The other deal breaker was a question posed to LC by the owner of the cottage we were renting up until a couple of weeks ago:
If something happened to you would you want to leave Karin in Clark?..............
We found a manufactured home just outside of Cody on two acres, went to see it four hours after it was listed and made an offer immediately.
The permanent foundation in the description wasn't recognized as a permanent foundation for loan purposes.
No deal.
We explored costs for land, were immediately encouraged by the low cost of some of the pieces of land in and around Cody and then was almost universally discouraged after learning of the extraordinary building expectations based on prevalent HOAs.
You could buy a reasonably priced piece of land as long as you wanted to build a $400,000 home on it - made of pre-approved materials in pre-approved colors and your fences were the pre-approved number of feet away from the pre-approved design of your outbuildings etc etc. etc. as described here-in by the architectural committee................
We found a home in Powell.
A strong, sturdy, straight and solid home with two tiny bedrooms, doorways in strange and non-intuitive locations, and duct work that overwhelmed to basement.
It was located in back of town on a large lot adjacent to the college.
It had a great one car garage-workshop for LC, a nice back deck and was reasonably priced.
It had been on the market for over a year which never bodes well in the Park County market, but it was a house that was always a "fall-back house" for us.
A good, solid house at a price we could afford on the last street in town, across from a church, college campus and a park.
What the hell more could two people of modest means hope for or expect?
AND there was a good store front right on the main street in Powell for my store.
We kept looking..........and the Powell house was always our back-up house.
And then one day a couple of months after our first look at the house, we went back to see it again.
By this time we were tired and stressed out. Beginning to feel overwhelmed. Mindful of the time we had remaining at the cottage and mindful of the upcoming tourist season only a few months away that would add significant pressure to the rental market.
We walked into the Powell house certain that we would be taking a cursory look around and would pull the trigger on it.
We walked away shaking our heads.
The duct work downstairs was a mess and completely overwhelmed the lower level. There were two large rooms down there but there was no way to make it into a comfortable "living space" - they would always just be "the rooms down in the basement".
The bedrooms were too small and the design of the house and the configuration of the yard made it impossible to expand.
The doorways were in weird places.
The doorways were in weird places.
I walked around the home a few times trying to wrap my head around this house.
Trying hard to make it work in my mind because I knew that LC liked this house.
We walked out and I looked at him.
He looked at me.
For both of us it was laid out worse than we remembered.
This wasn't the right house.
We really wanted it to be the right house, but it wasn't.
We were back to square one....................
Only........it wasn't QUITE back to square one.
There was a house in Cody that we had seen once and had been watching for a while.
A small house on a larger lot. Higher than we wanted to pay for a house but it had been on the market for a while.
We took a second look.
We made an offer.
They made a counter offer.
We made a counter counter offer and they said no.
When it was all said and done we were $10,000 apart.
We had already gone higher than we felt comfortable.
We walked away over ten grand...............
We looked at a huge and beautiful modular home on a couple of acres outside of Powell.
We saw it when it was dark outside, but loved the inside, loved the trees, loved the views we could see in the shadows of the moon.
We were interested.
And then we went to look at it in the daylight.
It was located among a small cluster of homes in an isolated neighborhood.
In the daylight we could see many abandoned vehicles in the backyard of one neighbor, and race cars and race car parts in the front yard of the neighbor across the street.
It backed up to the canal. We put together the stories about previous owners and french drains and the old but still obvious water issue that had been evident in the crawl space. The high mound of dirt in the backyard that the realtor assured us was for landscaping purposes.
The problem had been remedied we were told.
We went to see our banker. The first question: was the house in the Powell Plain?
We didn't need to buy a home that required floor insurance.................
Now we really WERE back to square one.
After spending a few months looking non-stop all over Hell and Half Of Georgia we were no further ahead than we had been back in October.
For the past couple of months I had also been looking at the rental market in addition to the buyers market and was becoming increasingly concerned about whether or not we would be able to afford even to rent in Cody.
Few places would even CONSIDER a dog, and all of those were very expensive.
LC started looking at real estate back in Idaho and when a lady we ran into told us about a house she had just bought in North Dakota I started looking there.
We looked at renting a mobile home in a mobile park and it was a disgusting place.
We looked at renting in a different mobile home park and it was nicer.
95% home owners as opposed to renters.
Possibly doable.
They had a few nice manufactured homes for sale as well that could either stay in the park ($300/month lot fee) or could be moved to your owned piece of land.
LC and I decided to give that a shot first - buy the manufactured home and pay the lot fee until we could find a piece of land to put it on (assuming we could find a piece of land that accepted manufactured homes).
Went to the bank and they would indeed finance a newer manufactured home.
For four years.
At 10% interest rate.
We could do that.
But we hated the interest rate. Hated the lot fee.
Maybe we should just rent a mobile home instead???
We looked at a couple of other homes for sale by owner in Cody.
One was $180,000, needed painting inside and out, and had a badly cracked foundation.
One was $209,000 that was nice but incredibly small and would have cost $60,000 in Tennessee.
A home for $139,000 was a disgusting mess.
After looking at the last of these three I looked over at LC as we walked back to the truck and said "People here have no shame".
Someone posted an enclosed porch for rent out in the South Fork and wanted $350 a month for it.
An enclosed porch.
An enclosed freakin' porch.
It was gone within hours.
People here have no shame.............
While still trying to decide what to do I was on a local classified site on-line and saw two houses for rent.
One was tiny and cheap. One was bigger and not cheap (but cheaper than anything else I had seen up to that point).
And they accepted a dog.
They said a small dog, but I figured our beautiful girl would win the owner over with her "sparkling personality" and "unfortunate ears".
Seven minutes after the house was posted on line I called the woman.
A couple of hours later we had rented a house.
An 850 sq foot house.
A nice, clean, well laid out, airy house.
Two mudrooms, two bedrooms, one bathroom, good sized kitchen, dining room and living room.
With nice ceiling fans, plenty of storage, a small yard, plenty of windows, a view of the mountains, on a dead end road in town.
It is a nice house, we can be comfortable here, and I am glad we found it.
Now we can take our time and figure out our next move.
And my store is five minutes walk away................
Basics until we can get our belongings over here from Idaho..............
I snapped these pictures late this afternoon while Kory and I were walking in the neighborhood after a brief snowfall.
A cute little German Shepard pup barking at my bemused dog...............
Rattlesnake Mountain in the background.................
We made our way to a new-snow-covered park that is home base for the hot air balloon festival in summer.
Today the park was cold and silent and empty.
In June it will be home to 30 or so colorful hot air balloons, and I am looking forward to seeing them again.................
Skate board park.................
Heart Mountain under increasingly blue skies.................
It had snowed heavily all morning, so by early afternoon both Kory and I were restless.
We walked snow-covered sidewalks, snow covered park, snow covered alleys that led to small snow-covered dead-end roads, and we happily set off dogs in yards all over one entire section of town.................
Visiting with a sweet black lab through the privacy fence in the alley.................
By the time we got back to the house I was freezing cold.
We are heading into a five day streak of regular snowfalls and consistent cold temperatures.
It is easy to get lulled into thoughts of spring when temperatures are mild, but we still have a lot of winter left to go.................
For the two of us, home isn't a place. It is a person. And we are finally home..............Stephanie Perkins, Anna and the French Kiss
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