Bruce and I bought these 8 acres at Cedar Mesa Ranches in 2005 from Julie and Vinnie. We were living in Monte Vista, Colorado where Bruce worked for the Rio Grande National Forest. Julie wanted to sell the property so we made arrangements to purchase it from her. Our plan was to build on the property some day. We had decided that we wanted to retire in the 4 Corners area and thought buying a piece of land ahead of that might be a good start. After purchasing the lot, we spent time camping on the property and working on the lot. It had been hit by the ips epedemic and many of the larger pinon trees were dead or dying and many of the juniper were also in decline. And in 1994 a fire came through the top of the lot and the firefighters dozed a line through the top in order to create fire line. There was quite a bit of clean up to accomplish. Bruce retired from the Forest Service in January of 2008, so we decided to start moving towards our goal of moving to the 4 Corners. We remodeled and spruced up our house and put it on the market in April and it sold in July. We moved to Dolores August 2, 2008 to a rental townhome. We explored some housing opportunities and finally decided that building on our Cedar Mesa lot was the best option. We hired a designer (Jerry Giacomo) and proceeded to tailor a floor plan we had found in a book to meet our needs. The end result was a 2000 square foot 3 bedroom house on one level with a sun room and two car garage. That design process took all summer so we did not choose a contractor until late October. Jimmy Burton, owner of Straight Edge Maintenance(SE Maintenance), was our choice. The mortgage loan went through quickly, but the construction loan process drug on and on. The weather was good and we had hoped to get started with the project before bad weather set in. We did go ahead and trench the utilities to the house site and put in the septic tank. Last week Jimmy stared digging the footers. We finally got a call from the bank today to sign the construction loan documents.
Meanwhile, Bruce and Chris (our son) have been working to clean up the dead trees and remove trees that are in the construcition site. The property looks quite different these days!!
